The Palace Theater is a 1,000-seat performing arts venue at Kings Point in Tamarac, Florida, a luxury lifestyle community for the 55-plus set, located just west of Ft. Lauderdale.
The venue recently installed a DiGiCo S21 digital audio mixing console to support concerts by a wide range of touring artists, including veterans of the South Florida circuit like Melissa Manchester and Tony Orlando.
Lately it’s also getting regular visits from tribute bands venerating Bruce Springsteen, Chicago and the Rolling Stones. Add to that comedy shows, regular first-run film screenings, and dramatic productions written, directed and acted by some of the community’s 9,000 residents and you’ve got an entertainment hub as busy as any up north.
“We’re doing a lot of rock tribute bands today, but we might be doing Britney Spears in a few years,” laughs production manager Anthony Ezzo, himself a veteran of the road running front of house on past tours for Michelle Branch, Mark Chesnutt, Stryper and DRI.
“We needed an audio console that could take us into the future as artists that residents grew up with come here to perform. I looked around and knew what I didn’t want—a cheap, $3,000 mixer with plastic knobs—but also knew that we didn’t want to spend $50,000 on a touring-type console. The S21 was the perfect solution: it sounds great, is easy to run and fit our budget.”
Ezzo says one of the S21’s advantages is the fact that it offers individual inputs. “This theater was built in the mid-1990s, so we have a lot of copper wiring in here, and we weren’t in a position to run Cat-5 for microphones from the stage,” he explains. “It’s old-fashioned but it works, and the S21 lets us put microphones directly into channels. At the same time, it’s very intuitive to operate. It’s laid out in an analog sort of way, but the layers let me access every aspect of each channel in a compact footprint.”
For instance, Ezzo notes that the theater has a dozen wireless lavs they use for theatrical productions, some of which may have 60 actors in the cast. The S21 lets him assign them to one set of actors as a macro, then switch to a completely different input configuration instantly when the lavaliere mics are donned by the next set of actors in a show.
The theater’s diverse range of music artists and shows also means that that Ezzo has to deal with prerecorded material from an array of sources including DVD, CD, Blu-ray, MiniDisc and even VHS (hey, it’s Florida).
“I can set up all of my inputs any way that makes the most sense,” he says. “I also use the Virtual Soundcheck capability of the console, so the PA is ready when the band shows up. The S21 is a real workhorse. As soon as you touch it, you know it’s not a toy. It’s the future.”
