Contents

Acknowledgments: the Without Whom Dept.

I’m still learning my way around being Music Director, so I must first thank all those people who’ve allowed me to practice on them, especially director Phil Lowery, who’s taught me a lot about the dramatic aspects of the MD’s job, and the supportive Board and Staff of the Altarena Playhouse in Alameda, California, where I’ve had the chance to learn about all aspects—especially the logistical side—of music directing.

Many of the examples of piano/conductor score notation are taken from the piano/conductor score of Oh My Godmother! ( http://www.ohmygodmother.com), music and lyrics copyright 2003 by Ron Lytle, arrangements copyright 2005 by Armando Fox, all rights reserved, excerpts used with permission.

Thanks to the many musicians who’ve allowed me to practice on them for not one but multiple shows, especially Roberta Drake, Mike Wilson, Adrienne Chambers, Wes Asakawa, Mike Brosius, Josh Cohen, Dave Brossard, Trevor Pering, and Deb Cembellin.

For arranging and musicianship, I’m indebted to Walter Fischhoff, without whose many years of musicianship and theory instruction I would be completely out of my depth in doing arrangements, and his wife Susan Fischhoff, without whose early instruction in piano technique I would be unable to play and conduct at the same time, something that seems to be part of the de facto MD job description these days.

0.1 About the Author

Armando Fox is a computer science professor at Berkeley who has a passion for music and theater. This is probably the best book about music directing by a computer scientist that you’ll ever read. He’s been a pianist for over 30 years, trained classically at the Prep Division of the Mannes College of Music in New York, and started playing in pits in 7th grade and conducting them in college. He does freelance music direction, vocal coaching, accompanying, etc. around the Bay Area, much of it at the Altarena Playhouse in Alameda; he plays piano and keyboards very well, drums decently well, and woodwinds not so well. He has done reductions of many “classic” musicals for smaller (6–9 piece) pits, including Man of La Mancha, Oklahoma!, Gypsy, Merrily We Roll Along, Assassins, Company, and others, and has done small-combo orchestrations for two original musicals, Oh My Godmother! and The Man Who Saved Christmas, both written by Ron Lytle. He’s on Altarena’s Board of Directors and the Advisory Board for the Custom Made Theatre Co. in San Francisco, and is the creator of Audience1st, the best small-theater ticketing and backoffice software out there.

Chapter 1
Who This Book Is For

When I served as Music Director for the first time in college, I already had extensive classical piano training, ear training, ensemble playing, some choral conducting, and music theory. I had also played piano in three or four pits, and I had seen dozens of Broadway musicals as a kid growing up in New York, so I sort of knew how theater scores were put together and rehearsed.

But I quickly learned that there’s a big gap between musicianship and Music Director. Conducting a pit orchestra is different from conducting an orchestra or a choir, and most community productions introduce additional limitations relating to budget, talent pool, facilities/space, staff/personnel, and other things they don’t seem to cover in any book. Delivering a great musical while juggling all of these is the real job of the Music Director, and I learned those things only by doing.

If this is the position you find yourself in, I hope you find helpful this collection of stuff I wish I’d known when I started doing this several years ago. My primary instrument is piano, and since piano/conductor is a common dual role for the music director, that’s my basic assumption about you, but most of this information will apply if you have a separate pianist or separate vocal director.

I’m also making the following additional assumptions:

• You have some musical background and can play an instrument. If you’ve played in pits or done some choral conducting [McElheran2005], some of what’s here will already be familiar to you.
• The production staff have staged musicals before (as opposed to plays). If this is the first show for all of you, I suggest you first read one of the many great books on how to stage a musical, such as  [Grote1986] or [Novak1996]; then come back and read this, treating it as expanded coverage of the topics specific to the Music Director’s role. And if this is your first musical, I hope you’re not starting with Sweeney Todd or West Side Story!
• I assume you have few or no professional singers, though some of your singers have vocal or other musical training and can read music, while others may be untrained “naturals” with good voices.
• I assume you may not have the resources for a full orchestra (many shows call for 10–25 musicians, including 4–12 strings), due to lack of money, musicians, or space to put them. Few or none of them may be professional-grade musicians, and some may not have played in pits before.
• Your organization is resource-limited and relies largely on volunteer labor, and everyone must do multiple jobs. Hence, besides being the music director, you are probably also the vocal coach, rehearsal pianist, orchestra conductor, and perhaps orchestra pianist.
• You don’t necessarily have access to professional facilities like a “real” pit at the front of the stage, so some creativity may be needed in where to put the pit and how to coordinate the onstage actors with the music.
• Your intention is to perform live music at every show, rather than using a prerecorded music track. To me, a prerecorded show soundtrack is an insult to the audience that completely defeats the freshness and energy of live theater. After all, the audience would walk out of a play if the actors were lip-syncing their dialogue to a prerecorded track.
• Your goal is to put on a show that people will come to because it’s a great show, not just because they are the friends or parents of the performers. There is a large middle ground between New York or London productions and “church basement” productions, but I believe an important goal is to aspire to a higher level of professionalism than may be strictly necessary for your venue.

1.1 Map of This Book

Music direction involves picking a show, understanding it dramatically, teaching actors to sing and act the songs, getting the musicians to play the music, possibly doing some musical arrangements to cope with resource limitations, and then putting it all together into an actual performance. Each of those topics is a book unto itself, but if you had time to read all those books, you wouldn’t need this one. The Music Director’s job in a community theater is about breadth as well as depth, so if it seems presumptuous to cover a huge topic like “Rehearsing the Orchestra” in the few pages of a single chapter, it’s because I thought you would benefit from knowing something about it even if you don’t become an expert, and that you’d go read one of the excellent books listed in the Bibliography to learn more about that topic.

I will therefore focus on everything that is expected of the MD, from the moment the show materials arrive to the moment the sets are struck after the closing performance.

For most MD’s, the adventure begins when the box of rental materials arrives, so chapter 2 covers the basics of unpacking that box: Will you be able to cover all the instruments called for, and if not, which ones do you leave out? What can you expect in terms of scheduling? How do you use that material to plan for auditions with the show’s director?

The MD has a crucial role to play in evaluating whether the sung portion of an audition indicates that an actor can handle the musical demands of a particular role. Chapter 3 covers how to prepare for auditions (as the evaluator), how to advise your auditioners to prepare, things to try during the audition if the auditioner’s material doesn’t give you enough information about her abilities, and the differences in what to focus on during first-round auditions vs. during callbacks.

Once the show is cast, the two major chunks of work the MD then has in front of her are teaching the singers to sing the songs (Chapters 4, 5 and 6) and recruiting and rehearsing an orchestra to play them (Chapters 7 and 8). Chapter 4 covers how to teach the singers the songs: how do you work with singers who have little or no musical training? What exercises or techniques can you teach them to help learn particularly tricky material? How can you setup rehearsal schedules to make the best use of everyone’s time but still make sure you have allocated enough time to learn all the material? Most important, once the actors have “learned the notes” and perform the songs technically correctly, how do you help them act and interpret the songs? (This is musical theater, after all, not just a musical concert!) This is the longest chapter since it covers such a large collection of scenarios.

Chapter 8 then covers the analogous challenges of working with the orchestra: How do you read a piano/conductor score and decode the markings specific to theater work (if you haven’t done theater work before)? What should you be looking for when recruiting/auditioning orchestra members? If you can’t recruit all the instruments called for in the show’s orchestration, what do you leave out and what can you rearrange so as to preserve the flavor of the original score as closely as possible?

Chapter 10 is somewhat advanced: it is aimed at the MD who may need to do significant arrangement or reduction of the provided orchestration to compensate for having a much smaller pit due to constraints such as space or budget. While arranging is a subtle art, and the best arrangers and orchestrators are highly sought after, I at least try to offer a few general rules of thumb to help the MD who is trying to squeeze an orchestration down to a much more modest size.

Finally, Chapter ?? provides information that wouldn’t fit anywhere else but is otherwise crosscutting to the MD’s concerns, such as good ways to use technology to facilitate your job and the pitfalls and politics of human resources in recruiting the pit.

On with the show…

Part I
Pre-Production

Chapter 2
Planning And Logistics

This chapter will help you to:

• know what to expect when the box of materials arrives, and how to use each kind of book;
• determine your orchestra staffing strategy based on what’s in the box;
• establish a rough timeline for rehearsals (even though you haven’t held auditions yet).

The material in this chapter is also useful when evaluating a potential show¹, especially Section 2.3, Instrumentation, since your ability to staff the orchestra should influence whether that show is chosen. Some shows can be “reduced” much more effectively than others.

2.1 What’s In The Box

Remember that orchestrations are rented separately from the other show materials. This implies several things for you:

• Orchestration materials (the instrument books) may not be in the box. By default they arrive later (typically 4–5 weeks before opening night), and if you want them earlier you usually have to pay more. But you should have at least one copy in the box of the piano/conductor score or rehearsal score, which is enough to get started with. We will defer discussion of the instrument books until Chapter 8.
• If there are multiple orchestration choices for your show, make sure the correct one is ordered to avoid extra fees and mailing costs later. In this chapter we discuss the different “sizes” of orchestrations and how to find out if there are different choices available for your show.
• Usually, the orchestration you rent implies something about your performance rights. For example, if you rent only the piano/conductor book and not the other instrument books, you may or may not be allowed to embellish the orchestration with additional instruments. I have seen shows get shut down for this, so read the contract carefully before proceeding.
• You’ll have to return all materials in pristine condition when you’re done (this clause is standard, event though I’ve never received books that were pristine when they arrived) or else pay an outrageous “erasing fee”. Consequently, most musicians I know work from a photocopy and never touch the original book. For the Music Director this makes even more sense.

Here’s what you should find in the box:

Conductor’s book. This is the book from which the conductor actually conducts during a performance and is usually one of three types. The most common is the “Piano/Conductor” score, which can be played on the piano but indicates the most important instrument cues (selected prominent passages played by other instruments). It may also be a full partitur (like a classical conductor’s score showing one staff per instrument) or a Piano/Partitur similar to chamber orchestration, in which the pianist is usually also the conductor. We discuss each format in more detail below.

Rehearsal pianist’s or accompanist’s book. If the conductor’s book is anything other than Piano/Conductor, there may be a separate rehearsal book, perhaps called “Piano/Vocal” or “Rehearsal Score”. In section 2.3 we’ll discuss differences between these and their relative merits.

Script/Prompt Book. The script may be a “Prompt Book” similar to what the stage manager will use, or if you’re unlucky, a “side” for each character containing only that character’s lines and one or two cue lines before each. Happily, such sides seem to be getting more rare.

Vocal Book/Libretto. There will be several copies of the Vocal Book, which includes the lyrics and melody but usually no accompaniment. Sometimes the script and libretto are combined, other times they are separate books.

Snag the conductor’s score, the piano/vocal score if supplied, the instrument books if they’ve arrived, and a copy of the vocal book for yourself.

2.2 The Conductor’s Score

Before going further, get a lot of pencils with good erasers, a bunch of yellow highlighting pens, and a looseleaf binder. Photocopy the entire CS onto 3-hole-punched looseleaf paper and put it in a binder in which you can easily reorganize the pages.² As you make cuts and rearrangements in the show, or need to re-photocopy a page that has become unreadable from repeated markings and erasures, you’ll appreciate having done this. It also lets you strategically insert blank pages to fix tricky page turns.

As noted above, the most common type of conductor’s score is called piano/conductor, even if the conductor is not actually expected to play the piano and even if there’s no piano part in the orchestration. This score is essentially a glorified piano reduction that preserves some of the most important instrumental lines present in the orchestration, often notated with “cue notes” in a smaller typeface alongside instrument names. Depending on how many instrument cues are shown, in some numbers they may be shown on the same staves as the piano part (Figure 2.2) whereas in other numbers there may be one or more separate cue staves to prevent the piano part from getting visually cluttered (Figure 2.2). This book is suitable for piano-only rehearsal but may require some creativity on the part of the pianist, since such reductions are not always playable or sound particularly good as written. If you’re doing the show with piano only, this is the book to use unless a separate piano-only reduction (see section 2.3) is specifically available for the show.

In some shows with large orchestras, the conductor conducts from a partitur, which is like a classical score showing a separate staff for every instrument in the pit (with transposing instruments notated in their reading pitch, not concert pitch, which can be disconcerting if you’re not used to score reading). In this case, a separate piano/vocal score (sometimes called a rehearsal score) may be provided that contains the lyrics and basic piano accompaniment but doesn’t reliably indicate the instrumental parts. This score is suitable for rehearsal but not for conducting (and indeed, if there is a piano part written into the show, it is usually in a separate book that is substantially different from the piano/vocal score). Note that some scores labeled “Piano/Vocal” are really piano/conductor (in that they include hints about instrumental arrangements). From now on we’ll say rehearsal score if we specifically mean a simplified piano-only arrangement with no instrument cues, and conductor’s score to mean “whatever the conductor conducts from.”

The third type of CS is a hybrid: the piano/partitur, which is used for small “chamber” orchestrations in which the piano is one of the instruments. This is just like a conductors score except that the piano’s part is in a larger typeface since the pianist will play from this book. In terms of format, it looks just like the piano part to (for example) a piano and strings chamber quintet.

In addition, whereas many older CS’s (and the corresponding IB’s) are basically photocopies of the original sheets handwritten by music copyists, scores for newer shows are usually machine-typeset. The latter are vastly easier to read and usually contain fewer errors, since the publisher can fix errors electronically and easily re-print the scores.

2.3 Instrumentation: Types of Ensembles

Instrumentation refers to the complement of instruments required to play the score. The term orchestration is often used, but technically, orchestration refers to the actual arrangements, not the list of musicians needed.

The original instrumentation (when the show was staged in New York or London) is usually listed on one of the front-matter pages of the conductor’s score. If not, you can infer it by enumerating the instrument books, or by looking up the show’s information online at whichever of the “big four” licensing agencies controls performance rights.

Licensing agencies sometimes use terms such as “large”, “small” or “chamber” to characterize the instrumentation (orchestra size) for shows that they license, but the meanings of the terms are not standardized. In practice, instrumentation for most musicals falls into one of four categories.

1. The “traditional Broadway pit” (my term) has the same sections as a symphony orchestra (rhythm/percussion, strings, winds, brass) and in similar proportions, but much smaller: a symphony orchestra can exceed 100 musicians, whereas the Broadway pit is 25–40 musicians. This was the dominant format through the late 60’s for Broadway musicals, when budgets went further than they do today. It is also the most challenging for smaller theaters because the orchestrations are often difficult to reduce.
2. In the 70’s and 80’s, budget concerns and a desire for a leaner, drier and more contemporary sound resulted in smaller orchestras of 12–14 musicians, dominated by woodwinds and featuring few or no strings. Nearly all off-Broadway musicals and many Broadway revivals use this smaller format. These arrangements can often be further reduced and are usually within reach for community theaters. Smaller arrangements often call for extensive doubling, a term that refers to a single musician who can play multiple instruments (not at the same time!).
3. Some contemporary shows call for a “chamber orchestration”—8 or fewer musicians, frequent doubling, and very exposed solo lines. The 1994 Rodgers and Hammerstein revue A Grand Night For Singing calls for percussion, 1 woodwind (flute doubling clarinet and alto), 1 cello, and 1 harp (which most small theaters omit or cover using piano or percussion effects). The 2001 musical The Last Five Years calls for piano, 2 cellos, violin, string bass, and guitar. This format is within the reach of community theaters, but requires strong players since each part is so exposed.
4. Shows with a rock score, such as Jesus Christ Superstar (1970) and Hair (1968), use “classic rock” instrumentation with period-appropriate guitar effects. Similarly, Rent (1996) relies heavily on synthesizers, drum machines and other elements central to the early 90s “pop sound”. These scores are realistic for community theaters, but unlike other kinds of scores, require careful attention to amplification and sound, and therefore probably require that the singers be amplified too. This is not necessarily a showstopper, but be aware that it can be a lot of extra work (see sections 8.4.1 and 5.7). Some scores like Next to Normal (2008) are hybrid, combining a rock sound with strings or woodwinds. These sometimes call for unusual doublings such as guitar/violin.
5. Some very small off-Broadway shows or revues call for piano only (as in 2007’s Musical of Musicals: The Musical), a “piano combo” (piano, bass, drums, plus possibly a soloist), or piano plus a single soloist (such as The Fantasticks’ piano and harp). However, unless the show is specifically written this way, or you are severely resource-constrained, my advice in general is not to reduce shows by doing them with piano only, as I describe in the next section.

Some shows may also require specialists (musicians who play only one or a small set of closely related instruments that do not routinely appear in pit orchestras), such as banjo for Chicago or accordion for Cabaret, to form the distinctive “signature sound” of those shows’ scores.

