November 2026 – The Box at Freespace, in Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District, is the largest black box theater in the city and the least fixed. It holds 950 standing or 450 seated, and it is built to be taken apart and rebuilt for whatever arrives next, with a permanent L-Acoustics L-ISA system that can be redrawn around each production.
Every night opened with a vinyl warm-up DJ set and closed with a full after-party, with an intimate and heartfelt musical in between. Holding all three in one continuous evening fell to sound designer Can Ha, one of Hong Kong theater’s most experienced practitioners, who brings two decades of work with composer Leon Ko and a run of L-ISA productions behind her, among them The Impossible Trial at the Xiqu Centre Grand Theatre.
Ha had designed the same show in the same room a year earlier and came back to rebuild it A new this year. She worked with L-Acoustics Application Engineer Daniel Lee, and with Nancy Lam, Technical Manager at Freespace, whose programming has given The Box its reputation for never feeling the same way twice.
For Hedwig, the stage sits at the wide end of The Box, which puts roughly 300 people across the width of the room rather than in a line back from the stage: a raked seated block in the center, with standing audience on both flanks. In the 2025 run the whole audience was treated as a single L-ISA zone, and the flanks heard a diluted version of the 360-degree image that the center heard in full.
The fix was L-ISA Sound Spaces, which lets one spatial mix be rendered independently into more than one listening area. Working with Ha, Daniel Lee designed a configuration that would allow her to duplicate the room’s design into three zones driven from a single control, each with its own surround ring: center for the seated block, left and right for the standing flanks, with every guest hearing the same spatial mix.
Two changes in the room made the zones work. The Kiva II hangs, previously out at the room’s outer edges, moved inboard between the main hangs, pulling the image back towards the center for the standing audience. Additional X8 went in between the zones so each flank could be covered by its own surround ring. The design was modeled and validated in L-Acoustics Soundvision before load-in.
For more information, visit l-acoustics.com.
