 Hi, and welcome back to our Theatre Highlight series. Today, we have the pleasure of Rich Fenton, Senior Theatre Consultant at Marshall Day, joining us. And Richard, thanks for coming along and thanks for chatting us to us today. Thanks for having me. Excellent. It's really great to have you here. So I just kind of wanted to start off and ask you about your experience and what you've been doing over the past few years and in your career. So I have worked, I've been lucky to work at some pretty well-known places. I probably started off mainly doing touring things. I did a fair bit of work for Northwest Productions and companies like that. But then I worked for the Sydney Opera House for 10 years. I started there as just a casual sound technician and became one of the first full-time audio supervisors at the Opera House. So I did a lot of rustering and acting in head of department when the head of department was away and a whole bunch of things like that. And then from there, I went to Singapore and I was head of sound at Marina Bay Sands and then acted in a technical manager role for a while there as well. Well, and then now I am obviously at Marshall Day as a Senior Theatre Consultant. Yeah. So I mean, it's pretty varied in the way that you've kind of progressed through your roles. And obviously starting out in Northwest and then moving to somewhere like the Opera House, I don't want to say chalk and cheese, but certainly a difference in the type of roles. So yes, it's production, but you're going from what's essentially more of a bump-in-bump-out style gig to now installed kind of bump-in-bump-out style gig. So how different was that for you moving from those different roles? It was very different. So Northwest, as you know, does a lot of amazing things and they have a lot of really great creative people doing a lot of really cool technical things. But as you can imagine, a lot of the casual employees, you don't really get much of a chance to do that kind of stuff. You're more just like put it up, make sure it works, do the best job you can and then bump it out and get it back to the factory. Going to somewhere like the Opera House that has the ability to produce some of its own shows and work really closely with producing companies, you got much more of a chance to be involved with creating technology that worked for the show and to be involved with making a piece of art work rather than kind of just coming in, making it happen and then leaving. You got much more of an interaction with directors and creative people and just being involved with actually making a show rather than moving gear, I suppose. Yeah, pushing boxes, right? Yeah, no, that's great. Being involved in the creative side and especially from a technology perspective would be quite a good challenge as well because you're then going out and trying to make this work for the job that might be in there for either a night or it might be in there for a season. So it would be quite good. And in terms of being able to have that opportunity to be the head of a department when those opportunities arose, how is that different to your normal everyday role? Yeah, being the head of department gets you to see things with a much broader scope, I think. So obviously, I was head of department at Marina Bay Sands and that was my entire job. But one of the things they did when I was at the Opera House is I acted as head of department for the Vivid Festival, which is a big, as you know, it's a big festival that occurs. And you got much more of an overview of seeing how all of the different shows come together and how everything works and how all the equipment moves together. When you're on the floor doing a show, you can get frustrated and be like, oh, I don't have this piece of gear I need or why kind of have this or what's going on. But when you're looking at the overall production of 15 different shows going on at the same time, you have much more of a wider scope of seeing how everything interacts and how if you take a piece of equipment from here, then it can't go there. We had a thing in Vivid in particular because we just had so much equipment going around the building. There wasn't actually any more equipment we could sub-hire in. So when Lou Reed curated the festival, his mono to speaker of choice was a DMVM2. We literally had every single DMVM2 in the country. And when he asked for more one day, we were just kind of like, well, I'm sorry, there isn't actually any more in the country. He was like, oh, okay, because we'd sub-hireed all of them in. And so, yeah, just dealing with things that pop up and kind of combating all the day to day, last minute things that happen and just sort of trying to facilitate all the different shows going on at once is a great kind of overarching view of how complicated a multi arts venue can be. And a lot of the time, even though you're working in a multi arts venue, you don't really see that because you're doing your show. Yeah, definitely. I mean, it sounds like a very challenging environment in some circumstances, but certainly fulfilling, I would assume. Oh, yeah, it was great. It was awesome fun. That's definitely one of the best jobs I've ever done. That's great fun. And then what about now? So you've moved from heading up a department at a large events style center to now being a consultant for the theater industries and theater buildings. How has that changed your point of view in terms of technology and going into theaters? There's a lot more kind of thought that goes into fitting out a venue and making technology work in a venue in the very early stages. And I think when I was, you know, when I was a technician or when I was ahead of department, I would come in and see something and I'd be like, oh, consultant, such an idiot. Why did they do that? And now that I am a consultant, I'm like, oh, they did that because engineering couldn't move this and architecture couldn't move that. And then the facilities had to put this here and that was the only possible solution. So it gives you much more of an understanding how the whole thing works. So as a consultant, we let work a lot with the architects. So architects will come up with a design and then they'll consult with us on everything from just building flow to technology and how it interfaces with the building and systems like that. So we're working on a project at the moment where it's a multi arts venue going in regional Western Australia. And we're looking at simple things like how do you get a truck in? How do you get cases from here to there? Once the cases are on stage, where are they going to store the empties? Things that an architect hasn't really ever had to think about and shouldn't really because they haven't done gigs before. If you have a performer on stage, how quickly can they get to their dressing room for a quick change? Or if they can't, where would you put a quick change? Things like that. Looking at a much broader scope to the building than I've ever had to look at before because generally I've been in a building that already exists. So those kind of decisions were never really available to me. But now we're looking at buildings on a plan and today we're like, oh, let's move the lobby here and let's put the waste disposal unit over there. And then that makes