Modern orchestrations tend to rely less on strings, in part because it takes 3 or 4 stringed instruments to match the volume and power of a single woodwind instrument (unless your string players are solo quality and the lines they are playing are written as solo lines), making the orchestra larger and driving costs up. (Of course, if you have amplification and are miking the orchestra sections separately, you can overcome this, but that’s a can of worms that this book dares not open; see section 8.4.1.)

By way of example, Table 2.3 compares 3 typical instrumentations: full instrumentation from an older and a newer show, and reduced alternative instrumentation for a (different) older show.

Some important things to notice from this comparison:

• Most of the difference in size between the orchestras of older/bigger and newer/smaller shows comes from omitting strings.
• Some string parts are marked divisi, such as Violin B of Oklahoma!. This means that while all the Violin B players are playing the same notes during most of the show, in a few sections they split up; usually playing parallel figures such as thirds or sixths. (If these players were playing different parts throughout most of the score, there would probably have been a “Violin C” instead.)
• Unlike string or brass players, most reed players are expected to be able to play multiple instruments, called doubling. But single-reed players (clarinets and saxes) are not usually expected to be able to play double-reed instruments (oboe, bassoons, English horn) and vice versa.
• In modern arrangements, it is common to expect the single-reed player to also play the flutes (flute, piccolo, alto flute, sometimes bass flute); in earlier shows, flute/piccolo was usually a separate chair.

2.4 Instrumentation on a Shoestring

Most small theaters can’t cover all the instruments for anything larger than a chamber orchestration. If yours can (perhaps you have access to a school band or similar), you’re all set, and all you have to do is get familiar with the instrument books and recruit musicians (see chapter ??).

Otherwise, you have some choices to make.

First, check whether a reduced orchestration is available from the licensing house. These arrangements tend to be quite good because they are usually prepared by a professional arranger and include extensive cross-cuing (which we discuss in section 7.2.2) to allow more flexibility in the composition of the orchestra.

If a reduction is not available, you can try to reduce the orchestration yourself. One easy option is “piano combo” (piano, bass, drums). While using piano only might seem an obvious choice, I wouldn’t recommend it unless the show is specifically scored that way; even a tiny complement of instruments will completely change the sound of the show and move you up into a higher league. A piano combo including bass and drums gives the music a tremendous amount more backbone and rhythmic “punch” than even the most muscular pianist can provide. If bass and drum books are provided, you’re done; if not, the bass can be inferred from the piano/conductor book, and a good drummer can probably pick up the drum part by listening to the cast album, notating the important breaks, and discussing the part with you.

If you’re willing to invest a bit more time, the next step up would be piano combo plus a single soloist—typically a wind player, ideally an accomplished one who can cover multiple instruments. Listeners will hear this as a small “orchestra” even though it’s just one additional instrument over piano combo because they will hear multiple sound colors in the tonal palette. If you can cover some but not all of the instruments, another option is to do some reduction, thinning out, or omission of the orchestration. Chapter 10 gives some helpful hints about selecting the most important instrument cues when doing this kind of reduction.

2.5 Electronic Instruments

Synthesizers. “Synths” are becoming more common not only in small orchestras, but in original orchestrations. Synths appear not only in rock/pop scores like Rent and Little Shop of Horrors, but are also called for to provide essential effects in modern scores like Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods.

Synths are sometimes used to substitute for string sections, to add midrange to the sound, or to produce unusual percussion sounds such as a xylophone or marimba that would otherwise require a specialist. Whether to use a synthesizer in this way is a matter of taste. Even the best synths still sound like synths, not strings, when combined with a small acoustic orchestra; but a synth may be better than the alternatives, such as omitting the string part completely.

If you lack a bass player, covering bass on synth is an option, but usually a bad one. A real bass can provide so much backbone and punch, even with a small amp and electric bass, that synth bass should be considered an option of last resort (unless, of course, the score specifically calls for synth bass for stylistic reasons).

Digital vs. Acoustic Pianos. A lot of theaters are now preferring digital pianos over acoustic uprights. While not cheap, digital pianos are maintenance-free, easy to move, easy to make louder or softer, and often capable of making other sounds (organ, electric piano, etc.) that render them useful in situations where space is at a premium. (Some advanced models also have features like automatic transposition, which seems like a boon but is really an accident waiting to happen when you forget to turn it back off after playing the one song that was transposed.)

The downside is that even the best digital piano played through a good sound system sounds like a piano reproduced through a mediocre stereo, and many sound significantly worse than that. (A digital piano played through its built-in speaker sounds like a digital piano played through a transistor radio. It’s not necessarily an unpleasant sound, but it doesn’t sound like a piano, to my ear.) Much of the “liveness” associated with a live-band sound is gone. I prefer a run-of-the-mill upright piano over a digital piano if at all possible, but budget or technical considerations may dictate your choice; for example, you may need both a piano sound and an organ sound, and not have room for two instruments. If you do use a digital piano, consider how you can make the most of it, perhaps by also using it for sound effects, other percussion (xylophones, bells, gongs), eerie background noises, etc.

In a few cases, dramatic considerations may intervene. For example, both Chicago, which takes place in the 20s, and A Little Night Music, which takes place at the turn of the 20th century, require a piano on stage as part of the action. As there were no digital pianos available back then, the dramatic rationale of preserving a “period look” may carry the day (assuming the stage piano can double as the orchestra piano). Another option is to have a real but nonworking stage piano and play the actual piano parts on a digital piano in the pit, but this only works if you can stage so that there is no way for the audience to tell the onstage player isn’t really playing. Otherwise it looks and sounds so cheesy that it’s hard for me to recommend (though that doesn’t stop a lot of theaters from doing it).

Drum Machines. Unless the show specifically calls for one (Rent, Chess), a tiny, 3-piece trap set, heavily muffled, sounds much more acoustically interesting than electronic drums—whether played by a human or through a drum machine.

2.6 Scheduling and Timeline

It’s never too soon to think about the rehearsal schedule. I aim to have a rehearsal schedule in place 1–2 weeks before rehearsals begin (indeed, accommodating people’s conflicts often requires this amount of advance planning), and an orchestra rehearsal schedule in place at least 4 weeks before opening.

The schedule template in Table 2.6 seems to work well as a starting point. We won’t discuss the rehearsal process in depth (see [Boland1997] and [Grote1986] for excellent suggestions on that), concentrating instead on specific techniques for teaching the actors to sing the songs.

Although the section about scheduling singing rehearsals is in Chapter ??, it’s appropriate to address the question of scheduling orchestra rehearsals right here, up front. Many musicians who do pit work have other regular gigs, so start early in scheduling the orchestra rehearsals! Once the rehearsal and performance schedule is set, busy musicians usually “fill in” their free dates with more work, so it’s virtually impossible for them to add new rehearsals or performances after the initial schedule is published.

In Chapter 8, when we talk about working with the orchestra, we’ll discuss orchestra rehearsals in more detail; but your immediate goal is to nail down some dates and times. If the pit players are experienced, the material (score) is straightforward, and the MD is experienced, a single orchestra-only rehearsal prior to tech week is probably enough. For each of those three clauses that isn’t true, add one more orchestra-only rehearsal. (In the extreme, an inexperienced orchestra playing a difficult show with an inexperienced MD would take six rehearsals …but you’re probably asking for trouble anyway if you find yourself in this situation! In practice, two or three rehearsals are usually more than enough.)

Chapter 3
Auditions

This chapter will help you to:

• Prepare for first-round auditions by determining what to listen for and test for at auditions;
• Suggest some basic exercises you can use to evaluate auditioners whose audition song doesn’t tell you enough about their abilities;
• Determine what nontechnical factors should influence your decisions to call back auditioners for different roles;
• Suggest different techniques to use at callbacks for lead roles vs. ensemble roles.

I’ll restrict my discussions to musical elements of the audition only (vs. spoken dialogue or dance). Great advice on the general running of auditions can be found in [Boland1997] and [Boyd1970].

Auditions are generally run in two rounds. From the MD’s perspective, the first round determines who is technically capable of learning and singing the show’s music, and the second round (callbacks) is for making final decisions. For many shows, rigorous auditions for the ensemble (a more accurate term than chorus) are at least as important as for the leads.

At callbacks, auditioners usually perform selections from the actual show. Since first round auditions have pruned away any actors who may be unable to handle a role’s musical demands, callbacks can focus on artistic aspects such as interpretation, some suggestions for which are given in section 6.

Before auditions, if you have a cast recording of the show (not of its movie version! they are often quite different), it is worth listening to the recording while following along in the score to identify some of the technical challenges you will have to keep in mind as you hear auditions: difficult vocal harmonies, tricky timings/rhythms, songs calling for a large vocal range, etc. Make some notes in preparing for auditions:

• What vocal range is required of each character? Sometimes songs can be transposed to match a singer’s range, but as we discuss in Section 10.6, this is difficult, tedious, error-prone, fraught with non-obvious pitfalls, and usually practical only for solo songs.
• Which characters have to sing harmony or counterpoint, if any? This is much harder technically than singing the lead, and you will need to test for it at auditions.
• Are the characters with the hardest songs also the ones who have the most dramatically demanding roles? (You may audition someone with a great voice, but if they can’t act well, it may remove them from the running for certain characters.) Surprisingly often, the technical vocal demands on the ensemble are greater than those on the leads, in part because show tunes were often written for a pre-cast lead actor who wasn’t necessarily a trained singer, as was the case with the material written for Ethel Merman in Gypsy and Glynis Johns (“Send In the Clowns” in A Little Night Music).

3.1 Provide Instructions to Auditioners

In the call for auditions, you should clearly state what you expect auditioners to prepare:

• What to sing. Typically each auditioner will prepare one or two song excerpts of 16 to 32 bars each. Often a single excerpt is enough, but depending on the types of roles in the show, you may want to hear two contrasting selections, for example an up-tempo number and a ballad, or a farce/patter song and a torch song.
• Are songs from the show OK? My preference is usually not to hear a song from the show, to avoid having actors “pre-slot” themselves into a role for which they may not be appropriate, and inadvertently excluding themselves from being considered for a role that is a better fit. This is particularly true if an actor is auditioning for a part they have played before in another production, as they will usually bring the interpretation of that production to your audition, when what you really want to know is whether the actor can take direction and interpret the role for this production.
• Background. I ask auditioners to answer some background questions that are not always answered by their résumés: Do you read music? Do you play any instruments, and at what level of proficiency? (Complex scores like West Side Story or Sweeney Todd are extremely hard to learn by rote for non-readers, and it’s more difficult for non-musicians to incorporate your vocal notes into their performance if they don’t have a basic musical vocabulary.) Have you sung harmony before, and if so, what kind? (Liturgical? Show music? Barbershop?) Have you sung counterpoint? (Madrigals? Choral music?) My experience is that, especially among untrained singers, counterpoint is much harder to teach and perfect than harmony.
• Conflicts. I ask auditioners to list all date conflicts they have during the rehearsal period. Scheduling is more complex than most people realize, and you’ll need this information to put together the rehearsal schedule.

3.2 First Round Auditions: Range, Tone, Pitch Retention, Rhythm

People get understandably nervous about auditions, and you can’t blame them: not everyone who auditions will be cast. Just do your best to put people at ease, be friendly, and remind people that the goal is to have fun.

In my view, even “non-dancing” characters must move around on stage, even “non-acting” (e.g. ensemble) characters have lines to speak, and even “non-singing” characters must have some sense of musicality. Correspondingly, your job is to make sure you listen to everyone sing, even if they say they are auditioning for a nonsinging part. There are very few truly nonsinging roles in any musical.

The goal of the first round of auditions is to identify those people who might be able to play certain roles on the basis of meeting some minimal technical criteria. You will want to listen for people’s range, tone, pitch accuracy, rhythm, and ability to sing harmony, and match these to the “problem areas” in the score you identified in your preparations.

• Range: what range does the required song exercise? Typical musical theater songs span from an octave to a tenth, with some songs spanning a twelfth and very few spanning two octaves (the latter usually calls for a trained singer). Where is the “break” between the singer’s chest voice and head voice? Songs that have many or prominent notes right around the break may require transposition.
• Tone: does the singer sound “out of tune” on some of the notes? Sometimes this is because they are at the very top or bottom of someone’s range, but often it is because of difficulty in “nailing” a note when the interval (jump) from the preceding note is awkward. Audition songs whose melodies move only stepwise will not reveal this. Particularly good are songs with weird intervals in the melody; for example, “Maria” from West Side Story (although that is an unusually demanding song). There also may be issues of “blend”: certain singers have an unusual vocal character that, while not necessarily bad or unpleasant, may prevent them from blending well with other singers if they have to sing a lot of ensemble material.
• Rhythm/timing: pretty obvious—does the performer have a sense of rhythm. Songs with really trivial rhythms won’t reveal this; songs with syncopation and compound rhythms are good, like Gershwin’s “Fascinatin’ Rhythm” or other songs featuring hemiolae. I’m surprised how often an actor will bring an audition song that has tricky rhythms or time signatures and then perform it incorrectly; that’s often reason enough for me to listen no further.

Unfortunately people often choose audition pieces that show off none of these, so I have my own ways of evaluating them, which you may find helpful. To be consistent and fair, if I use any of these techniques, I ask everyone to do it, however strong or weak their singing audition was, if the requirement applies to them. (So anyone who has to sing counterpoint would have to do the counterpoint exercise.)

Pitch Retention. Play each of the two-note sequences (intervals) below and have the singer sing it back to you with “yah-yah” or “la-la” or some suitable syllable. They’re arranged in increasing order of difficulty, so most singers won’t be able to do all of them. For singers whose audition song was weak, I start with the easiest interval; for singers who performed solidly, I start with the harder ones right away.

Harmony. A basic test for harmony singing is to have the singer sing and hold the middle note in a chord (or middle line in a sequence of chords) while you play the outer notes on the piano. (See example below.)

Counterpoint. Take the auditioners 6 or 9 at a time and split the six into groups A, B and C containing 2 or 3 auditioners each. Find a 3-part harmony or counterpoint line in which none of the parts is substantially easier than the others (and make sure it has been distributed in advance as part of the callback materials). Teach the three parts to groups A, B and C respectively, and put them together incrementally: just A and B singing together, then just B and C, then just A and C, and finally all three groups singing together, so they feel comfortable on the part.

Next, rearrange the way people are standing so that rather than all the A’s standing together, etc., they are standing in the order A, B, C, A, B, C, …, and have them sing it again. This will expose people who are relying too much on what their neighbor is singing. Lastly, get subgroups of 3 people (one each from A, B, C) to sing the selection.

Rhythm. If there are tricky rhythms in the show, it’s worth testing for that. For example, the “flamenco-esque” songs in Man of La Mancha contain lots of syncopations and hemiolae. I divided the ensemble into two groups and had them clap the huapango pattern below (the same pattern underlies the song America from West Side Story). I then listened to subsets of the groups and moved people back and forth between groups to get an idea of who was most solid.

Based on techniques like the above, I then categorize the singers:

• Anchor: can sing the line correctly even if someone near them is throwing them off, and can even help strengthen the other singers.
• Teachable: can sing in an ensemble as long as they can rely a little on someone nearby singing correctly with them
• Weak: cannot be counted on to sing the part reliably, even when bolstered by someone nearby.

For very large casts, there may be an intermediate category “Teachable, but a stretch”. Be realistic about how much a weak singer can be “taught,” especially if your rehearsals are on a tight timeline (and whose aren’t?). This is not just about your ability to teach, but the singer’s ability to learn: counterpoint and harmony singing take time and practice to learn, and even if the singer has a good sense of pitch (and some don’t), it is probably beyond reasonable to attempt to instill this skill in them and teach them the songs in the few weeks before production week. You can save yourself and the singers a lot of misery by making tough choices now. As MD, you should have the final word on whether someone can handle the musical demands of a particular role or not.

3.3 Making Callback Choices

As a courtesy to auditioners, you should make every effort to post a callback list within a day or so after first-round auditions are over, and make callback material (song excerpts, dialogue excerpts, etc.) available. Usually we decide even before first-round auditions on what material from the show will be used at the callback. It’s only fair to give singers a few days to prepare and practice these materials; for that reason, first round and callbacks are usually separated by several days. (See Technology in chapter ?? for some suggestions.)

Given an actor whom you believe can technically handle certain musical material, the next goal is to identify the actor who can best inhabit each character. Sometimes actors can be excluded based on being too old or young, or affecting a manner inconsistent with the character, e.g. coming across as sweet or mild when auditioning for Velma or Roxie in Chicago. Sometimes particular physical traits are required: in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, the school’s “comfort counselor” is doing his community service, so you need someone whose demeanor and appearance are as unlike a comfort counselor as possible—e.g., a bouncer or a pro wrestler—or else the sight gag doesn’t work.

One pitfall in callbacks occurs with actors who have played a particular role before, and therefore bring to the character some preconceived notions (theirs’ or the previous directors’) about how that character behaves and acts. These ideas may or may not be consistent with your creative team’s ideas, and it’s often hard to get actors to step away from these, but remember it’s your show, and the thing that distinguishes one production of a show from another is the artistic choices that are made.

