Paul Kavicky talking to the crowd under the theatre dome.
According the venue website (https://www.capa.com/venues/detail/southern-theatre), the Southern Theatre in Columbus, Ohio, is the oldest surviving theatre in central Ohio and one of the oldest in the state. It opened in 1896 as a performance space and hotel complex, and was designed for touring productions and later film, vaudeville, and more. The Southern is now a Columbus Association for the Performing Arts (CAPA) venue, along with a number of other historic theatres in the area. You can read more about the Southern at the link above.
As Head of Audio & Video Production at the Ohio, Palace, and Southern Theatres, Paul Kavicky does work in multiple venues for CAPA, but the Southern Theatre is home base. At this event he talked us through the ins and outs of managing a production at the Southern while giving a tour of the space. He discussed the gear, mixing and adjustments needed to create seamless supporting sound feeds that balance out the sound for people sitting in balcony areas (which are unobtrusive and mostly hidden from view), what happens at front-of-house on the Yamaha CS-series board versus what's on-stage, and talked about the dynamic nature of running sound for a theater production as compared to music performance productions. It's a different world when your mics are moving across the stage and in and out of each other's pickup patterns! There was also talk about more than audio, such as how they use infrared light to set scenes in the dark.
