Bringing Louis Armstrong Back to Broadway

New York, NY (February 19, 2025)—As an iconic entertainer, singer, trumpeter, actor and more, Louis Armstrong captivated audiences for half a century with his accessible jazz and charismatic personality. With a colorful personal life and enough hits to fill a jukebox, it’s no surprise that his tale has now been brought to Broadway as a musical extravaganza, A Wonderful Life: The Louis Armstrong Musical. Centered around James Monroe Iglehart’s lived-in lead performance, the show never stops moving, regardless of whether Armstrong’s dancing and romancing (he was married four times) or attempting to reconcile his dated image with the changing politics of the 1960s.

While Armstrong’s career had its share of ups and downs, so did the show itself, determinedly reaching Broadway years after it first debuted in Miami; along the way, the musical, originally focused on Armstrong’s wives, survived considerable rewrites, creative team shakeups and the literal showstopper that was Covid.

Along for the entire ride was Tony Award-winning sound designer Kai Harada, who first became involved in 2019 when he created an audio system for the show’s first iteration, using gear from Sound Associates. Set to launch at Miami New Drama, the show entered previews in early March 2020 only to shut down for the pandemic, eventually opening there for a 2021- 2022 run. A revamped version hit the road in 2023 for a mini tour that played New Orleans and Chicago—two cities that figured prominently in Armstrong’s life—and carried a touring sound system as a result.

Now the show has settled in at New York City’s Studio 54 with a full audio system from Sound Associates, overseen by A1/mixer Marc Fisher, A2s Adrianna Brannon and Adam Rigby, and production sound engineer Ian Carr. The Broadway production finds the show bolstered by new orchestrations and arrangements created by Branford Marsalis. Harada pointed out, “It’s awesome music, the arrangements are new, and there are some new songs that they didn’t use in the previous versions as well.”

Fortunately, the new arrangements didn’t greatly change the sound system that Harada and associate sound designers Isabella Curry and Owen Meadows had developed for the Broadway run. “We knew what the orchestration was going to be in terms of how many instruments there were and who was going to play what,” he said. “It’s still a nine-piece orchestra; they just changed the notes they play, so it wasn’t a huge departure because it was still going to be in a jazzy style that’s appropriate for the music and the time period. It’s not like we’re going from a classical orchestration to a rock-and-roll orchestration.”

While earlier iterations of the show had orchestra members come out and play on stage, the Broadway edition kept the musicians hidden upstage for most of the show. “It acted in our favor because it gave us full control over how much acoustic sound or how much not-acoustic sound we could get,” says Harada. “For instance, for a scene where they’re in a recording studio, there are actors on stage miming instruments that are played by the orchestra, and we route them differently so that it sounds like the actors on stage are actually playing.

“The important thing,” he added, “is that Louis Armstrong and King Joe Oliver, who is Louis’ mentor and fellow trumpet player, always sound like they’re playing their instruments— which they’re not; they’re being played by the orchestra. If we can create that illusion, then we win the audience over.”

Most of the onstage instruments’ audio emanates from a pair of Meyer Ultra-X40 loudspeakers disguised as suitcases, situated on an upstage, second-level balcony. “I use those speakers in what I would call the ‘regular’ sound of the show, too, because we get so little acoustic information from the orchestra themselves,” said Harada. “That helps create the illusion that they’re somewhere upstage, and the drums are on the fourth floor in a dressing room.

But when there’s a solo moment of a trumpet or a trombone, those instruments get routed differently—the level gets turned up, and we pan it between those two speakers appropriately to where the actor is miming on stage. I think for most of the seats, we’re successful in creating that illusion. As the performers come further downstage, we lose a little bit of that success, but we’ve done a really good job without having to use spatial, object-oriented [immersive audio systems]. There’s a world where that could have been something we did, even disguising small wireless speakers in places, but really it seemed more dangerous to go down that route, because we could get bogged down in the technology rather than just keeping it simpler.”

The Ultra-X40s aren’t the only Meyer Sound speakers onsite; Studio 54 is one of the few Broadway theaters with an installed P.A., so the production makes use of Meyer underbalcony, surround and fill speakers already in place.

That said, the main proscenium P.A., comprised mostly of Meyer Lina and Mina speakers, was brought in; other boxes around the house include 750 LFC subs, UPA-1P and 2Ps, additional Ultra- X40s and more. “It’s pretty much all Meyer,” Harada conceded. “I know what Meyers are going to do and sound like; they have such clarity and preserve imaging so well. We have some d&b speakers doing ancillary fold-back, but anything that the audience hears is Meyer.”

Over at the house mix position, Fisher oversees a Studer Vista 5 console. “It’s a wonderful-sounding digital desk,” said Harada. “If I do a half-dB EQ change on a Studer input channel, I can hear it. The onboard compression sounds good, the way it sums to busses into matrices sounds proper, you can use all their onboard EQ and dynamics, and it sounds pure, like an analog console would. Also, this isn’t a show that requires me to have some ridiculous bass amp simulator plug-in. It’s a real acoustic bass—we have an Ear Trumpet Labs Nadine mic and a pickup on it. They sound great by themselves, they sound great together and I am a big proponent of a pure, cleaner signal path.”

The cast’s vocals are captured via a Sennheiser Digital 6000 wireless mic system, with the actors wearing MKE-1 or MKE-2 lavaliers. Most of the male ensemble wear microphones over their ears, while most of the women have mics on their center hairlines; Iglehart wears both, enabling a switch to the ear mic if his costume requires wearing a hat. “We could have done the show with headset mics like DPA 4066s, but it’s not period, so that’s no good for this kind of show,” Harada explained. Wireless MKE-2s are also used to capture the show’s frequent tap dancing, with mics run down each pant leg.

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In the orchestra, keyboards are DI’d, while a Sennheiser MKH 8800 microphone is used for acoustic guitar and banjo, and reeds play into an MKH-40 overhead. Trumpets get two microphones—Royer Labs R-121 ribbon mics when they’re part of the main orchestration, and DPA 4099s for a different tonality when they’re featured as a soloist. The trombone also gets an R-121, and the drums are surrounded by a typical assortment of Shure and Sennheiser mics, along with Neumann overheads.

The result of all that gear—and the production’s five-year journey to Broadway—is a crowd-pleasing show that presents Armstrong’s colorful life with plenty of song and dance, all leading up to the inevitable final number alluded to in the show’s title. Throughout, the sound supports the performers and the narrative without ever drawing attention to itself, and that’s just how Harada likes it. “My goal is always to make things sound right and stay under the radar,” he said. “I think we accomplished that.”