Similarly, operatic or classically-trained singers with no show experience may do poorly in callbacks because they perform the song as they themselves might sing it, not as the character might sing it. This applies not only to interpretation but also to diction: Ado Annie in Oklahoma! wouldn’t pronounce lyrics the same way as Adelaide in Guys and Dolls or the same way as Anna in The King and I.

We did an interesting exercise in auditioning an actor for the part of the Emcee in Cabaret. We liked the actor, but the audition song he had prepared was a love ballad, and we were looking for someone who could come across as slightly dangerously off-kilter. So we found a toy machine gun (a prop from another show being staged in that theater) and asked him to sing the love ballad to the machine gun. He certainly sold us the performance and convinced us that he could act his way through a song.

3.4 Tips to Auditioners for a Successful Audition

This section is for auditioners as well as for the music director, so I’m putting it on a convenient new page that you can separately copy and post for your auditioners. (If you’d like to copy and paste the text to edit for your own auditions call, visit the online version of the book.)

Putting Your Best Foot Forward At Auditions

Prepare. Read the call for auditions and know what you’re expected to prepare. Don’t just show up and expect that the director will suggest a song for you to sing. Since many auditions allow you to choose your selections and prepare far in advance, the auditors will assume that your audition performance reflects your best work. Stick to the guidelines: if the call specifies a 16-to-32 bar section or “around 2 minutes of singing,” don’t prepare a 5-minute solo selection (or, conversely, expect to be cut off and therefore unable to sing the whole selection, even if you didn’t get to sing “the best part”).

Show your best stuff. To the extent possible given the audition requirements, select songs that show off the strongest part of your range to its best advantage. Note that wanting to be (or claiming to be) a soprano doesn’t make you one; if you’re unsure about what part of your range flatters you most, find an experienced actor, singer, director or music director to advise you. Remember: if your audition sounds terrific, even if you aren’t cast the auditors will remember you in the future.

Bring music. Unless specifically instructed otherwise, bring music for the audition accompanist to play. An a cappella audition gives the music director virtually no information about you other than that you have been watching American Idol a lot. An audition with a recorded karaoke track is very difficult to judge. Some auditions let you bring your own accompanist if you wish, but generally an accompanist is provided.

Help the accompanist help you. During a typical evening of auditions, the audition pianist will accompany dozens of songs, some of which he may never have played before. His job is to help you sound your best by providing solid support for your singing performance. Here’s how to help him help you:

1. DO bring pages that are easy to turn and stand up on the piano’s music desk on their own. Best is a looseleaf binder that lies flat and whose pages can be turned easily; you will get extra bonus points for protecting each page with clear vinyl sheet protectors, which makes them easier to turn and more durable. “Accordion” fold-outs are OK if they are no more than three or four pages; more than that won’t fit on the music desk. DON’T bring loose sheets of paper that will fly around, rolled-up or folded sheets that can’t possibly stand up on their own, or a bound book that doesn’t lie flat when opened. And DON’T complain if you do bring such a book and it’s returned to you with the spine cracked and the pages dog-eared; there is no other way to get it to stay open upright.
2. DO clearly mark any cuts or repeats in the selection you plan to perform, with a highlighter or a bright color, making it perfectly clear what is to be played. If your cuts are substantial, rearrange and copy-and-paste the pages in advance. Remember, the pianist is thinking about many things and may never have played this particular selection before, and might easily miss a small mark that isn’t highlighted. It is to your advantage to arrange the music to minimize page turns; if you want to repeat a section and there’s a page turn right in the middle of that section, you can pretty much count on the music “dropping out” for a couple of seconds each time through as the pianist struggles to make the page turn in time.
3. DO bring sheet music in the same key as you plan to sing. Most pianists can’t transpose on the fly, especially more musically intricate theater songs by composers like Stephen Sondheim or Jason Robert Brown. If the song’s in the wrong key, pick a different song, find a different arrangement, visit one of the many websites where you can purchase sheet music for almost any song transposed into a key of your choice, or use Craigslist to find a musician to transpose it (many musicians do this work on the side fairly inexpensively).
4. DO use a bookmark or sticky-note if your selection is in a book containing many songs; browsing through the book while others are waiting is not nice and makes you look unprepared. Even better, since bound books often don’t stay open on the music desk, photocopy the pages and put them in a binder.

Part II
Working With Actors and Singers

Chapter 4
Teaching the Music

Great! The show is cast, and the actors are eager to start rehearsals. It’s always a good idea to start working on the music early, because the songs are so important to the tone of the show that performing them should be “second nature” to the actors when they start putting them together with staging, dialogue and dance. This chapter will help you to:

• Plan vocal rehearsals to make the best use of everyone’s time
• Suggest techniques and exercises singers can do at home to practice material outside rehearsal
• Suggest techniques that can be used during rehearsal to help polish tricky spots, including harmony and counterpoint

The most important thing in teaching the notes (i.e., the technical aspects of the songs) is to know your singers. Trained and experienced singers will learn a lot on their own, and can even help the less-experienced singers; completely untrained singers may rely on muscle memory only (you should strongly reconsider having such people sing—Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady was the exception that tests the rule). In between these two extremes are the majority of singers, who are less experienced but do have a sense of pitch. Here is a variety of techniques that can help them both learn the basic melody or interior lines and polish the tricky parts.

4.1 Scheduling and Running Vocal Rehearsals

The first task is to come up with a comprehensive rehearsal schedule. When I work on shows, the director and cast are usually other adults with day jobs, so we have to schedule very efficiently to make the best use of everyone’s limited time. It’s not unusual for us to have “split rehearsals” in which I am working with actors on some music while the director or choreographer is working simultaneously with other actors on blocking, staging or stage movement.

Since the ensemble numbers require all or most of the cast to be present, I schedule rehearsals for those first to accommodate cast member conflicts, then schedule rehearsals with soloists around that. I try to arrange the call schedule to minimize the amount of time people are sitting around not working; it’s impossible to please everyone, but you will get a lot of credibility and respect for making a good faith effort to minimize wasting people’s time. In some productions, scheduling is done by the stage manager or production manager. In this case you’ll need to come up with a list of material, and for each piece of material, who is called and approximately how much time you will need to work on it. To that end, I’ve found the following rules of thumb very helpful in scheduling rehearsals:

• The 90/90 rule: It’s almost a cliché in the world of software (my day job) that “the first 90% of a project takes 90% of the time, and the remaining 10% takes the other 90% of the time.” Nowhere is this more true than rehearsing a musical: there always seem to be 16 or 32 bars in the score that end up soaking up a disproportionate amount of rehearsal time, and they won’t be the ones you thought would be hard. Leave some slop towards the end of the music rehearsal schedule to review and polish the trickiest material.
• Complex ensemble work takes 3–5 minutes per measure of music, vs. 1–2 minutes per measure on average for solo material; but this varies widely depending on the complexity of the ensemble work.
• The vast majority of the rehearsals will be done with a rehearsal pianist only, not with the orchestra. If you’re a small operation, that pianist is probably you. Since most piano/conductor scores at least try to indicate which orchestra cues will be most prominent by notating them in the piano part or as cue notes, be sure to be consistent when you play the piano accompaniment.

4.2 Practice Tracks For At-Home Preparation

The most commonly used technique in amateur productions is “learning at the piano”: you play and sing the melody first, then the singer(s) sing along with you as you play it again, then they sing it without you given only the accompaniment. However, this is a poor use of time since each singer is “learning at the piano” while others are probably standing around idle. A better approach is to have each performer prepare before rehearsal, and use rehearsal for technical polishing or working on interpretation.

Singers used to bring a portable tape recorder to rehearsal and ask the rehearsal pianist to record their part for at-home practice. Today you can do this just as conveniently in advance with a laptop or PC at home, and email or post the practice tracks on the Web as MP3 files; see section 11.4 for suggestions and instructions. You can get a jump on this and starting making and distributing practice tracks prior to the first rehearsal. (Actors are expected to study their lines before coming to rehearsal, so why not their music?)

What should you record? Here are some useful permutations:

• The singer’s melody with block chords, so that less-experienced singers can get used to how their melody sounds with the harmonies, especially if the harmonies are weird. (Example: “Agony” ostinato)
• The singer’s melody with bass notes or other obvious notes that they can use to find their pitch; particularly useful in cases where the orchestration is sparse or the harmonies are very unusual (I’m thinking Sondheim here, of course).
• The singer’s starting melody note, then accompaniment only (like a rehearsal pianist might do), or the song intro from which the singer should get their starting note, perhaps with emphasis on that starting note. (Example: “Married” intro from Cabaret.) This will teach the singer not to rely on hearing their melody notes played by the piano (or orchestra). See section ?? for suggestions on doing this if entrances are tricky or singers would need to remember a starting note for a long time.
• For harmonies, a couple of passes of other permutations of voices, so the singer can practice her own part relative to other voices.

4.3 Pitch and Interval Training

These are simple exercises singers can do at home (or wherever they have access to a piano) to help learn tricky melody lines. They require only that the singer not be tone-deaf, i.e. that she can tell whether the pitch she is singing is the same or different from a pitch played on the piano.

Pitch training. Play a key on the keyboard somewhere in the middle 3 octaves (roughly, a three-octave interval with middle C in the center). While holding the key, sing the note using “la” or “ya” or any open-vowel syllable. The goal is to be perfectly in tune with the piano; the first several times, the singer may be way off pitch, or on pitch but slightly out of tune. Ask the singer to “hear” the note in her head after the key has been struck but before singing; this is surprisingly effective at prepping your vocal cords to do the right thing. A more advanced version of this exercise involves hitting a key outside of that 3-octave range, and singing the note that is an octave above or below the struck pitch.

Interval training. This technique is more advanced and requires some basic music-reading ability. Pick an interval to train—this may be an interval from an interior vocal line of a song, or for drilling, just start with the easy ones like perfect fourths and fifths and then move on to the more difficult ones like sixths and sevenths. A melody line, especially interior lines in counterpoint singing, may contain weird intervals that lend themselves well to this practice method.

1. Play the interval on the piano one note at a time, then sing the interval (using the mnemonics in the Appendix) using either “yah-yah” or the lyrics if you’re using this exercise to work on a specific passage.
2. Play the first note of the interval on the piano; then release it; then have the singer sing the interval; then play the second note of the interval on the piano and check the singer’s pitch.
3. Sing the interval while playing only non-melody “reference notes”—say, a block chord or the bass note of the chord—on the piano.
4. Once it’s solid, add one or two notes before and one or two notes after the interval; then repeat that phrase over and over. (TBD: show example.)
5. Once that is mastered, have the singer sing the entire phrase containing the interval, but hold each note of the interval and verify its tuning with the piano.
6. Finally, have the singer sing the whole phrase in tempo, but ask him to mentally pay special attention to the weird interval. My experience is that once they have mastered the singing of the interval, thereby demonstrating their ability to tune it, the only thing that causes it to go out of tune is simply not thinking about it enough. After it has been repeated enough times with special concentration, it becomes second nature.

A particularly useful application of this technique is training on a reference interval to help a singer must get a starting pitch. For example, suppose the singer must come in on the note G, but the most prominent sound in the accompaniment is a C in the bass. The singer should practice singing the interval C to G (perfect fifth); then when the C is heard, the singer “mentally sings” the C to herself along with the accompaniment, then actually sings her note G.

4.4 Passing/Neighbor Tones vs. the Long Line

Especially in moving passages with weird passing tones or neighbor tones, pitch accuracy on the in-between notes can be a problem. To work these passages, first identify the “skeleton” or long line of the phrase. Sometimes the long line outlines the melody, as bars A–D and G–H in figure 4.4 outline the rising melody line of bars 1–4 and 7–8 respectively. Other parts of the long line may outline important harmonies, as bars E–F outline the augmented major triad spelled out in measures 5–6.

To practice this, first help the actor perfect the pitches in the long line, singing the appropriate syllables, as in measures A–H. Once this is done, variable-stress practice (section 4.5) can be used to polish the interior pitches (passing and neighbor tones).

4.5 Variable-Stress Practice

Especially in fast-moving melody lines, pitches on unaccented notes (e.g. pickups), or pitches that the singer must leap onto or away from very quickly, may suffer from being indistinct or inaccurate. Variable-stress practice¹ can help fix this by forcing the performer’s attention to focus on every note.

As shown in figure 4.5, the idea is to sing the passage a tiny bit under tempo, but “sitting on” (stressing and holding) different notes each time. Stressing and holding a note forces the performer (and you) to really listen to it and make sure it’s on pitch; this trains the vocal muscles to retain that pitch when the note is sung at full speed in performance. A practice track can be very helpful for a performer who wants to work with this technique at home.

There are various permutations you can do, depending on where the trouble spots are. For example, you could drill the selection in figure 4.5 by first stressing and holding every third note (variation 1), then every fourth note (variation 2). Disregard the original rhythm during variable-stress practice: all notes should have equal duration except the stressed notes, whose duration should be three or four times that of the unstressed notes.

A variation on this technique combines it with variable-stress practice. The bottom staff of figure 4.5 shows the long line of the passage. Have the performers sing the passage slowly but in rhythm, but stressing-and-holding the notes in the passage corresponding to the long line (syllables tics, streets, end, world, Cit, etc.) while doing so.

This is tedious work, since the overall practice time can end up being several minutes per measure, but it’s the most reliable way to really polish these passages (and is a good candidate for the “90/90 rule” above). Most performers can only do this for 20–30 minutes at a time before their sense of pitch becomes a little numb, so plan your rehearsals accordingly. Once a passage has been polished with these techniques, put it together by singing it slowly and speeding up gradually, keeping a sharp ear for any lax diction or rhythm creeping in after you’ve worked so hard on accuracy and precision.

4.6 No Obvious Starting Pitch

A similar technique can be used when singers have to get their starting note from a previous vocal note or from a non-vocal cue. A common example is a canon or other multipart harmony where one singer’s starting note must be cued off a note sung in a different voice, or if there is no good candidate note for this, a prominent note in the orchestration, such as the note that’s in the bass or being played by a prominent high-register instrument such as trumpet or piccolo. (TBD: Need an example.)

The strategy is to treat the cue note and the opening note as a tricky interval, have the singer “remember” the cue note in her head, and then sing her own entry note, by using the interval-drilling procedure above. I find it helps to have you play the cue note and then have the singer hit her entrance note and hold it to get used to how it sounds against the cue note; the goal is to avoid “sliding” onto the correct pitch due to uncertainty.

“Same note as” tricks – practice the phrase starting and ending on the same note

Sing under your breath before your entrance; eventually muscle memory will take over

4.7 Teaching Harmonies and Counterpoint

Books on auditioning and rehearsing choruses [Lamb1974] have good exercises on “pitch retention” that can be used to strengthen singers’ ability to stay on pitch when they’re not singing the melody. Inexperienced singers and those without good pitch retention tend to get thrown off by other people around them singing different parts; they eventually “slide onto” the part of someone else who happens to be near them.

Part of teaching harmony is teaching singers to listen to each other and “lock up” on harmonies. Some good warm-up exercises for doing this are suggested in [Lamb1974] and [Boyd1970], but here is the general gist. Break up the singers into three groups (doesn’t necessarily have to be according to range) and have them sing a simple chord—not a triad in root position, but a chord built from different intervals, such as an inversion. Have them listen to each other and lock pitch. Progress to more difficult chords (some suggestions are shown below). Then shuffle the singers and break them up into four groups rather than three, and try some additional chords. Work your way up to six or seven groups (or alternatively, three or four groups but with octave doublings within a group to achieve big “open” voicings of different chords). One of the most challenging chords I had to teach an untrained ensemble to sing is the final couple of bars of the short Overture from Sondheim’s Company; it is shown below as an example to work the singers up to.

For moving lines and counterpoint, start by teaching each inner line as if it were a melody line using the techniques above, including practice tracks. One way to practice putting moving lines together is permutations of voices. For example, in a 3-voice harmony, first have voices 1 and 2 sing together, then 1 and 3, then 2 and 3. Of course, with large multipart harmonies, you probably don’t have time to try every permutation, but the idea is to get people accustomed to how their part sounds when combined with other parts.

Furthermore, pick some key points during the line at which the singers will stop and hold a chord together (see example below); these serve as intermediate “milestones” to keep singers listening to each other. Vary the milestones on different practice runs, so that eventually the singers will have held at least one “milestone” chord in each measure or so. When they hold a chord and lock pitch in it, their vocal cords become accustomed to the position as well, and this kind of drilling will eventually result in focusing attention on each note.

4.8 Tricky Rhythms

Things that make rhythms tricky:

• Switching between time signatures; a special case is odd or compound time signatures such as 7∕4 or 7∕8, which most singers hear as alternating between double and triple time
• Syncopations or other difficult rhythmic figures in the context of “straight” time

Aim for downbeats

Feel beat units (3/4 to 9/8 to 3/4 in Judges Johanna; use dotted quarter notes in 3 to pre-establish beat unit in 9/8)

4.9 Tips for Running Successful Vocal Rehearsals

Make a Schedule and Follow It. Keep the rehearsal moving along and focused. Use the above rules of thumb to estimate how long each rehearsal selection will take, but if things are stalled on a particularly difficult passage, move on and stick to the schedule, and use one of the offline “learning acceleration” methods described below to help the performers prepare to polish that material at the next rehearsal.

