Beauty & the Beast & Alcons

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The latest theater production of Joop van den Ende productions, “Beauty & the Beast” is amplified by an Alcons ribbon sound system.

Ticket sales of this musical, exceeded that of success musical “The Sound of Music”, which was the best “pre-selling” traveling musical in the Netherlands, until then.

The show needs no less than fourteen trailers to be moved and is therefore the largest traveling show of Van Den Ende productions so far and will visit the 13 largest Dutch theaters until June 2006. It is also the first time that Joop van den Ende Theater productions has made a traveling show of a Disney-musical.

The sound design is made by Jeroen ten Brinke, who already has made many sound designs for successful musicals, like De Jantjes, Anatevka, Fame De Musical, 42nd Street, Rent, Saturday Night Fever, Titanic De Musical but was also involved in Cabaret, Les Misérables, The Phantom Of The Opera and Miss Saigon.

For the musical Beauty & the Beast, a co-production of Joop van den Ende Theater productions and Disney Theatrical Productions, he applied an Alcons ribbon sound system for the first time. The system consists of 28x Alcons LR14 ultra-compact ribbon line-array, 4x LR14B compact line-array bass, 4x BF302 bass system and 11x ALC4 controller-amplifiers, complete with SDP processing modules.

The configuration is as follows: 6x LR14 flown arrays left and right, with 1x LR14B above; 3x LR14 stacked array left and right with 1x LR14B under, 10x LR14 as center-cluster and 2x BF302 subwoofer stacked left and right.

Jeroen ten Brinke: “I had never heard of Alcons before, until I had a gig in the Pepsi Stage in Amsterdam; There I was surprised by the guts of the person who had prepared such small cabinets for a producer who likes “a FAT sound”. When I started, I simply shut my mouth; So much coming from so little I had never experienced before!”

(Beauty & the Beast / Alcons press cont’d)

Ten Brinke continues: “Later, while visiting Tom Back of Alcons Audio I immediately heard it again; those typical, wonderful “electrostatic” highs. In the conversation that we, Jeroen Bas, Igor Milosavljevic and I had with Tom, he seemed very cooperative and wasn’t even disturbed (as first sound system manufacturer on earth!) by my request for flying the center-cluster horizontally, instead of vertically.

After having spoken to a number of people and Alcons users, like Andrew Bruce of Autograph UK, we were convinced about our choice. That’s how it appeared on the list for Holland’s largest theater tour "Beauty and the Beast" of Disney & Stage-Entertainment.
Since the opening première in Royal Theater Carré Amsterdam on September 25, 2005, we’ve received a lot of positive reactions on the sound, a.o. from Tom Schumacher, Walt Disney's executive vice president of Theatrical Productions: “I’ve never heard such a good sound in a theatre like this!”.”

Already during the première of the Dutch tour, preparations for launch of the production in Germany had started.