much better access to the dressing rooms. Things like that, but we never really would get a chance to do. Being a consultant has taught me how important having a consultant in early stages of a building is. From that perspective, you're obviously dealing with the architect and they're obviously designing the building and the floor of the building. Are you also in heavy consultation with the owners or whoever is looking after the build for the theatre or whoever will eventually look after that build for the theatre? Yeah, we definitely try to be. So you mean like who the end user will be? Yeah, yeah. So that's definitely one of the first people that we try and get in contact with. Sometimes they don't even have that person in existence yet. And so that can be a little challenging, but sometimes those builds that they've hired technical people or they know that, for example, a local theatre production company is going to be the resident venue, the resident company at that venue. And so we're going to contact with that at them and see exactly what they do and how they do it and what the best way we can facilitate with them is. So I'm very much a believer that the more consulting that you have with the end user, the better your result will be. And that's largely from being an end user who didn't get consulted a few times and the project's terrible. Yeah, definitely. And so do you tend to also look after existing, so consulting for existing theatres or are you more looking at, yeah. And how does that differ from, because obviously you've got a fixed space as opposed to something that's pliable as such. How does that differentiate the way that you look at the space? I suppose it's much more fixed in what you can do in general. What we do a lot with existing theatres is we do what we call a venue health check where we will go and talk to often more regional venues, but we've done it with bigger venues in major cities before. Basically, most of your technology is 8, 10, 12 years old, whatever. It's probably time to upgrade. Can we help you specify that, work out how to implement that and work out what the best equipment for your venue is? So a lot of our existing kind of venue work is more technical based of helping them to upgrade their sound system, lining systems, technical systems, whatever. And then there's also a lot of venues that there is a venue, and then they're doing renovations and building on with that. So we'll be involved in that, which once again has architects involved in designing things. And yeah. Yeah. So multiple stakeholders in there all wanting their own way of doing a certain thing. Pretty much. It is funny sometimes you have to tell people that's just simply not going to work. Yeah. And talking about those types of challenges, is there specific challenges you face when you're designing these new theatre spaces? Some of the challenges will be that equipment space and storage space hasn't been allowed for, but we've been bought in too late in the project. And the concrete started to be poured or something like that. And they're like, well, we can't change that now. You'll just have to come up with a new solution. And so there's a lot of kind of trying to gerry rig spaces to make them work if we haven't been able to have input early on in the project. And the same with technical infrastructure and even simple things like touring venues that wanting to receive theatre touring shows, but they have no way of getting a multi-core from front of house to stage because no one has thought about it. And generally infrastructure people or architects will be like, well, but we're putting in all this cabling, all this patching. And I'm like, yeah, but a touring show won't care about that. They have their core and they want to run it. And so a lot of that kind of stuff can be forgotten. And then you get bought in too late and you're kind of trying to make a solution that no one really wants to hear. That can be interesting. Yeah, definitely. And so in terms of the types of infrastructure that you're putting into these spaces, are you seeing more of the spaces heading towards ethernet-based cabling and fibre and so forth in order to be able to get around rather than traditional mic cable and stuff? Yeah, we're putting in less and less standard kind of analog cabling in venues. In a lot of kind of smaller school venues, we're not really putting in any at all. We're just sort of suggesting solutions based on like cat six or whatever technology. So something like Dante or even consoles like Alan and Heath have there. It's called the S-Link and Yamaha runs Dante and all those kind of different consoles. They just run cat six or cat five or cat five E or whatever for their cores. And so it saves not many people know that it actually costs quite a lot of money to run an analog cable and terminate it. So it saves the client a lot of money in the end and they just plug in a plug in one box at one end and plug in one box at the other end and you have that kind of solution. But then there's obviously other venues that need that versatility of analog patching and in talking to the clients. That's exactly what we do for them. We suggest analog cabling and we document that up for them. But yeah, for sure, there is lots and lots of cat and cable going in and lots of fibre going in nowadays. And a lot of that is to future proof. We've had clients say, what do we need all this fibre for? And we're like, well, right now with the technology you have, you don't. But in five years time, guaranteed you will get everything. Yeah. Yeah. And when thinking talking about communications, when thinking about incorporating integrated communication system into a venue, what's really important to you in the design process of that? A lot of that I think depends on the venue itself. So if we were doing a big multi venue arts place like the Sydney Opera House or like Vic Art Centre or something like that, matrixing abilities, like abilities to call different venues and software control of the overall system to be able to create call groups and all that kind of stuff is really important. That becomes even more important, I think in a post kind of COVID-19 world where more and more shows are going to be broadcast. So being able to communicate clearly and easily with broadcast people in the facility or outside of the facility or wherever they may be when you're doing a live show and having the ability in your comm system to be able to do that really easily and clearly and quickly, I think is really important. If you're doing a smaller venue, you know, say a more regional venue that's just like a 300 seat theatre, most of that stuff is not necessarily important. And if we're going to be honest, those kind of venues won't have the budget to facilitate a comm system that does all that stuff. So then in that case, we'd be looking for a much more simple option, which is quite easy to do. And yeah, for bigger venues, things like Riddell, you know, cat based technology, you can plug it in, you can make it work anywhere you need to work. It's really easy to program and yeah. All right, Rich, thanks so much for your time. This has been a great chat. Thank you for joining us here at Riddell today. And thanks once again for your time. No worries. Thanks for having me.