DiGiCo-Driven Broadway Shows Take Home Coveted Tony AwardsBuilding on the success of the DiGiCo D5T, still in current use on shows such as Cinderella, SD7T consoles have become a mainstay in the audio trenches on Broadway and in the West End (UK) for many a year, with their powerful hardware, Stealth engine, and theatre software kit capable of handling the most intricate demands of theatre audio today. This June, a slew of the newest productions utilizing Digico consoles took home coveted 2013 Tony Awards. Using a Digico SD7T, Kinky Boots received - Best Musical; Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical (Billy Porter); Best Choreography (Jerry Mitchell); Best Original Score (Music and/or Lyrics, Cyndi Lauper); Best Sound Design of a Musical (John Shivers); and Best Orchestrations (Stephen Oremus). Pippin received - Best Revival of a Musical; Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Musical (Patina Miller); Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Musical (Andrea Martin); Best Direction of a Musical (Diane Paulus). Matilda: The Musical received - Best Book of a Musical; Best Scenic Design of a Musical (Rob Howell); Best Lighting Design of a Musical (Hugh Vanstone); Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Musical (Gabriel Ebert). Since his involvement designing The Lion King for Singapore in 2010, John Shivers has been using Digico SD7Ts on just about every show since. The award-winning sound designer says the console offers a lot of flexibility, especially with the new "T" software, which he says brings features and functionality specific to their needs on theatrical productions as well as a solid sounding foundation in a very compact package. The SD7T software has added these very beneficial features thanks to [award-winning sound designer] Andrew Bruce's involvement in the development. "Having onboard compression, gating, and delay -- along with the programmability and recall-ability of those parameters on every channel -- opens up possibilities that you just can't have with an analog console. It's definitely been an upgrade for us from that standpoint. A positive byproduct has definitely been the size of the console, which allows you to get into smaller spaces and require less seats be removed and has served as a large financial windfall for producers. For me, from a purely creative and design standpoint, it's about the capabilities of the console. I'm not one to follow the crowd necessarily, but the SD7T has become a standard of our industry and the reason everybody's using them seems clear. It has proven itself to be a very capable and reliable console." Additionally, Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella, which utilized Digico's 5DT, was awarded Best Costume Design of a Musical (William Ivey Long).
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