Stay Focused. When switching to a new selection or repeating a section that needs work, minimize the “dead time” to avoid people losing focus; once focus is lost, it takes additional time to get back to where you were, and the time adds up fast. Similarly, avoid people wisecracking or otherwise losing focus. I’ve had directors who want to attend rehearsal and end up distracting the cast and wasting time. Vocal rehearsals are grueling and require concentration, so build some breaks into the schedule—at least one 15-minute break every hour and a half. In my experience, three hours is about the longest you can rehearse with the same group or on the same material before people get exhausted and lose focus, or their voices give out.

Bring Extra Copies. People sometimes forget to bring their vocal book. Admonish them, loan them your extra copy, and move on. If the rehearsal space has Internet access, you may be able to post rehearsal materials on the Web so you can access and print them from any browser (see Section 11.1).

Start on time with a 5–10 minute warmup. Warmups are extremely important to avoid damage to voices. The Appendix contains some simple warmups you can do, and [Boyd1970] has extensive advice on how to use the warmups to get singers psyched for the rehearsal as well as limbering up their voices. Start on time, even if some people haven’t arrived yet, but don’t let people get into the habit of thinking the warmup is optional and they can arrive 5–10 minutes late.

Include those challenging passages in every warmup. Every show has a few “trouble spots” that feel like they could always benefit from more practice: a tough counterpoint or harmony section, an ensemble number with lots of weird entrances, etc. There may even be two or three of these. Make a point of making them part of every warmup. Besides more practice time for the tough parts, this serves another purpose: since the usual vocal warmup exercises don’t really require a lot of musical thinking, singing a tricky passage that requires concentration warms up the brain as well as the vocal cords, so to speak.

Write It Down. Insist that everyone write everything down when you give a technical or dramatic note, voice a chord, etc. For example, in a block chord, you may assign individuals to specific notes in the chord; in a choral number, where the singers are identified in the score as “Group 1”, “Group 2”, etc., you may assign individuals to particular groups. Resist when people say, “I’ll remember.” They will not. I have done many shows, and inevitably, as the rehearsal process goes on, both they and you will be asked to remember a million more things, and the vocal notes slip away. I recommend that each actor make a photocopy of the vocal book to mark up. This also helps if you are double-casting or unexpectedly have to call in an understudy. I have never, ever, done a show where people who said “I’ll remember that” actually remembered without writing it down.

4.10 Summary and Checklist

• Use dynamics to compensate/cancel out “built in” volume changes due to pitch, rhythm, or changes in singer’s range (e.g. short pickups)

Chapter 5
Diction

Actors and singers worry about singing wrong pitches or forgetting a lyric, but in fact the audience rarely notices such errors unless they are truly egregious. In contrast, since lyrics are critical to most musicals, and they can go by very fast without giving the audience a chance to “rewind the recording,” the audience gets angry if they don’t understand every word—that is, if the performers have poor diction. This chapter will help you:

• Identify performances whose diction needs improvement. Poor diction usually reflects lack of effort or lack of directorial attention, rather than lack of ability.
• Apply simple (usually) practice and performance techniques to address some of the most common diction problems.
• Identify and fix problems that while not strictly related to diction, can cause the intelligibility of the lyrics to be compromised.

5.1 Diction Basics

Each style of music has its own conventions for diction. Theater is no exception. A few specific cases are worth calling out before we go any further.

Theater diction is not opera diction. Classically trained (“legit”) singers may need to be reminded that “sing” and “kiss” should never be pronounced “seeng” or “kees”, no matter how long the syllable is held. Furthermore, tremolo is usually the enemy because it compromises diction; while Barbara Cook can pronounce every word clearly and maintain a beautiful (and non-overbearing) tremolo, most of us have to compromise. When compromise is necessary, clear diction is always to be preferred over a “classical” operatic sound, which is inappropriate for most musical theater material anyway.

Theater diction is not pop diction. “Natural” untrained singers with great voices often need the most help in fine-tuning and polishing their pitch and diction, because they are used to being told that they sound great but not that they need to be more precise. In most pop songs, diction is deemed secondary to “raw emotional authenticity” (whatever that means when you can’t understand half the lyrics). In theater songs, diction is just as important as acting. It is not “second” to anything.

Melisma belongs on American Idol, not on stage. Melisma refers to varying a pitch while holding a single vocal syllable (see example). In pop songs, it is added as a special effect by the performer. In theater songs, it sounds cheesy in the extreme and should not be used unless a specific pop (or comic) effect is being sought for character/dramatic reasons. This is a particular peril for show tunes that have become famous independently of the shows they came from (such as “Memory” from Cats), or when burgeoning young singers try to imitate a performance they’ve heard on American Idol. (Unfortunately, combined with the current Broadway trend to feature the “American Idol flavor of the week” in musicals with no apparent directorial oversight, thousands have been misled into thinking that those singers’ performances represent good theater diction.)

Hard breaths are for cheaters. A nasal “hard breath” before a word that starts with a vowel—e.g., saying hyou for you, hall for all, hi for I, etc.—is a device used by amateur pop singers when they can’t nail the pitch properly in full voice on an initial vowel. Like melisma, it is cheesy in the extreme and should not be done unless the show’s score calls for it as a special effect—that is, to make a song more cheesy.

Now that we’re clear on what theater diction is not, here are some suggestions to help singers achieve what it is.

5.2 Vowels and Consonants

Distinguish the vowels, especially when the lyrics are going by very fast. Even the lowliest sixteenth note deserves to be heard as a distinct vowel sound. Remember that “uh” (represented phonetically by a schwa, e ) is not a proper vowel sound and is rarely the sound called for by the sung syllable. For words whose vowel pronunciations depend on dialect (roof, either, etc.), you and the director should make an appropriate choice depending on the show’s setting, the character’s persona, or other dramatic factors, and everyone should be consistent about following it.

Emphasize interior consonants (i.e. the ones that occur in the middle of a word as opposed to ending the word). The vocal warmups in the Appendix help somewhat with vowels and consonants: for example, when singing “Doo-bee”, the lips should be exaggeratedly rounded for “Doo” and exaggeratedly cracked on “Bee”. For the second part of this same exercise, “Too-bee”, overemphasize the dental “T” and plosive “B” to warm up those muscles.

Close off final consonants by putting a tiny e after them. Trained vocal performers call this a “shadow vowel,” and it is especially critical for words that would otherwise be ambiguous. For example, if holding the syllable “too” on a long note, is the word going to end up being too, tune, tomb, or tube? Often it is evident from context, but not always. Avoid the risk and sing too, too-n e ,too-m e ,too-b e accordingly. The final e should be just enough to allow the consonant to be crisply pronounced, no more. Remember to have everyone write down the specific beat on which to close the consonant; if you happen to have a free conducting hand during the performance, you can use it to give the cutoff cue, but the singers should not rely solely on this cue as a crutch.

Distinguish double consonants. In Stephen Sondheim’s famous song Send In the Clowns, Désirée sings the lyric “Don’t you love farce?” Unless the v of love is closed off before pronouncing the initial f of farce, it will sound like “Don’t you love arse?”, which is particularly amusing to speakers of the King’s English. Similarly, consider the lyric “This is my quest, to follow that star” from The Impossible Dream. Without first closing off the t of quest, the audience might hear “This is my quess, to follow that star”. Some of them will be wondering “What the hell is a quess?” and by the time they figure it out they will have missed the next lyric¹ and they will be angry.

The solution in both cases is easy: “This is my ques–t e ”; “Don’t you lov e farce?”, though the specific fixes must be applied slightly differently due to the rhythm of the lyrics, as shown in figure 5.2.

5.3 Diction and Rhythm

Good diction is particularly imperiled in “patter songs” or up-tempo songs whose lyrics go by very fast, especially when the rhythm of the lyrics is “swung”. This is similar to pitches getting “thrown away” when they occur on unaccented notes such as pickups, and the variable-stress practice technique (section 4.5) can be used here as well.

For example, consider the excerpt in figure 5.3 from “Don’t Tell Mama” in Cabaret. There is a tremendous risk that the diction rules about over-enunciating vowels and pronouncing interior consonants will go out the window on the short (16th-note) swung syllables. An easy fix for this is to have the singers sing the rhythm nearly straight as opposed to swung. A tiny amount of swing, plus the fact that the musicians are playing swung, will suffice to give the impression of a swung melody.

A related problem occurs when diction or pitch accuracy is imperiled because of a pickup that is shorter and unaccented. Again, the solution is to overcompensate: have the singer write in an accent (and if necessary a tenuto mark) over the pickup to remind herself of this fact, and use variable-stress practice if necessary to drill it. For example, in figure 5.3, were no pitch problems on “throw” because the melodic leap naturally accents the note, nor on “crumb” because it’s a downbeat. But the pitches of “Why can’t you” were getting “thrown away”, i.e. not struck with the same accuracy as the other notes.

Another example is below from the song CinderAlbert: the two eighth-note pickups in each phrase (“I’m no prize, in their eyes, just a schmuck they des-pise”) need to be over-enunciated, both because they risk getting lost otherwise as an unaccented pickup, and because the pitch being sung on each first note (I’m, in, just, they) is an octave lower than the subsequent pitch, it will tend to sound softer anyway. Overenunciating compensates for this.

5.4 Tempo

Related to diction is precise timing. Left to their own devices, the ensemble will drag behind the orchestra more and more during long passages. This is human nature. If the orchestra then slows down to match, the ensemble will slow down even more.

The remedy is to remind singers to mentally anticipate their vocal entrances. This works because the only way to do so is by counting on one’s “internal metronome” until the entrance. The alternative, which many singers do, is get their cues by listening to someone else; for example, [TBD need an example here.] Invariably the second entrance will be just a hair late, the orchestra will slow down just a tiny bit to match the singer, and this will keep happening until the song grinds to a slow tempo.

The approach can be extended to handle pickups: count internally and subdivide the beat as necessary. For example, for an eighth-note pickup in 4/4, ask the singer to mentally count the pickup measure (“1-and-2-and-3-and-4-and”). To sing on the “and” of 4, the pickup breath must occur on the ictus of 4. Also, whereas many singers in this situation would instinctively aim for the downbeat after the pickup, that would run the risk of “losing” both pitch and diction on the pickup syllable as described previously.

The technique of timing entrances to an internal metronome (rather than to other singers) is especially useful when the potentially-late entrance has a lyric beginning with a vowel or soft consonant with a long attack.

5.5 Dynamics

Pitch. Whether in solo or ensemble singing, lower pitches naturally sound softer than higher pitches, especially when there is a large enough interval leap in the melody that it straddles ranges of the singer’s voice that have different timbre. The solution is to actively modify the dynamics to compensate for the difference: sing the low pitches louder and/or the high pitches softer.

Ensemble. When singing in ensemble, the ensemble members must understand that everyone’s volume control, taken individually, contributes to the ensemble’s sound. A small change in the volume of every ensemble member creates a large change in the overall ensemble volume, so when something needs to louder, each individual ensemble member may only need to be a little bit louder.

Consistency is also important. If you want the ensemble singing f, you need everyone singing somewhere between mf and f, rather than one or two people belting and others singing sotto voce. The latter are simply going to sound unconfident and wrong (see “tentative entrances” above). Conversely, when you want the ensemble singing p, this means each individual will be singing between pp and p, but it doesn’t mean “sing indistinctly under your breath”—it means sing with the same (or even more precise) diction, pitch control, and intensity, but softly.

Counterpoint. If the ensemble is singing counterpoint, or in a song with two or more soloists singing overlapping or counterpoint lines (duets, trios, etc.) in which the lines are all of essentially equal importance, an easy way to self-regulate volume is to ask each ensemble member: Can you hear the other line as easily as you hear your own when you’re singing? If the singers (or groups) can clearly hear each other, the balance will be approximately correct for the audience too.

Projection. Projection refers to the ability of a vocalist to “sing to the back of the room” and is a quality that is different from volume. Good projection consists of applying all of the above polishing—precise diction, precise rhythm, expressive dynamics—and combining it with enough volume to “hit the back wall of the theater” without compromising any of that precision. Sometimes, simple physical things such as keeping one’s chin off of one’s neck will help projection, but projection is an active effort that singers must think about at all times. Many situations of “undersinging” result not from a lack of volume but from a lack of precision in the other ingredients. (A loud singer with poor diction or imprecise attention to the details discussed in this section will not be perceived to be projecting well.)

5.6 Polishing Away Easily-Avoided Pitfalls

An unpolished performance lacks the clarity and energy that the show deserves, and nothing saps the energy of a song worse than a bunch of people mumbling. A potpourri of easily-avoided (through rehearsal) vocal performance pitfalls rounds out our discussion of polishing the material. Note that polishing is even more critical for the ensemble than for soloists—the only thing worse than someone mumbling lyrics is a whole group of people mumbling lyrics!

Uncertain or tentative entrances. Less-confident singers may start a phrase tentatively, and once they’re sure (usually by listening to other singers around them) that they’re singing a correct note, they get louder. This must be avoided at all costs: in performance, tentative entrances always sound wrong, whether the notes are correct or not. Pay special attention to tentative starts when tricky intervals are involved—everyone seems to wait for someone else to sing it first. If necessary, work with individual singers or groups of singers by training the entrance pitch using the “interval method” described above.

Uncertain or tentative cutoffs. Cutoffs should occur at the exact same time for everyone. Nothing sounds worse than a bunch of vowels fading out at different rates, or a bunch of people closing off a “t” at slightly different times. You should mark what beat (or part of a beat) signals the cutoff of each held note, and have the singers write it down. If the cutoff is on a vowel, there should be no decrescendo leading to the cutoff (unless it’s specifically marked as such in the vocal book). If the cutoff is a consonant, everyone must close it off at the same time. As stated above, you may be able to cue the cutoff while conducting, but this should be an “extra help” and not something that the singers rely on.

Sounds flat/sounds sharp. Some unusual intervals like tritones and minor seconds (half-steps on the piano) are particularly troublesome to sing without sounding flat or sharp. Examples are the motif for “Maria” from West Side Story, which starts with a tritone from C to F♯, and the excerpt below from “All I Need Is the Girl” from Gypsy, which has lots of half-step neighbor tones. Furthermore, some regular major and minor intervals may present tonal difficulty for whatever reason to less-experienced singers. The solution is simple: if a note sounds slightly flat, just ask the singer to mentally “aim a little higher” to fix it, and vice versa. (And make him write that down in his vocal book!) For flat/sharp problems in harmony singing, a different approach is needed; see section 4.7.

Goes flat/goes sharp. A related problem occurs when a long-held note gradually goes flat or sharp. This is particularly common when the harmonies are changing under the held note; an example is the long held chord at the end of “Wilkommen” (the opening number of Cabaret). A surprisingly good solution is to have the singer listen to her held note against each of the harmonies. In a very real sense, a G sung against a D major chord is a different note than that same G sung against a C major chord.² Get the singer to hear this difference and to think of each chord change as a renewed opportunity to re-establish pitch based on how the note sounds relative to the new harmony. [TBD: show example.]

Sloppy ensemble diction. Singing well in an ensemble is often more demanding than singing solo, yet it’s distressingly common for the MD to treat the ensemble as second-class citizens, giving them less time and attention than the principals. Performers must be aware that the ensemble is not a place to hide! A strong ensemble is a joy to the audience and adds tremendously to the music; a sloppy ensemble sounds like a place where deficient singers are sent as punishment. Drill the ensemble as hard or harder than the leads—you will be highly rewarded, and they will be energized to understand how critical they are to the show.

Inconsistent performance. Singers are human, and they sometimes forget rehearsal notes. You can minimize this by always telling them to write down things like pronunciation, cutoff beats, technical notes (remembering to “aim high” or “aim low” on a tricky interval), etc. Then, if you are able to cue them in performance, the cue is an added help rather than a crutch. Ideally, once the music starts the singers should be able to perform the song correctly and consistently without seeing you or relying on your conducting. This will be helpful in tricky situations (section 9.1.2) such as when eye contact with singer(s) is impossible or when you don’t have a free hand to conduct them onstage.

5.7 Microphones: A Blessing and a Curse

There are two principal reasons that mics are often badly misused. One is that the tech staff doesn’t realize how hard it is to get the right balance and sound with mics: it requires a mixer, possibly wireless/body mics, a sound board, amplifiers and speakers appropriate for the space, and a sound operator who can competently set up and actively operate that equipment for every performance. In other words, you can’t just turn a mic on and forget it. (For an excellent discussion, see [Campbell1999].) More often, though, even when properly set up, mics are misused by performers who haven’t been taught how to use them properly. Mics and amplification systems increase the volume of sound put into them. Under the best of conditions, that is all they do, and they do it to varying degrees for different timbres and pitches. If the sound going into them is flawed, the audience will simply hear flawed sounds loudly. Here are some things to keep in mind to make effective use of mics.

