RESIDENT SOUND DESIGNER
TODD MACK REISCHMAN TODD HAS DESIGNED SOUND FOR NEARLY 100 IRT PRODUCTIONS IN HIS 20 SEASONS AS RESIDENT SOUND DESIGNER. AMONG HIS FAVORITES ARE THE PIANO LESSON , MACBETH , FINDING HOME , ROMEO & JULIET , NOISES OFF , AND 12 ANGRY MEN . IN 2018, TODD WAS AWARDED AN EMMY FOR HIS SOUND DESIGN ON THE WFYI BROADCAST VERSION OF IRT’S FINDING HOME—INDIANA AT 200 .
WHERE ARE YOU FROM? I was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and lived there for eight days. We moved to Stillwater, Oklahoma, because my dad went to grad school at OSU. He eventually worked for the Department of Defense, so I grew up in San Diego and northern Virginia. HOW DID YOU FIRST GET INTERESTED IN THEATRE? My elementary school did Oklahoma!, and I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. I wanted to be in it, but you had to be in at least fifth grade. The next year I played Prince Chulalongkorn in The King and I, and the year after that I played Frank Butler in Annie Get Your Gun. I fancied being an actor as a kid; I did it all through high school, but then I needed to work. I also learned that I really sucked at auditioning. HOW DID YOU BECOME INTERESTED IN MUSIC? When I was 10 I started playing drums. When I was a freshman in high school I learned to play the guitar, and eventually I was in a band called Paradise. Yeah, very eighties. But when I graduated from high school we were doing pretty well, we had a recording contract. We recorded a five-song demo, and a couple of our songs were used in a
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program that toured high schools for Mothers Against Drunk Driving. We thought we were going to go somewhere, but we broke up pretty quickly. Meanwhile I now had a son to raise. I moved back to San Diego and began to work in food service. I managed some kitchens, and I even ended up with a chef title at one place. Then some time in the early nineties I accidentally got a part in a play. I happened to drive by the Grove Playhouse, and I walked in and volunteered. They needed someone to do sound, but then one of the actors dropped out, so I ended up doing this small part. At the end of the run, I went to every theatre in San Diego looking for work, and I ended up on the tech crew at San Diego Rep. HOW DID YOU LEARN THE ART OF SOUND DESIGN? My folks had great taste in music, so I grew up listening to different kinds of music, and I loved it. What music did to the body and the soul fascinated me from a very early age. I tinkered with our stereo equipment. I wanted to learn how to make it more powerful, I wanted to learn how to add more speakers in different places—all completely coincidental to what I ended up doing for a living. When I started playing the
