I wish I could remember the long post I thought I made yesterday in the aftermath of the taping of
Cheek to Cheek. I guess I forgot to hit "Post".
In any case...
The show that was supposed to start at 7:30pm really started at 8:15. It was scheduled to end at 9 with a 1hr bumper till the 11pm meal break to do retakes. Ten came and went, 11 came and went, at midnight the line producer finally put a stop to the retakes. I was out by 2am, the truck was probably loaded by 2:30. Woo Hoo!
Over all it was a fun experience. Everyone involved was easy to work with, Lady Gaga, Tony Bennett (always), Chris Botti (always), the excellent crew and staff of
Rose Hall at Jazz at Lincoln Center, and everyone involved with the TV production.
A note on that photo of Rose Hall. The onstage seating in the photo was not used. It is portable, and stores all the way upstage. We used the full width, and probably 60' of depth on the stage.
There were basically 4 different musical set ups, the Tony Bennett Quartet, the Lady Gaga Quintet (different drums, B3), the "Big Band" which was either the quartet or quintet with the horn section, and the orchestra, the big band plus strings, french horns and harp. The event was quite long for a concert in front of an audience being close to 4 hours, and Tony
is 87 years old, but all the artists stayed professional and polite and made for a pleasant working environment for all of us.
Besides being acoustically good, and inside an RF Faraday cage, Jazz at Lincoln Center is home to the XM Radio studio, where we were able to record the show for remixing for the Ultra HD broadcast. The 2 track program mix sounded great. The show used the house PA (3 arrays of Vertec 4888s) and recording system (96? channels of Millenium mic pres going to the XM studio), but brought in an SD7 for mons, and a PM5D with a Venice sidecar for strings at FOH. There were Aviom monitors for the orchestra, some wedges for the horn section, sidefills for Tony and Gaga, and some RF IEMs.
I think the night was a success for everyone involved, kudos all around!
Mac