Mics are not a substitute for projection. A singer with poor projection will be mumbly and unintelligible through a mic. A singer with good projection probably doesn’t need a mic unless the orchestra is large and the house is vast. Good projection is possible even in softer passages. Worse, the mic can become a psychological crutch that the actor relies on “when my voice gets a little tired.” This can result in “undersinging”, which can actually be more dangerous to the health of the actor’s voice than “straining”, and once the crutch habit is acquired it is very difficult to break.

Mics are not a substitute for diction. I’ve already beaten the diction horse to death in the preceding sections. Some singers think that a mic relaxes the restrictions of good diction. This is wrong, and in fact the opposite is true because even the best sound systems introduce some distortion. Less-experienced singers may not realize this because they listen to recorded albums and they think that is how a mic makes you sound. But those albums are recorded in soundproof studios under ideal conditions and postprocessed by expert sound engineers using thousands of dollars’ worth of electronics. Less-experienced singers may also assume that the sound of a mic in live performance resembles live performances they have heard recorded for broadcast or for sale as albums. Again, such recordings require hundreds of microphones placed hours ahead of time, a crew of professional sound engineers, and hours of pre-show trial-and-error sound checks with and without the orchestra. It is extremely expensive and error-prone, which is why live recordings are rarely done.

Finally, no mic can change the fact that the acoustics of a live room differ fundamentally from those of a studio sound booth. The close-in “studio sound” of a mic simply cannot be achieved under live conditions. Using studio singing technique in a live setting will result in the audience hearing a lot of sibilance (hissing) and unintelligible vowels.

Mics are not a substitute for good stage acting. Much more than actors realize, audience members rely on visual cues and even some lip-reading to catch all the lyrics. If the actor has her back turned to the audience while singing, those lyrics will be harder for the audience to catch, no matter how loudly they are amplified. This is a particular challenge in theaters where thrust (audience on 3 sides) or arena (audience all around) staging is used: vocal numbers must be staged so that the audience is able to see the singer’s face as much as possible.

Does this mean mics are never appropriate? Hardly. If the staging is careful, the singers are projecting, and their diction is good, but they are still not loud enough to be heard over the orchestra, it’s appropriate to try mics. But do so with a realistic understanding of what they can and can’t do, and of the technical requirements involved in getting it right.

5.8 Summary and Checklists

TBD: Table or checklist of common problems to listen for in rehearsal, and which sections to read for how to address them.

• Diction: final consonants and cutoffs
• Diction: distinct interior vowels
• Don’t sacrifice diction to rhythm: swing it less, “sit” on the pickup a litte bit to make sure it gets the pitch accuracy and diction it deserves
• Use dynamics to compensate/cancel out “built in” volume changes due to pitch or rhythm (e.g. short pickups)
• When using a mic, sing as if you weren’t using it

Chapter 6
Performing the Material

Just as staging a play requires more than just taking the scripts out of the box and reading the lines, bringing a musical score to life requires more than just playing the notes in the score and teaching the cast to sing them. Once the technical hurdles have been surmounted, it’s time to actually perform the material. In well-written shows, the music is just as integral to the show and deserves the same dramatic considerations as dialogue, blocking, lighting and scenery.

To that end, this chapter will help you to:

• Work with actors to make sure the songs receive the same dramatic attention as their spoken dialogue, and suggest specific questions to help guide this exploration.

Most actors are eager to be part of the process of defining and inhabiting their character; that is why actors love to act. Nonetheless, the advice in this section can be boiled down to a single observation: All too often, an actor who spends hours analyzing how to act every word of a monologue will “turn off” his acting brain when the music starts, singing the songs rather than acting them.

There are two variants of this pitfall. In the first variant, the actor is so focused on technical execution that he forgets that he is still supposed to be in character. This can be overcome by practicing. In the second, which occcurs especially in so-called “star vehicle” shows, the actor forgets that the songs are there to serve the show—not vice versa. Songs should call attention to themselves because of the way the character sings them, not because of the way the actor sings them.

You can avoid both problems by helping your actors “deconstruct” the music they will perform, just as they would dialogue. Part of this deconstruction comes from the context of the show, part of it comes from the story, part of it comes from the structure of the music itself, and part of it—surprising as it may seem—even comes from the orchestration.

6.1 Putting the Show in Context

In trying to converge on a vision for the show, it helps to remember that although many of the “landmark” shows are products of their times, including Company, Hair, A Chorus Line, and Cabaret, their themes are often timeless even if the plot and characters are not. What was happening in the world then? Can it be connected to things that are happening today?

When I worked on Cabaret in 2005, we saw parallels between the way Weimar Germany was lulled into a disastrous nationalism leading up to WWII and some of the things happening in our own country following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and we took that as a reference point for the production. Although we did not change a single line of dialogue or stage direction in the show, many patrons told us how intriguing it was that we had made the connection. In fact all we did was keep the connection in mind in interpreting the show; it was the patrons themselves who made the connection! When I worked on Company in 2004, same-sex marriage was making waves in California (where I live) that were being felt in the Oval Office—just as Company was controversial in 1970 for presenting nontraditional and nuanced views of marriage and relationships that defied the simplistic “happily ever after” formula so popular in musical theater. Recently I got to work on Man of La Mancha; Don Quixote, the mildly deluded idealist with whom the audience ultimately identifies, may have inhabited Inquisition Spain, but he’d be right at home as an activist in today’s America. Making these connections gives the actor (and, in performance, the audience) something to identify with, and they’re more likely to “get it”.

Part of this process is doing thorough book research. At its most basic this involves identifying any idioms, references, slang, etc. that occur in either lyrics or dialogue. For example, during the rehearsal process for The Last Five Years, I learned that the actor playing Jamie didn’t understand the significance of “the JCC of Spring Valley is crumbling to the ground” (in reference to his character, a nice Jewish boy, falling for a Gentile girl), in part because he didn’t know what a JCC was. Without an understanding of that phrase and its cultural context, it’s hard to inhabit that song. In rehearsing Man of La Mancha, I had the opportunity to point out, as a native Spanish speaker, that Quijote (alternate spelling of Quixote) is simply Quijana (the name of the deluded gentleman who believes himself Don Quixote) with the Spanish augmentative ending “-ote”, meaning roughly “the big one.” That is, Quijana has deluded himself into believing he’s “the BIG Quijana”, or “el Quijote”. This simple etymological observation sheds additional light on Cervantes’s writing and therefore on the character.

6.2 Getting Inside A Song

When an actor approaches a piece of dialogue, particularly an important monologue or a critical scene with other actors, often he will spend hours deconstructing the dialogue, trying to connect what is said back to the larger context of the character’s “arc” through the show, understanding what the right vocal inflections and emphases will be, thinking about facial expressions and body language to accompany the text, etc. Surprisingly, those same actors often don’t give nearly as much attention to their songs.

Musical theater songs often arise from dialogue: the character reaches a point where she must use the heightened dramatic effect of lyrics with music to really get her point across. The song then becomes an essential and compact way of advancing the plot or illuminating character with more intensity than spoken words alone. If the actor doesn’t understand and work towards this, the song won’t be convincing. To help actors give the same level of attention to song lyrics as they do to dialogue, I’ll spend a good chunk of an actor’s rehearsal time (up to 20 minutes of a one-hour rehearsal) discussing four points:

1. Why is this song in the show?
2. Read (and act) the song lyrics as dialogue first
3. Dealing with repetition (word, phrase or stanza level)
4. How to translate your observations about #1–#3 into musical terms

The questions can’t always be addressed in the same order, but I like to be sure that by the time we have come to agreement on how the song will be performed, we have a good answer for each one. The approach is best illustrated by some examples.

6.3 Example: So What (Cabaret)

In Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, we meet Fräulein Schroeder, an innkeeper in Berlin during the rise of the Third Reich. Over the course of several pages, we read about how heartbreakingly difficult her life has been: though once wealthy, she has lost her fortune and her previous lovers, survived a war, and weathered a depression, and we get a glimpse of the battered interior beneath her tough outer shell. Frl. Schroeder embodies both survival and resignation.

In the musical Cabaret, a dramatic adaptation of Isherwood’s work, the character has been renamed Frl. Schneider, and all of this background must be presented in two and half minutes during her song So What early in the show.

Why is this song in the show? It introduces the audience to Frl. Schneider’s personality by letting her tell her own backstory. This sets the stage for how she will handle breaking off her soon-to-be engagement to Herr Schultz, the Jewish grocer, under pressure from the Nazis.

Read the lyrics as if they were dialogue. If the character was telling her story, she would speak differently when recounting happy times than when describing the times when she managed to simply survive despite everything. Her body language, facial expressions and cadence would all be different. So should they be when sung.

The song has three verses, each of which addresses a different sides of her personality—losing her fortune, losing love, and ultimately survival—and indeed even the orchestration is different in each verse. In particular, the last verse, which deals with her much better earlier days (“So once I was rich, and now all my fortune is gone—so what? / And love disappeared, and only the memory lives on—so what?”) has a much more subdued orchestration—the rhythmic “oom-pah-pah” waltz figure is replaced by simple held chords, with the addition of a high, melancholy violin line.

Dealing with repetition. Not only should the three verses be sung differently despite having the same melody: at the end of the song, there is a coda in which she sings “It all goes on …So who cares? Who cares? WHO CARES? So what?” (emphasis mine). By this point in the song, the audience has heard these phrases repeated many times. The coda isn’t there to lengthen the song—it only adds 8 bars. So why is it there?

Often there is no “right” answer; but what is important is that there be some interpretation for why the coda is there. Our interpretation was that while most of the song has been about survival, the coda punctuates her resignation. Each “Who cares?” can get more and more resigned, until the last “So what?”

This amount of detail may seem like nitpicking, but with only two and a half minutes to make the audience really care about this character when they see her in trouble later, every nuance of the performance counts.

6.4 Example: Dulcinea (Man Of La Mancha)

Early in Man of La Mancha, when Don Quixote first sees Aldonza, the kitchen wench and prostitute, he believes he has found Dulcinea, the (mythical) honorable lady in whose name he will fight for the right and chastise evildoers. He then sings about Aldonza calling her Dulcinea, as if she were noble and chaste.

Why is this song in the show? Aldonza’s arc over the course of the show is roughly: scorn and ridicule for Don Quixote; unease when he sings about her so beautifully and apparently without guile; resentment that his sincerity disarms her of the toughness with which she protects herself; and finally, “conversion” to Quixote’s ideals and his “quest,” identifying herself no longer as Aldonza but as Dulcinea. In this song, seeing Aldonza/Dulcinea take the first steps on that journey is at least as important as hearing Quixote sing the lyrics (which, without this level of deconstruction, come across as overwritten).

Reading the lyrics as dialogue. Although Aldonza/Dulcinea is onstage with Quixote throughout the number, we decided he is not singing to her (in the sense of serenading), but rather singing to himself. The song then serves to let the audience see Dulcinea’s reaction. The actor playing Quixote¹ and I identified a key lyric:

So far, everything about Quixote’s interactions has been in his head: the windmill was to him a giant; the inn, a castle; the innkeeper, the castle’s lord. But this is different: Quixote is in effect telling the audience, “See, it’s not just in my head. Dulcinea is actually real! She’s standing right there!”

Similarly, in the last stanza, Quixote sings “Now I’ve found you, and the world shall know thy glory / Dulcinea!” Because the word “Now” coincides with the high note of the phrase, most actors are tempted to make “Now” the climax of the phrase. However, given the above reading of the lyrics, the more important phrase is “found you”, so we decided to emphasize that with some tenuto marks.

Dealing with repetition. The name “Dulcinea” occurs umpteen times in the lyrics. The actor playing Quixote perceptively compared the song to Maria in West Side Story. Just as we had decided that Quixote is not singing to Dulcinea/Aldonza but about her, in Maria we hear Tony singing not to Maria but about her, repeating her name to himself just because he is so enraptured at the sound it makes. There are even some similar lyrics:

So we decided that Quixote would use the repeated word “Dulcinea” throughout the song to savor all the different ways it sounds as he says it to himself. Indeed, the performance might be a bit different every night—and that’s OK, it’s part of the appeal of live theater!

Part III
Working With the Orchestra

Chapter 7
A Tour of the Orchestra Materials

If you haven’t used theater scores before, this chapter will help you to:

• Understand musical symbols and notations with which you may be unfamiliar in the Piano/Conductor score
• Understand symbols and notations in the score relating to the pacing of the show and to fitting the music to the show action
• Understand the the layout and content of the instrument books, and the pitfalls of inconsistencies between these and the conductor’s book

If you are experienced in reading show scores, you can probably skip this chapter.

7.1 The Conductor or Piano/Conductor Score

7.1.1 Common Musical Notations

One of the goals of the music copyist (the person who prepares the individual instrument books and/or piano/conductor score from the orchestrator’s master score) is to achieve clarity of what is to be played using the minimum possible number of marks on the page. Various shortcuts have evolved to serve this purpose.

• Slash notation allows the player to stay in rhythm and “comp” (from “accompany”)
• Rhythmic notation
• One and two bar repeats
• Chord names
• The crazy world of measure numbering

7.1.2 Script Cues

TBD: need pages from OMG showing:

The beginnings of songs will usually be marked with a cue, which tells you when the music starts. The cue may be a line of dialogue (ADELAIDE: It says here in this book...) or a stage action (SALLY sits down). There’s various ways the “cue to continue” can occur:

• Before the first lyric of the song: the cue line or stage action happens, then the music starts and the actor joins in (possibly a bar or two later)
• Coming out of a safety or vamp (see below); dialogue happens during the vamp, and the singing starts on the last time through the vamp (appropriately marked Last time in the score).
• Coming out of timed dialogue; see section 7.1.4.

There may also be a warning, which is a dialogue line or stage action that occurs a couple of bars before the cue line; this lets you get your musicians’ attention, or if it’s just you, lets you get ready to play.

7.1.3 Common Structural Notations

A vamp is just a few bars of music (2–4 is typical) repeated while an event of indeterminate length is going on—spoken dialogue, dancers getting into position, or whatever. Vamps are usually marked as such, and often annotated with Continue on or Cue to continue indicating the spoken line or other event that should cue you to exit the vamp (i.e. play past the repeat symbol). A variant is the marking vocal last time, meaning that when the vocals start, that’s the last time through the vamp and then the music continues past the repeat bar. This marking is especially important for musicians who are not playing at the time of the vamp, because hearing the vocals lets them know when to start playing (or when to resume counting measures).

A vamp til cutoff marking means to play until some specific cue happens, at which time the music just stops; usually it’ll be your job to watch for the event to happen and then stop your musicians.

A safety is basically a vamp that may be played only 1 time, that is, a repeat that may or may not be needed depending on timing. Sometimes the measures are marked safety and also surrounded by repeat bars; other times there are no repeat bars. You can treat a safety like a vamp that might be played only 1 time.

We’ll return to how to conduct cues, vamps and safeties in section 9.2.4.

7.1.4 Underscoring

Underscoring is music that plays while other stage action, usually dialogue, is occurring. As such, it must usually be played very softly to avoid drowning out the dialogue. Sometimes underscoring is a standalone piece of music, e.g. when a whole scene requires it; sometimes it occurs in the middle of a song, where some dialogue or other action occurs between verses.

Underscoring may or may not include vamps; if it doesn’t, and the length of music provided doesn’t match the needs of your production, the underscoring may have to be stretched or shrunk to fit your production. Set aside time during a rehearsal to actually time the dialogue or stage action and figure out how long it will take; you may have to shorten the underscoring by cutting measures, or lengthen it by repeating parts of it or by marking certain measures as vamps or safety measures (see below).

7.1.5 Segues

Various things can happen at the end of a number:

1. Time (or Scene continues). Dialogue or other action follows the number, so you can relax for a bit.
2. Playoff. These are most common after a big ensemble number, to cover getting the ensemble off stage or otherwise out of the way. Sometimes the playoff is a separate number in the conductor’s score; other times you can create one by repeating the last 8 or 16 bars of the number.
3. Segue (pronounced “SEG-way”, Italian for “continue”): during applause or immediately after it, go on to the next number, which will probably be a scene change, play-off, or similar. Attacca is just like a segue, but even faster and more aggressive transition; barely time to turn the page and go. Segue as one means go right into the next number without breaking rhythm, i.e. the audience will perceive the whole thing as a single number. Sometimes a long number will be split into multiple sections with all but the last marked segue as one; other times a scene change may lead directly into a musical number, etc.
   Tip. Highlight segues in yellow highlighter so you know what to do during rehearsals (and while conducting!). It’s remarkably easy to be so relieved at finishing a difficult number that you forget you have to immediately go on to the next one.

