Capitol Theater
Overture Center - Madison, Wisconsin
The Overture Center is Madison’s new $205 million performing arts center, home to the Capitol and other theatres plus the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.
The 1,000-seat Capitol Theater is a complete renovation of downtown Madison’s 1928 movie palace. It now houses the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra, the CTM Family Theater Company, and travelling shows including Broadway, dance, music, comedy and children’s programming.
Lewis Sound & Video installed an all-new sound system which includes:
- Left and right stereo speaker clusters, each consisting of a low-frequency driver and two mid-high loudspeakers. These are hidden behind curtains on either side of the stage.
- A center cluster behind the proscenium curtains above the stage.
- Six speakers on the lip of the stage, serving the first few rows of seats.
- A 40-channel Midas mixing console and rack was saved from the old theatre.
- A production booth with a BSS Soundweb digital signal processor plus microphone, line-level, intercom and video jacks.
- An amplifier room above and behind the stage with additional DSP equipment plus all amplifiers for the sound system.
- A CCTV system which routes signals from two permanently mounted cameras in the theater into the lobby and back-of-house areas, so that guests, production staff and performers not in the theatre can see what’s happening on stage.
- Input/out panels onstage with jacks for microphones, stage monitors, and video monitors.
- A production intercom system.
- An assistive listening system for the hearing impaired.
Lewis Sound also installed a building-wide paging, music and CCTV system which allows staff to send pages throughout the facility and audio and video from the various theatres into other theatres, production areas, dressing rooms, green rooms and administrative offices. The hub of this system is a communications rack room located above the Playhouse.
Read about other sound systems we installed in the Overture Center’s Playhouse and MMoCA Film and Video Theater.
Read an interview of Henry Lewis about theatrical sound system design.