New York, NY (August 16, 2022)—The camera rarely sits still in the fast-paced, early-1960s setting of Amazon Prime Video’s hit series, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Everywhere the show takes us, from New York City’s toney Upper West Side, to the grittier Gaslight Café in Greenwich Village, to the storied stage of Carnegie Hall, the dialog is snappy, the streets are noisy and the clubs sound like…like nightclubs from the early 1960s.
It’s the world created by series creator Amy Sherman-Palladino and inhabited by Miriam “Midge” Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan), a recently divorced mother of two who embarks on a stand-up comedy career to pay the rent and fulfill creative urges, much to the chagrin of her extended family.
In the Season 4 finale, “How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall?” — nominated for this year’s Emmy Award in Outstanding Sound Mixing for a Comedy or Drama Series (One Hour) — we start in a hospital and end up watching Lenny Bruce stalk the stage at Carnegie Hall; in between, there’s a snowstorm, burlesque revue and a police raid thrown in for good measure.
“We do sometimes talk about how we can Maisel-ize the track,” says supervising sound editor/re-recording mixer Ron Bochar out of C5 in New York City. “There’s a certain slapstick sound to certain scenes throughout the series, and we play that up. In this episode, we had a few moments where we can breathe and really feel the emotion from the characters, so we let that play, too. And then the music is just wonderful.”
It’s Bochar’s third Emmy nomination for his work on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, as it is for production sound mixer Mathew Price, CAS, who admits, “It can be challenging chasing the camera as the actors move through so many rooms and locations. But we use the radios to capture the dialog as we keep up with them, and then a boom to get as much of the ‘room’ and perspectives as we can so that we can pass them on to Ron.”
Bochar and Price, interviewed for this special Emmy Awards Season video, have shared all three nominations (and one win) with Foley Mixer George A. Lara, while sharing two nominations (and a win) with ADR Mixer David Boulton. Joining Bochar, Price and Lara in this year’s nomination is Scoring Mixer Stewart Lerman.
Music plays a key role in the series, both grounding it in the time period and playing a dance between source, score and needle-drop score, with infallible taste in the songs of the day. Composers Thomas Mizer and Curtis Moore are up for their second nomination this year in Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics, and Robin Urdang, a three-time Emmy-winning music supervisor for her work on Mrs. Maisel, is nominated once again in Outstanding Music Supervision.
Voting for the 2022 Emmy Awards is open now through 10 PM on August 22, 2022. The primetime telecast will be held on Monday, September 12, on NBC.