7.2 The Instrument Books

The instrument books are the ones you actually hand out to the orchestra musicians. Their format should be familiar to musicians with orchestra or ensemble experience, but unlike classical music, they may include some of the notations above (vamps, cues, repeated bars, safeties, etc.).

A common format is one book per pair of parts, e.g. “Violin A & B” or “Trumpets 1 & 2” in a single physical book of which multiple copies are provided. A copy may be given to each player, or more commonly, one copy is shared between two players, so they can also alternate page turns when one has to play across a page turn. Usually parts for separate players are written on separate staves, but occasionally multiple parts (rarely more than three) may be written on a single staff. This is most common for strings and is often accompanied by the notation divisi if it only happens occasionally (e.g. “Violin I (divisi)” means that although the Violin I players are usually playing unison, occasionally they divide). The implication is that when planning your personnel, the Violin I book can mostly be handled by a single player except for a few parts. (If the divisi parts were frequent, they would probably be broken out as a separate instrument book, such as “Violin II”.)

7.2.1 Doubling

The exception to the multiple-musicians-per-book rule is the woodwind section, which is second only to the rhythm section as the mainstay of modern pit instrumentation.¹ Indeed, the woodwind books often exhibit the inverse relationship, as most woodwind players are expected to double or cover multiple instruments, which are usually combined into a single book per woodwind chair. In general, single-reed players are expected to cover clarinets, saxes, and sometimes flutes and piccolos (even though these are neither wooden nor reeded); double-reed players handle oboe and English horn; bassoons are usually played by specialists; and a few accomplished players can handle instruments from all three categories. (It has become somewhat more common to expect single-reed players to play some oboe.) The ability to cover multiple instruments is fairly common among pit and session musicians, but far less common among classical musicians who tend to specialize in one or perhaps two instruments. In Chapter 10 we’ll talk about selective coverage of material from the books for which you can’t recruit separate players or players who double.

Two rules of thumb apply when doubling is indicated:

1. The reed books are numbered in approximate order of how critical they are to the score. So if the books are labeled Reed 1 through Reed 4 and you have only two players, try to cover Reed 1 & 2.
2. Besides being grouped so that a single player has time to switch among multiple instruments, the instruments grouped into a single reed book are often cross-cued (see below) to support players who don’t double.

7.2.2 Cross-Cuing

Some orchestrations go further and include cross-cuing, which allows a line assigned to one particular instrument to be played on a different instrument in case the original player is absent. For example, suppose there are four Reed books marked as follows:

Reed 1, Alto sax/Flute/Clarinet
Reed 2, Tenor sax/Clarinet
Reed 3, Flute/Oboe (clarinet)/English horn (clarinet)
Reed 4, Bass clarinet/Baritone sax

This means that while the Reed 1 and 2 players must each play multiple instruments, the English horn and oboe parts in Reed 3 are both cross-cued to clarinet so that a clarinet player could cover them if needed. This usually means they are provided on a separate staff, since clarinet and English horn are transposing instruments, whereas oboe reads in concert pitch.

Note that in the above example, there are two ways to use the cross-cuing. If you have four musicians but none plays oboe or english horn, cross-cuing allows those lines to be covered on clarinet. If you have fewer than four musicians, Reed 2 can use the Reed 3 cross-cues to selectively cover some of Reed 3’s material; you’ll have to make judgment calls as to what to omit, and chapter 10 has some hints.

Chapter 8
Working With the Orchestra

Working with the orchestra goes through four main phases before opening night:

1. Recruiting: identify which instruments/musicians you’ll need; you may find you have to settle for fewer than the official instrumentation requires, something we’ll discuss in Chapter 10).
2. Rehearsing: one or more play-throughs of the score without the singers. If your orchestra is experienced, this is probably also the first time the orchestra will be playing together, and may be the only orchestra rehearsal before tech week. Any technical issues exposed here should be fixed before the sitzprobe.
3. Sitzprobe (or sit-n-sing): the cast performs the songs with the orchestra, but no staging. This exposes any problems of balance or cuing. This step is optional, and I rarely do it for reasons I’ll describe later.
4. Tech/dress rehearsals: full rehearsals with staging and orchestra.
5. Production: I usually ask the pit to be prepared for an earlier call than usual for the first two shows (typically 45–60 minutes earlier) to fix last-minute bugs.

8.1 Orchestra Recruiting

Your initial recruiting list is based on the instrument books that came in the box. Many non-professional theaters are often too small or too budget-constrained to recruit a full pit, especially for older shows that call for a “classic” Broadway pit of more than 20 players (although a school with a strong music program may be able to recruit as many unpaid music students as needed).

You may need to trim your recruiting list for various reasons:

• Lack of budget.
• Lack of space. Before you recruit, get a good look at the pit space and estimate how many musicians can be accommodated. This is discussed in section 8.4.1.
• Lack of musicians. There are fewer tuba players out there than trumpet players; fewer bassoonists than clarinetists; and fewer harpists than just about anything. Sometimes one instrument can cover another, or several others, as we discuss in Chapter 10.

If you have access to a school band or similar source of ready personnel, great. Otherwise, I’ve had good luck using Craigslist ( http://www.craigslist.org) to advertise pit work and recruit musicians; the Appendix contains a sample posting I’ve used. A surprising number of amateur musicians, as well as some professionals who have a passion for musical theater, are willing to work for minor consideration such as complimentary tickets, returned favors (you fill in when they need a substitute musician in one of their other bands, e.g.), and/or a service stipend. Where I live, community theaters that can afford to pay such stipends typically offer from $25 (at the low end) to $75 (at the high end) per musician per service (performance or rehearsal). This is lower than what semi-pro theaters pay and a lot lower than union scale, so be aware that musicians who rely on their music for a living may find it difficult to absorb the high opportunity cost of working with you. Whatever your budget, be up front about it, to avoid wasting your own time and that of others who are simply unable to justify working for the pay you can offer. And if your budget is zero—if you expect the musicians to play for free—say that too. You will still get some volunteers, if not as many or as experienced as you might have liked.

I maintain a “personal Rolodex” (actually just a big Google Docs spreadsheet) of musicians I’ve worked with. Of course, the theater I work with has their contact information in the volunteers database, but their information is not as detailed as mine (“This accordion player can also play harmonica”, “This player has great clarinet chops but only so-so flute chops”) and doesn’t include my personal “black list” (musicians I will no longer work with—usually not because of poor playing, but because they have flaked out on previous commitments and left me holding the bag at the last minute, or have been difficult for other musicians to work with).

However you recruit, here are some caveats.

Technical chops. While show music is not as demanding as classical symphonic music, neither is it trivial, and some of the older classic shows have some pretty killer parts (the clarinet part in Fiddler is a classic example). Be sure the players are technically up to the job, and/or supplement them with a few “ringers” to anchor the orchestra. Musicians who have played only as part of a section in a larger orchestra may find themselves a bit overwhelmed in a small-pit setting where they cannot blend with (euphemism for “hide behind”) other members of their section.

Small pits require better players. If you’re working with a smaller pit of 5–10 people—whether it’s because the show is scored that way, or because you have to work with reduced resources—be aware that every instrument is exposed and you really need solo-quality players to make it sound good.

Ensemble skills. Playing in an ensemble is a different skill from solo playing. While pit playing differs from classical ensemble playing in some important ways, classical musicians with orchestra or ensemble experience will do well; strong soloists without ensemble experience may find it more challenging than they expect.

Drummers. Unlike rock drumming, a pit drummer must be able to read drum charts and be able to follow the conductor for tempo, cues and dynamics (i.e. have ensemble skills), rather than setting these themselves. A less-virtuoso drummer with these skills who can read charts is preferable to a technically astonishing drummer who doesn’t have these skills or doesn’t read charts.

8.2 The Mighty Piano

In most modern pit orchestras, the piano’s role is so important that it deserves its own section. In arrangements that include an actual piano part (Rent, Godspell, A Chorus Line, Chicago, Ragtime, Pippin…, the piano is the backbone of the rhythm section. In arrangements that don’t, the pianist may cover a good deal of what’s in the Piano/Conductor or Piano/Vocal score if you have less than the full complement of musicians called for by the orchestration. (In this section and in section 10.3 are some hints for the pianist who finds herself handed the conductor book and instructed to “fill in the gaps.”) Either way, the pianist cannot “hide” behind any other instrument and must play with confidence. Note that sightreading isn’t a prerequisite for pit piano (though it may be for rehearsal piano; see below).

Pit Piano for Classically-Trained Pianists. I was classically trained when I started doing pit work, and I had to break a number of bad habits. Most of them boil down to the realization that the piano’s role in a pit is fundamentally that of a rhythm instrument, not a solo instrument. Even classical ensemble work doesn’t place as much pressure on the pianist to handle this responsibility. As such, you may find yourself having to break some habits of your own:

• Beat down, not up. Many classical pianists have a habit of “recoiling” from playing a big chord by having their head and body move back or slightly up as their fingers push down on the keyboard. Unfortunately, this is exactly the opposite of what your musicians probably expect, which is a rising motion on the pickup and a downward motion on the downbeat (or ictus). Train yourself so that your head and body make a downward, not upward, motion when you play on the beat. If your head or body is moving up or backwards on beat 1, instead of down or forwards, your musicians will be confused.
• Bass and chords are much more important than melody. In fact, unless you’re in an instrumental section (overture, underscoring, etc.), the singer(s) are already singing the melody, they don’t need you to play it, and playing along with them will probably make things worse because you won’t be precisely synchronized with them. What they do need is to hear some structure in the music: rhythm and harmony. The bass line and chords give them this. If you have a bass player, make sure you are “locking up” with her (tight ensemble) if you’re doubling the bass line on piano; don’t play a bass line that is in any way different unless you’re sure you know what you’re doing—instead use the piano to strengthen and solidify the existing bass part. If you don’t have a bass player, it’s that much more important that the bassline you play be crisp, rhythmic, and audible. Even in the absence of chords, the bassline at least suggests harmonies and serves as an anchor for the singers.

Rehearsal Pianists. Some productions budget for a rehearsal pianist; others assume that you, the MD, will do that job (as well as the job of conducting the orchestra). Still others budget a total amount for all music-related expenses and it’s up to you to figure out how to spend it. In an case, be aware that a rehearsal with a bad pianist is almost worse than no rehearsal at all. Getting the rhythm and basic chord changes correct are far more important than playing all the right notes. A good rehearsal pianist should be a confident player who can slop her way through something given a few days’ time with the rehearsal score. A great rehearsal pianist is a good rehearsal pianist who has played this show before or is otherwise familiar with it. Good (and great) rehearsal pianists are hard to find, so if you find ones that you like working with, do everything you can to make them happy.

8.3 Strings

The string parts in show scores fall into two categories. “Traditional” scores call for a string section of 6–12 players. If you can recruit, pay, and seat that many string players, good for you. If you can’t, please resist the temptation to have, say, a string quartet stand in for a full string section written in the score. Besides the volume balance not being right, the intonation probably won’t be right. Tiny variations in intonation actually add warmth to a string section, but stick out like a sore thumb when the strings are individually exposed. An exception is the cello: a good cello player can probably hold down the cello “section” because of the size and warmth of the instrument.

The other category of show score calls for a small number (1–3) of solo string players, with very exposed parts. For example, A Grand Night For Singing calls for a single cello, a reed player, and a rhythm section. Next to Normal includes cello, violin, guitar and piano. In these cases, intonation problems will be mercilessly audible and you need particularly strong ensemble players to avoid them. Unfortunately, strings are highly idiomatic to write for, and inexperienced orchestrators sometimes end up writing string parts that only an extremely strong player can handle. Because both categories represent real challenges, many modern show scores (especially for smaller pits) omit strings altogether, as do many re-orchestrations of revived shows, in favor of a leaner sound and fewer musicians.

Lastly, accomplished arranger Don Sebesky writes “There have been several attempts to get a large string ensemble to swing, but to my knowledge, none has ever been very successful” [Sebesky1984]. If your show’s string parts involve the kind of complex polyrhythms of jazz and Latin music—The Last Five Years is a good example—it may be worth the extra effort to seek out string players who also have jazz or world music experience and are comfortable with such rhythms.

8.4 Preparing for Orchestra Rehearsal

8.4.1 Orchestra Rehearsal Venues

Make sure you have adequate rehearsal space for the orchestra rehearsal. Rehearsing in the theater is ideal for working out issues of seating, balance and sightlines, but sometimes the theater is not available because it’s needed for stage rehearsal or tech work. When choosing a rehearsal space, keep in mind:

• Will all the musicians fit?
• If a piano is needed, is one present in the rehearsal room or does one need to be brought in?
• Are there music stands and stand lights? Can some musicians bring their own?
• Are there power outlets and/or extension cords for plugging in amplifiers, electronic keyboards, stand lights, etc.?
• Are the acoustics at least tolerable? (A church is not a great place to have an orchestra rehearsal.)

There’s also the important question of where the pit is located during actual performances, which you should investigate early even if you’re not rehearsing the orchestra in the theater. If you have a real full-size pit in front of your stage, you’re lucky and probably in the minority of people reading this. This is logistically the easiest arrangement from the point of view of doing your job (as conductor and MD), though often the least popular among the musicians, who don’t get to watch the show as they play and may be shoved under the apron of the stage. It also means your theater is large enough that you probably will have to use microphones and a sound system to balance the orchestra and singers, which is astonishingly hard to get right, even in “simple” cases (see [Campbell1999] for an excellent discussion). I’ll assume you are not using microphones and will discuss some ways to address balance problems without using a sound system.

More common is a smaller “pit” that is offstage, backstage, upstage, in a loft, in the wings, etc. Some important considerations for you to think about regarding the pit space:

• Space: Map out where the musicians will actually sit. An upright or digital piano’s footprint is about 4’x4’, including the seated player; a minimal trap set, 5’x5’; seated soloists, at least 3’x4’, larger for wind players who double and need extra space around their chairs for their other instruments, and larger for cello or upright bass players because of the space needed for bowing. Also, an upright bass (vs. electric or “Fender” bass) player needs somewhere to lean the bass when he’s not playing.
• Acoustics: Is the pit closer to the audience than the actors are (e.g., in an overhead loft that is actually closer to the audience’s heads than the actors are)? If so, unless it’s a real pit, your balance and volume problems may be severe unless you take many steps to compensate: install sound damping (big chunks of foam or blankets), use mutes more often, tone down all dynamics by a notch, etc. Similarly, if the orchestra is higher off the ground than the actors, this will tend to amplify the instruments.
• Eye contact: in general, can you see the onstage performers and can they see you? It’s not necessary to have 100% unobstructed view of every performer all the time, but in general, someone on stage will need to see you for cues and you’ll need pretty good peripheral vision to the stage.

There is a temptation, especially when you have a few electronic instruments like digital pianos or guitar/bass amplifiers, to send only these few instruments through a house sound system while leaving the others unmiked or using only their own small amps. This destroys the illusion of having all the music appear to come from the same approximate location, whether the overhead house speakers or someplace onstage, and is disorienting for the audience. It also makes it impossible to use dynamics to control the balance among instruments. Don’t do it.

8.4.2 Preparing the Book

Well before the orchestra rehearsal, you should be in a position to collate your book. This involves arranging the pages to meet several goals. (I assume here that you’re working from a photocopy of the original materials; if you’re using the actual book that was sent to you, your ability to rearrange pages is very limited.)

• Remove material that has been cut.
• If numbers have been moved or duplicated (e.g., re-using a chunk of scene change music or underscoring), make additional copies to insert in the right sequence in the book so you don’t have to flip back and forth during performance.
• If there is a tricky page turn, re-photocopy the pages by inserting blanks to avoid the bad page turn.

8.4.3 Mark Up the Book

Highlight important cues—vocal, instrument cues, scene changes, stage actions that you need to be aware of, etc. Use a bright yellow highlighter, because during the performance you’ll be glad you did.

Highlight warnings (so you can get musicians’ attention to start a number) and segues (so you know to keep their attention when a number is finished).

You should also have your musicians tell you which entrances in which songs are uncertain for them, and highlight those entrances. For example, if the trumpet has 40 bars of rest before her first entrance in a song, she can write in the last couple of lines the singer is singing before she comes in (or if there’s no appropriate line, write in something like “2 measures after the vocals come in,” or “after flute solo,” etc.), and you can highlight her entrance and mark “Cue tpt” to remind yourself to give her a special cue. Some instrument books have such cues written in, and many piano/conductor scores have the cues written in so you can give them to musicians while playing. This preparation will speed things up a lot during dress rehearsals when the show has to be stopped (and it will).

Be sure measure numbers are clearly written in the score; as a last resort, you or another musician can stage-whisper measure numbers to a musician who’s lost. You’ll sometimes find that measure numbering is inconsistent between the books and the conductor’s score, or that certain measures appear to have been added or deleted in one or the other. This is less common with modern scores that are machine-typeset, but try to catch these during orchestra rehearsal!

