The Phantom

The phantom power mentioned in a Nady Phantom power supply is a mystery to me...or at least it was until I found a very useful page telling me exactly what phantom power is. Read the page: he does it much better than I could, and manages to make it comprehensible.

For those who don't get around to reading the page, I can tell you that phantom power has nothing to do with the paranormal (although some singing that goes into the mics using phantom power might well be considered abnormal).

That aside, it reminded me of that old comic strip, The Phantom, a character who doesn't seem to have been taken up by Hollywood in its current rash of super heroes. Admittedly The Phantom - or The Ghost Who Walks - didn't seem to have any particular powers - his abilities were mostly fairly easily explained if you thought about it. Perhaps his peculiar power of being able to wander through the jungle in a tight suit and mask without ever getting it torn was something special, but otherwise he was a pretty ordinary bloke, I think.

I thought The Phantom had long since departed the syndicated comics scene, but though his creator, Lee Falk (who first introduced him in 1936) died twenty-one years ago, the series continues. It's been drawn by several artists over the period, though only one other writer, Tony DePaul, seems to have been involved since Lee Falk died.

The Phantom was the first hero to wander around in a skin-tight suit (thus setting a trend for all the later super heroes) and also the first to wear a mask that somehow hid his pupils. This idea of having no visible pupils apparently came from sculptured Greek statues, many of which were eyeless.

When I say that Hollywood hasn't recently worked with The Phantom, that's not to say it never has. There was a successful serial way back in the forties, and there was a feature film in 1996 (starring Billy Zane), which I can't say I remember seeing advertised. A more recent version was to have been filmed, but seems to have gone down the plughole. Sam Worthington was at one time being touted as the lead.

There have been at least three Phantom musicals, two of them originating in Scandinavia, an area of the world with which the Phantom has long had an association through Fantomen, the Swedish version of the character, which dates from 1950, Fantomet in Norway, and Mustanaamio in Finland.

Well, there you go. Plainly The Phantom/Fantomen/Fantomet/Mustanaamio is alive and well, and looking forward to being around much longer than any of his creators. It helps, of course, that us ordinary mortals can't distinguish Phantom number 21 from number 20 and so on.

mics and voices

One of the complications of putting on the musical, Grimhilda!, is how much use do we use mics?  Some of the cast will be fine without them, but we have two kids in the show each night, and sometimes they have to talk over music playing in the orchestra pit, and, of course, they'll be singing with the orchestra.   It seems logical to use mics for them.  But what about other members of the cast?  Mics are an expensive item in the budget and supplying them to everyone isn't going to be an option.  Which means that the man controlling the mics is going to have his work cut out balancing miked voices with unmiked ones.    It's going to be an interesting process.  

When you're rehearsing a show there always seem to be some members of the cast who are comfortable with using a stage voice even when in a smaller rehearsal room, and some people who find the size of the space inhibiting.  Once they're out in the theatre their voices bloom, and you can hear them easily wherever you are.  But in the rehearsal space you sometimes despair of hearing them at all anywhere else.

And it's easy for inexperienced cast members to forget that they're going to have to throw their voices further than a couple of metres once they go on stage.  I don't know why that should be, but it is the case.  I prefer to be using a stage voice (somewhat modified to the surroundings) from early on in the rehearsal process.  It makes the transition from rehearsal room to stage a much easier one.

Mics? Yikes!

Amongst many things the production crew for our musical Grimhilda! have been discussing are radio mics (but not USB mics) for the singers.

I find it quite difficult to remember to use this spelling; my tendency is to go for mikes, in line with the spelling of my own name.   But like it or not the normal spelling by the techie people is 'mics.'

It's an oddity in spelling terms: I can't think of another word that ends quite like that and still sounds like mikes.  When you look at it, especially the singular form, you tend to try and figure out how to enunciate the 'c'.  Standing alone like that, with no 'k' or 't' to follow, it seems isolated.  If there was another syllable or two before it, as in the word pandemic, we'd know that it was pronounced 'mick'.  In fact, even looking at it bare, without other syllables, there's a tendency to think of it as a mick word, like endemic, systemic, polemic, academic, polemic.

But mic (say mike).  Nah, it just don't ring true...