8.4.4 Practice the Cues During Regular Rehearsals

When you’re rehearsing piano-only with the cast, pretend the orchestra is there and is expecting to be conducted and cued. Give the drummer that starting tempo. Cue that trumpet player who’s been resting for 40 bars. Slow the players down at that tenuto or cut them off after that fermata. To do these things, you’ll need a free hand, an eyebrow, or some other bodily motion; practicing these during regular rehearsals will make you aware of which limbs are available. If you’re playing the piano as well as conducting, you may have to do some planning in order to have a limb or other bodily feature free to give these cues. Now is a good time to think about how you will do it. Various tricks to help you in tricky situations are detailed in the next section.

8.5 Running the Play-Through

By the time you rehearse the orchestra, you’ll probably have played whole scenes, if not whole acts, with the cast. This means you know where many of the dialog cues, stops, etc. all are; which songs may have to be transposed or have cuts; and so on. You can use this information in various ways when preparing for the orchestra play-through.

Remind the musicians that they’re expected to come to orchestra rehearsal already able to play their parts; there will be plenty to fix during rehearsals—tricky entrances, transitions, dynamic changes, balance, etc. This is especially important in more recent shows with smaller orchestras where the instrument parts are very exposed, and musicians who don’t know their parts won’t be able to “hide” behind other players in their section as they might try to do in a larger orchestra.

Here are a few of the most common problems with the conducting or arrangements that may be exposed at the play-through, or if you’re having multiple orchestra rehearsals, that you can prepare for as you go into rehearsals.

8.5.1 Budget 30 Extra Minutes

During the first orchestra rehearsal—or at least, the first one actually held in the performance space—plan to piss away about 30 minutes futzing with the orchestra setup: how are the chairs and music stands arranged? Do you need to run extension chords to plug in amplifiers, synthesizers or stand lights? Do all the musicians have a reasonable sight line to the conductor? etc. This all takes time but usually has to be done only once. Add 30 minutes to your first rehearsal to accommodate it.

8.5.2 Polishing

Tricky Entrances (Timing). By now you’ve read a good book on conducting and realized that there’s no single right way to conduct tricky entrances. The play-through is the time to clarify how you’re going to conduct them, and/or to try a couple of methods and see which one works best. For example, for an entrance on beat 3, are you going to conduct the whole measure starting from the downbeat? Or are you just going to give beat 2 as a pickup? Are you going to conduct a full measure going into any of the numbers (“1 for nothing”) or just give a pickup? Write down (and highlight!) what you’re going to do, and make sure the musicians do too. Having them write it clearly makes it easier for a sub to fill in later if needed.

A special case of a tricky entrance is a button, the punch at the end of the song that signals the audience to applaud. These are worth practicing because they are the last thing the audience hears in that song, and they won’t likely forgive sloppiness there. (For similar reasons, make sure the overture and finale are flawless! And while scene change music often gets short shrift during rehearsals, it is one of the few times that the audience is probably listening intently to the orchestra, so it’s worth doing right.)

Vamps and Repeats. This will doubtless change when you go into full rehearsals, but have a definite plan for every such point. How many times are repeated sections played? What’s the cue to come out of a vamp? Are some vamps going to be ignored?

Typos in the Score. Surprisingly often, especially with older hand-copied instrument books, there are inconsistencies between the instrument parts and the conductor’s score. These can include differently-numbered measures, differently-marked cuts and vamps, and just plain wrong notes. (Although be careful of concluding that a note is wrong without careful investigation. Some scores, notably Sondheim’s, have eclectic harmonies that can sound wrong initially, especially if you’re playing a spare orchestration like Jonathan Tunick’s with only a subset of the indicated instruments, or if there are minor tuning issues among the instrument sections.)

“Holes” In The Arrangement. Most community theater orchestras are resource-limited and can’t supply the full instrumentation required by the score, so you will find yourself making decisions about which instruments or parts to omit. We’ll discuss this in detail in chapter 10, but you may find during the play-through that your reduction results in an unpleasant surprise—a “hole” in the arrangement where some part of the texture just seems to fall out of the music. You may have to fix this outside rehearsal and communicate the changes to your musicians before the sit-n-sing. If you had to do a lot of arranging or reduction, this is a good reason to have the play-through and sit-n-sing on different days; if not, it’s probably fine to have them on the same day, since the orchestra will get to play the score twice and you’ll save on having to schedule another group rehearsal.

Bring out important lines. Especially if you have reduced the orchestration, be sure you know what the important counter-lines are and that they are brought out. The additional texture of counterpoint lines is a lot of what makes the arrangement sound full. We’ll discuss this more in chapter 10.

Tight Rhythmic Ensemble. Look for the rhythmic figures in the score that are most audible and will therefore make the ensemble sound “tight”. Syncopations and polyrhythms are often the place to start looking.

TBD: examples: Have I Got a Girl for You (Company); The Next Ten Minutes (Last 5 Years)

Sins of Omission vs. Sins of Commission. Don’t be afraid to leave notes out if there is a passage that is so demanding that some of your musicians are simply not quite up to it. In most cases, wrong notes are far more noticeable than omitted notes. There is no embarrassment in making some adjustments this way—remember the First Goal of the Orchestra.

8.6 Sitzprobe or Sit-n-Sing

Once the orchestra has played through the score as an ensemble, some directors like to do a sitzprobe (sometimes called the sit-n-sing): the cast will sing the songs with orchestra accompaniment, but no blocking or choreography, just so that the cast and orchestra get accustomed to each other. The cast is usually very excited about it, since up to that point they probably have only rehearsed with piano.

Some singers may get completely lost, off-pitch, etc. when the orchestra plays, often because they are subconsciously relying on something in the rehearsal-piano accompaniment as a cue. (For this reason, it’s good to have a competent rehearsal pianist who can stick close to the notes when playing the piano reduction in the piano/vocal score; the reductions are usually pretty close to the orchestration in terms of bringing out important instrumental lines that singers may cue from.)

8.7 Tech Week

This is it: tech rehearsals are just like playing the show, though the first one (or two) may have a lot of starts and stops. This is your opportunity to identify mundane but important issues in performing the score under realistic conditions, for example:

• Note stage directions that affect the orchestra (e.g. “Turn off stand lights prior to blackout”). It helps for the pit to know what’s happening onstage that motivates the non-musical cues.
• Similarly, have your musicians note places where the orchestra must avoid drawing attention to itself, whether aurally or visually. For example, during a quiet moment or dramatic pause in songs or dialogue, avoid extraneous noises such as turning pages, swapping instruments, silent/muted “practicing” of passages (as reed players do), taking a sip from a bottle of water, or opening that magazine they brought because there’s a 20-minute gap in the music during Act I.
• Some issues of balance won’t emerge until tech. Be prepared to do last-minute arranging or adjusting using the same techniques as covered in chapter 10. In particular, you may find moments where singers are softer/less audible than they were at the sitzprobe, e.g. because they are far upstage or for some other staging-related reason.

8.8 Subs

If you can’t get people to commit to all the dates due to schedule conflicts, or if late-breaking conflicts arise (as they often do), you may have to locate subs for certain musicians on certain nights. It’s up to you whether doing so is your responsibility or the primary musician’s responsibility. Subs are at a disadvantage because they haven’t been rehearsing with your ensemble (usually), so if anything a sub needs to be a stronger player than the one she’s sitting in for. Good subs are hard to find and often more expensive than the player they replace, especially on short notice. As mentioned earlier, the sub will rely on the musician to have annotated the book as to how each situation will be handled during a performance, and the sub will rely on these markings being complete and legible, which in practice often isn’t the case.

I like to have a sub play at least one rehearsal before playing in a show; if this absolutely impossible, I ask the sub to attend a performance and take notes in her copy of the book regarding cues, vamps, etc.

Finally, I ask the sub to arrive 45–60 minutes before orchestra call if possible and just walk through the book with them, using my conductor’s score as a reference and making sure all their cuts, fermatas, etc. are properly notated.

Chapter 9
Conducting

When most people think of the “conductor,” they think of someone standing on a podium, wearing a tux and waving a stick around. In fact, the conductor is whoever holds the orchestra together and glues it to the on-stage performers. When the orchestra changes tempo, starts on a cue, starts or exits a vamp, etc., one person must set the tempo, make a cue happen at the same time for the musicians and the cast, or decide when a vamp is over; the conductor performs these functions. Once the song is going, the rhythm section can keep things going without the conductor’s help.

Piano/Conductor is a common role because of the piano’s role in anchoring the rhythm section and also because most score reductions due to lack of instruments end up being covered by the piano, with the logical extreme being a piano-only show. Drummer/conductor and other combinations are possible too; in community theater, you have to be willing to improvise a little.

9.1 Conducting 101 for Pit Conductors

There’s a pile of fine books on conducting, and many bad ones that sound pretentious. My favorite for down-to-earth concise advice is [McElheran2005]. If you’ve done some conducting before, you have a head start. If you haven’t, then please go read [McElheran2005] before continuing! There isn’t nearly enough space here to even review the basics, nor could I pretend to do justice to the topic the way McElheran does.)

If you have previous experience conducting choirs or pits, you have a head start, and the tips below may help you. Either way, though, what is new about show conducting is that the music has to follow the stage action, so there are probably some new conducting situations—vamps, safeties, starts/stops, underscoring—that you may not be familiar with. The rest of this section will assume that you have basic conducting knowledge and explain how to handle these new situations. Also, in general orchestra and choir conductors don’t also have to play an instrument while conducting, whereas a great many pit conductors also have to play piano; section 9.1.2 explains the secrets of “hands-free conducting.”

Have you done choral conducting? If so, bear in mind that in instrumental conducting, the players need a definite ictus (beginning of the beat period) delineated by the “bounce” on each beat, making the beginning of the beat an unambiguous instant in time. Choral conductors often use fluid and sweeping motions, which may be OK for choral conducting because of the naturally soft “attack” of a chorus of voices. But in an instrumental situation, fluid conducting just obscures where the actual downbeat is, and makes for a mushy ensemble.

Some people find the image of “dipping your finger quickly in water” helps make the bounce definite; others swear that this imagery leads to jerky and difficult-to-follow conducting and should be avoided. A surefire way to evaluate yourself is to watch yourself in the mirror, or even better, constantly ask your musicians how you could improve—after all, they’re the ones who have to follow you.

Have you done orchestral conducting? If so you’re in good shape. The main difference is that you may find yourself having to play piano (or some other instrument) and conduct at the same time, and/or you may find that you’re both conducting the pit and cuing actors. The rest of this section has some hints to help you.

9.1.1 Rules of Thumb

Keep in mind the following three guidelines when working on your conducting:

Precision. The musicians must know exactly where the downbeats are, as described above. This is largely a matter of technique—practicing in a mirror or with your musicians is the best way to improve.

Confidence. Don’t be wimpy. Entrances must be absolutely unambiguous to distinguish them from conducting through rests, setting tempo before a cue, etc.; use whatever body language you have to. It’s better to err on the side of too much and adjust later.

Consistency. Once you’ve identified a particular way that a certain cue or entrance in the score will be conducted, do it the same way every time. This means every time the cue is played is one more opportunity to further tighten your ensemble.

9.1.2 Hands-Free Conducting

Although we’ll discuss several strategies for hands-free conducting, giving cues, etc., be aware that all of them are based on the same fundamental “body language” as conventional conducting with your hands. So even if you expect to have to do a lot of hands-free work, it’s worth developing a solid conventional conducting technique as the foundation.

Many musical theater conductors use one hand to conduct the orchestra and the other to help conduct or cue the singers. If you have the luxury of having both hands free and can teach yourself to do this, great. Silently mouthing the words for onstage singers may be helpful now and then, but if the conductor’s face is in full or partial view of the audience, it’s very distracting to the audience. (Also, you don’t want the singers to rely on this as a crutch.)

On the other hand, if you’re playing the piano and conducting, you rarely have both hands free, or even one hand. In these cases you’ll find yourself relying on your head and facial gestures to communicate a lot of things for which you’d otherwise use your hands. Here are some tricks that may help.

One hand conducts, one hand plays. As described in chapter 10, many older scores rely on a large group of strings as the “rhythm section”. By conducting with your right hand, your left hand is free to play some of this rhythm on the piano. This is a tricky but useful skill to develop. You may find yourself sometimes conducting with one hand while playing the piano with the other. Sometimes you can do some re-voicing of chords to free up one hand for conducting if need be. You’ll be a real hero if you can learn to use either hand to conduct while the other plays.

Conducting with your head. Conductors already rely on body language for things like this; you just have to take it to a greater extreme when you lose the use of your hands for conducting. Think of your nose as the baton and conduct with your head. Use your whole body for emphasis: rise up off the bench somewhat in preparation for a downbeat, e.g., and then use smaller bobs of the head to keep the beat. (Think of it as “bouncing to the beat,” as you might do in your car when a really good song is on the radio.) But keep these movements subtle or they become distracting; my experience is that even when the musicians are pretty far away from you, subtle movements are surprisingly effective.

You can similarly suggest dynamics by rising up or lengthening your posture to indicate “more” and crouching or hunching down to indicate “less”. It’s all about force of will—use your eyebrows, shoulders, facial expressions, or whatever else conveys the dynamic you want (louder, softer, more intense, mellow out, slow down, etc.) Don’t overdo it; you’ll find your sweet spot eventually.

Setting tempo without using your hands. Since the drummer or rhythm section can hold down the basic beat very well once things are underway, one trick is to set the tempo well before the song starts. During pre-song dialogue, start conducting full measures in the target tempo, in a subtle way that all the musicians can see. Then, when it’s time to play, you can just conduct a pickup beat with your head.

Giving vocal pickups.

TBD: Mouthing vocal pickups as in Sweeney. Helps with counterpoint entrances, cues, give actors extra confidence, etc.

9.2 Theater Conducting Situations

This section has some hints on how to conduct the various constructs that are mostly unique to theater. The constructs themselves are described in chapter ?? in case you’re new to theater conducting.

9.2.1 Warning and Start

Conducting the opening four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth is terrifying for many conductors. Happily, most show music isn’t this demanding to conduct, but cuing an entrance can still be tricky.

First, get musicians’ attention. I usually allow 5–10 seconds for this, and I write in (and highlight!) a warning cue (stage action, dialogue, etc.) that occurs about 5–10 seconds before the music must start (if one isn’t already provided in the score). A typical “warning” gesture is raising the baton to chest height and holding it still, or if you’re not using a baton, raising your hand to higher than the highest it gets on a normal upbeat.

To actually get the music to start, the most common techniques are giving a pickup only (1 or 2 counts) or conducting a full measure of silence before the downbeat (“one for nothing”). In a fast 2-count tempo, “two for nothing” may be more helpful. The best choice depends on the particular situation, so you’ll have to experiment. But whichever you do, the beat that corresponds to the entrance of the orchestra must be absolutely unambiguous. In other words, if you’re conducting 1-for-nothing, there should be no confusion among the musicians about whether that first measure is the “for nothing” measure or the cue to play. One common way to do this is that the “silent” measure is conducted with small, almost rigid (straight-line) motions, until the pickup and downbeat which are conducted using the larger “normal” motion.

Of course, as often as not, the orchestra must come in on a beat other than the downbeat. While the remarks above generalize to those cases, I strongly urge you to read through [McElheran2005] for a much better and very concise treatment of the basics of conducting. The executive summary is: experiment, work it out with your musicians (and make special note of cases where you have agreed on a specific kind of cue, so that you can inform a substitute musician about them should you need to), and don’t assume there’s a single right way to conduct an entrance.

9.2.2 Tempo Changes

Abrupt tempo changes aren’t too bad as long as (a) you have previously established what the tempi are (so the musicians have some idea what to expect), and (b) one person sets the new tempo. This can be you, if you have the time to give a pickup (ideally more than 1 count) in the new tempo, or it can be (for example) the drummer.

9.2.3 Dictated Notes and Colla Voce

“Dictated” refers to the conductor conducting every single note in a passage; this is common if the notes are fermatas, if the notes are tied to stage cues, or if some special musical effect is required that can’t be easily expressed in terms of conducting a fixed beat.

One trick for cleanly conducting dictated notes is to treat each dictated note as a downbeat, and make the pickup beat the same duration. This gives the musicians (and/or the cast) a natural way to figure out when the actual dictated note is coming: they can observe the timing of your pickup (from beginning of stroke to top of stroke) as the duration of one beat, and come in with you on the chords. (If your hands aren’t available, you can still do this trick when conducting with your head; see section 9.1.2.)

Example: last two chords of OMG

9.2.4 Exiting Vamps

Vamps are there to allow matching the music to the timing of dialogue or other stage business. Conducting through a vamp requires two simple tasks. The preparation consists of making sure your musicians know, unambiguously, which measures are “vamped.” For example, in Example 9.2.4,

The execution consists of committing to getting out of the vamp when conducting the song. Deciding when to come out of a vamp is always a judgment call. If you come out too early, the actor may miss jumping onto her next lyric. If you come out too late, the actors may be standing around awkwardly waiting for the music to come back in. And the longer the vamp unit, the harder it is to make. That is, if the vamp is a 4-count measure, the “cost” of misjudging the exit is at most 4 counts of idle awkwardness; if the vamp is two 4-count measures, the cost is up to 8 counts of idle awkwardness.

You should practice the vamps with the actors, and their timing should ideally be pretty consistent from performance to performance, but variations (and mistakes) will happen. The important thing is once you have made the judgment call to come out of the vamp, follow through. You can’t go back on your decision or your musicians will get confused and so will the actors. Conducting out of the vamp involves an obvious pickup-type gesture as if you were starting the piece anew in the measure following the vamp; once you have started to make this gesture, don’t go back on it.

Some vamps make the judgment call harder because the vamp is followed by one or more nonvamp measures that are dialogue-timed. Examples 9.2.4 and 9.2.4 show this: there is one dialogue cue that exits the vamp, but then additional measures where the dialogue is supposed to be timed. Practice with the actors and get it so that their dialogue is delivered with consistent timing so you literally know which spoken dialogue words you will use as your cue to continue.

TBD: write other instrument cues into instrument parts

A special case of a vamp is often marked “Vocal last time.” In this case, the vamp measures also serve as the beginning of a sung phrase, and when the phrase is sung, it’s time to exit the vamp. Make sure your musicians know about this and you won’t have to do much. Note that this is different from “vocal entrance after vamp”: in example 9.2.4, it’s important for musicians to know whether they are in measure N or N + 1 when they hear the vocals.

9.2.5 Underscoring

Unlike a vamp, underscoring is nonrepeated music that must coincide with dialogue timing. Depending on how the director has the actors speaking the dialogue, underscoring may need to be cut or extended. When cutting, look for “seamless” cuts in which connecting the two parts across the cut doesn’t result in a drastic harmony or texture change—this would be distracting to the audience. When lengthening, consider repeating a subset of the measures, or turning the last couple of measures into a vamp, whichever is more appropriate. Also, in some situations the underscoring need not be in tempo—you can slow down or speed up as needed during the underscoring section in order make the timing work out.

The key to doing this is to write in “dialogue landmarks” that you can use to vary your conducting speed in performance to match the actor. (If the underscoring accompanies stage action without dialogue, write in “stage action landmarks” instead: ADELAIDE smacks NATHAN with the back of a spoon.) In example 9.2.5, I have written the actor’s dialogue into the music in such a way that certain dialogue words line up approximately with the downbeats that they should be timed to; also notice there is a “safety” at the end, in case the actors speak the dialogue more slowly than usual some night. Essentially, we break up a 6-bar (in slow 4) underscore into three 2-bar underscores, with a safety at the end (see section 9.2.6).

A special case of underscoring is song introductions where dialogue leads into the songs. All the same advice applies, except that if you don’t have the option of turning the last intro measure into a vamp, just turn it into a fermata. Example 9.2.5 shows an example: if we arrive too soon at measure 4, we can turn it into a fermata.

9.2.6 Safeties

TBD describe safety

If you’re having a lot of trouble timing some dialogue or underscoring, you can try to insert a safety near the end of the timed phrase. TBD: need example.

9.2.7 Starts and Stops

Warn, cue, stop, continue

Chapter 10
On-the-Spot Arranging

Arranging (and its cousin, orchestration) are specialized and demanding crafts. Reading these few pages won’t make you an arranger, but in community theater, sometimes you are forced to do some minimal amount of arranging, for example, reduction of the number of instrumental parts to be played by consolidating or eliminating parts if you can’t staff the whole pit. As another example, since many show scores don’t actually feature a piano, deciding what to play on the piano to cover missing instruments amounts to reduction.

We also cover transposition. Sometimes it can’t be avoided, but other things being equal, it’s a bad idea to cast a show oblivious to vocal ranges and assume you can “just transpose” troublesome songs later. Besides the fact that well-crafted songs won’t sound good if sung far outside the range for which they’re written, transposition is more perilous and fraught with caveats than most people realize if more than just a piano is involved. It’s covered in this chapter for those cases where no reasonable alternative exists.

Before diving into doing a reduction or arrangement, check whether a reduction is available from the licensor, as discussed in chapter 2. The quality of reductions varies from lively to abysmal, but if you have limited orchestra resources, this will save you a lot of work.

10.1 Part Consolidation

Flex combos and other reductions already make heavy use of cross cuing (section 7.2.2), which allows the arrangement to be played even if some instruments are unavailable. This idea can be taken further to shrink an already-reduced orchestration. In a recent production, the orchestration called for a 7-piece flex combo (piano, bass, drums, alto sax/flute/clarinet, tenor sax, trumpet, trombone) but we had room for only 6 players. Since we really wanted to include the trombone for reasons of tonal color, we consolidated the two reed parts into a single part. Specifically, we discovered that most of the tenor sax lines were well within the range of the alto sax (even though they were not all cross-cued to it), although in some cases where both saxes were playing, we had to choose the “best” line. Sometimes it was a matter of losing one or another solo line; other times it was a matter of going from two reeds playing in thirds or sixths to one reed playing a counter-line, so we had to choose the counter-line that was most effective against the other parts and/or the sung melody. The decision process included trial and error, listening to the recording, and looking at the conductor’s score.

Finally, if you are short on musicians even after exhausting the above strategies, you can use cross-cues to cover some lines on piano.

Synthesizers. Some scores have synthesizers written in, usually for specific sound effects that can’t be achieved on acoustic instruments or to simulate other electronic instruments such as Hammond organs and Rhodes electric pianos. I tend to stay away from using synthesizers as stand-ins for acoustic instruments, but they can be used effectively in other ways. For example, we performed Company with a rhythm section, a single violin (to play some important counterpoint lines), a reed player who covered 5 instruments, and a synthesizer used for a Hammond organ sound and some marimba-like sound effects. We used the Hammond sound to play certain chords that actually had been played on the organ in the show’s original 1970 orchestration but were re-scored for more reeds (which we didn’t have space for) in the revised orchestration; using the Hammond sound allowed us to pay tribute to the original orchestration, so it made sense to us. We also used the synthesizer effectively for sounds like electric marimba and glockenspiel. Your listeners will thank you, though, for resisting the temptation to use synthesizers to cover string parts; better to omit them or handle them on piano, since only a high-end synthesizer played by an experienced synthesist is likely to even approach the sound of real strings in a live setting.

10.2 Doing Your Own Reduction

If the reduced orchestration is unavailable or still exceeds your resources, and you don’t want to go all the way down to piano-only or piano combo, you can do even more of the above tricks and produce your own reduction. This is a lot of work and you will probably want your (experienced!) musicians to help you with it, but it can be done. The key to a successful reduction is to pick out the elements of the original arrangement that are most prominently audible and try to preserve them (or preserve their spirit, at least), even as you change and thin out the instrumentation. The first step is to determine what kind of pit you can actually recruit, and then match that up with what each instrument or section is going in the score. Here we discuss some reduction strategies and I include some real examples of reductions I’ve done using these strategies that have worked well.

10.2.1 Who Can Be Recruited?

Do some musicians play multiple instruments? This is common for single reed players, less common for double reed players (except that Oboe/English Horn is a standard doubling), occasionally true for brass players, and rarely true for string players.

Are the tone colors appropriate? A tuba makes a beautiful sound but your possibilities are limited if it’s your only solo brass instrument. Do the instruments blend well? Clarinet blends with almost everything; saxophones can be made to sound either “more brassy” or “more reedy depending on how they’re played and what they’re blended with; but strings can sound thin and brittle if they’re competing with brass or with a big woodwind section, or if a small complement of strings is being counted on to carry a lush string part. The arranging books in the Bibliography, particularly [Sebesky1984], have a lot to say about this.

10.3 Score Analysis

Your first goal is to identify the “bare bones” elements of each song in the score and come up with a strategy for it: assign it to one or more instruments, omit it, or change it. Covering the third is way into the realm of orchestration so we’ll stick to the first two.

The elements of most “traditional” show tunes orchestrations are:

1. Rhythmic foundation
2. Melody lines
3. Counterpoint lines
4. Embellishments
5. Solo/obbligato lines
6. “Signature sound”

Not all songs have all features or fit this template, but it is a good starting point.

10.3.1 Rhythmic Foundation

This is what keeps the song moving. Especially in older shows, the percussion/drums part is less critical to this than you might think; commonly, the rhythmic foundation will be assigned to a full string section, which you probably don’t have, sometimes with flutes doubling the strings. (TBD: show example)

In smaller pits, depending on the character of the song, you can usually assign the rhythmic foundation to the piano or, if appropriate, a guitar or similar percussive instrument. This will require “imploding” the solo instrument lines into something the pianist can play.

In the modern score for The Last Five Years, there are no drums at all, and rhythmic movement is left to the guitar (for pop-like strumming-based rhythms) or the piano (for syncopations and more complex rhythms).

TBD: Example - implode a string-based rhythmic foundation to a pianistic reduction

10.3.2 Melody Lines

In a full orchestration it’s common for one or more instrument sections to double the melody that the singer is singing. I’ve found that you can usually dispense with these lines altogether. However, if the song also includes some underscoring or other non-sung sections where the melody is expected to be heard, someone will have to cover melody on those sections.

The piano may get called on for double duty in this case: covering rhythmic foundation throughout the song, and also covering a melody line here and there. Most reasonably accomplished pianists should be able to do this.

TBD: Example

10.3.3 Counterpoint Lines

Counterpoint lines provide a stable legato line against which the rhythm can play. In traditional large-pit orchestrations, these lines are often given to cellos or horns; this has led some people to call them “thumb lines,” since a piano reduction of such an orchestration would probably require the pianist to use her left or right thumb to play those lines (since they fall in the middle register right around middle C) while also playing the bass and rhythm chords.

TBD: “Must be in LOve” from OMG–has a thumbline as well as embellishments

The other job of the counterline is to keep the general motion of the song going (and give the audience something to listen to) when the singers are holding a long note.

TBD: Example: violin counterline from “People Will Say We’re In Love”.

TBD: Talk about fills as special case of counterline

10.3.4 Embellishments

10.3.5 Obbligato Lines

Obbligati are tricky because by definition it’s hard to dispense with them and still retain the original characteristics of the orchestration. An excellent example is the woodwind obbligato underlying the Night Waltz in A Little Night Music: it’s a signature element that the song won’t sound the same without. (In that particular example, the obbligato is doubly important because it also outlines the harmonic structure in a way that makes a “strong” chordal accompaniment unnecessary.)

Ideally, you should keep as many obbligati as you can and assign them whenever possible to the instrument for which they were originally written. If that instrument’s not available, you have three choices:

1. Assign the obbligato to a different instrument. See “Common Substitutions” in section 10.4.2 for ideas.
2. Assign the obbligato to its original instrument, and decide what to do with the line that instrument would otherwise have played (cover on another instrument, or omit).
3. Omit the obbligato. Your ear will tell you if the result sounds funny. Also, consider whether this obbligato line is part of an important vocal cue (i.e. some singer is getting either the timing or the pitch of her entrance from this obbligato).

10.3.6 “Signature Sound”

Don’t overlook the “signature sound” of the score: it is the tonal color that people will remember as distinct. Not all scores have this, but where they do, you should latch onto it as a “non-negotiable” element of the orchestration that preserves something important about the flavor of the score. The “signature sound” can take many forms, including:

• A solo instrument sound or texture that pervades the score, such as the flamenco acoustic guitar in Man of La Mancha
• a particular instrument that gives unique color to “period piece” scores, such as the accordion in Cabaret or the vaudeville-style banjo in Chicago
• an instrument that plays solo line(s) strongly associated with the show, like the solo violin in Fiddler on the Roof or the bassoon basslines in Into the Woods
• an instrument whose use in the orchestration is unconventional or in memorable contrast to how it’s usually used, such as the “rock cello” in The Last Five Years and Next to Normal

10.4 Reduction Strategies and Examples

10.4.1 Rules of Thumb and General Principles

A full treatment of choosing instruments for an arrangement could be the subject of its own book (and there are many good ones; see the Bibliography for some), but in general the key in getting a “big” sound with a small orchestra is to augment the rhythm section with a few instruments that span different ranges and timbres. For midrange solo lines and harmonies, I like clarinets because they blend with pretty much everything and 2 clarinets together sound remarkably full without being overpowering. Saxes are also good because they can be played softly to get a mellow intonation or powerfully enough to blend well with brass instruments (or give the impression of a brassy sound when you don’t have a brass section). Also, since sax often shows up in pop music as well as jazz, sax players may be easier to find than other reed players. On the other hand, my experience is that while most clarinetists also play sax, the converse is often not true.

Flute or violin are great for counter-lines (and are often interchangeable when a reduced orchestration is provided, as the flute’s volume and agility are comparable to the violin’s, especially in the higher registers). Viola can often substitute for violin in solo work unless the range is extreme and/or a very specific sound is required (the viola sounds “woodier” and less bright than the violin, especially in the upper registers, to my ear anyway). Some accomplished reed players can also cover flute.

If the score calls for a traditional string section, you would need 8 or more string players to sound even halfway decent. My advice would be not to attempt that: understand how the string section is being used, and cover those parts on other instruments. For example, if the strings are used to provide a rhythmic foundation, that can be covered on piano. Pizzicato strings and moving block chords can sometimes be covered on a synthesizer. Low string counter-lines (e.g. cello lines) can be handled on clarinet or bass clarinet, and so on.

When I say “the rhythm section” I usually mean piano, bass and drums. In most shows, upright or electric bass will work, especially if the score is “jazzy”; a few shows really call for one or the other (e.g. Bye Bye Birdie’s rock and roll songs call for electric bass and electric guitar, whereas Chicago’s vaudeville style calls for upright bass if at all possible). However, I’ve heard nontraditional rhythm sections that sound great; for example, substituting a tuba for the bass, or ditching the trap set in favor of some other percussion.

10.4.2 Duplication and Substitution

Look for duplication. Who holds the line vs who reinforces it.

Move lines to another instruments. Common coverages. When should a line be given to piano (vs rhythm)?

Look at the conductor’s score.

Choosing a “big” unison sound over a “fat” sound. eg OMG.

Do an example, from La Cage score.

10.5 Example Strategies

To give you an idea of how to proceed, here are sketches for taking two shows that normally come with full orchestration and reducing them to “shoestring” orchestration while maintaining the character of the piece.

10.5.1 Sondheim’s Assassins

Signature sound: the American-folk feel of many of the songs can be suggested by the use of folk instruments like fiddle and harmonica. A good solo violinist can play both fiddle and “straight” violin material, and I use an accordion since it can approximate the harmonica sound very well but also provide rhythm, texture, fill, and cover some woodwind solo lines. It can also make the “calliope” sound that opens the show.

A solo violin is necessary for the folksy “fiddle” sound in Ballad of Booth, Guiteau, and other songs. Finally, I know a multi-instrumentalist who plays drums and banjo (among many other things), so he can strum the banjo in some of the folk songs where drums aren’t necessary.

With all of that in mind, here’s how we performed Assassins with a 4-piece orchestra; I would have liked to include bass, but there just wasn’t room (the orchestra was onstage with the cast).

1. Piano/Conductor
2. Accordion
3. Drums/banjo (banjo played when no drums)
4. Solo violin

10.5.2 Man of La Mancha

Signature sound: the flamenco-esque feel of many of the songs. Having the Spanish guitar sound is therefore a must. Fortunately, the guitar is one of the few instruments that is as capable as the piano in carrying the rhythm section—fortunately since a piano would sound out of place in this score.

Similarly, the flute/piccolo solos that combine with the guitar to give the “Spanish troubadour” sound are indispensable. This generally gives me clarinet coverage as well, and on this show I took advantage of being lucky enough to work with woodwind players who can play both single reeds and some oboe, letting me keep some of the beautiful melancholy oboe solos in songs like Dulcinea and The Impossible Dream. But most of what I assigned to the oboe could have been covered on clarinet as well.

The show also has a number of “knightly” fanfares scored for one or more trumpets. The original score calls for 2 trumpets, 2 trombones and 2 horns, but the trumpet sounds so distinctive when doing fanfares that I decided a single solo trumpet would be enough to characterize the fanfares.

Two horns provide a nice full texture for some of the other songs, and make a lovely backdrop for clarinet and oboe solos, as well as having a nobler brass sound of their own (for brass passages that sound more thoughtful than fanfare-like) . My horn players also double on trumpet, so some parts of the show have 2 horns and other parts have 1 horn plus 1 trumpet. (The original score calls for 2 of each, but in a small space, one of each is more than enough.)

So the final complement is:

1. Spanish guitar
2. Acoustic Bass
3. Percussion/Conductor: bass drum, snare drum, floor tom/“tympani”, castanets. We saved some space by using a “cocktail” trap set in which the bottom head of the floor tom doubles as the bass drum. (Actually I jury-rigged it using an angled kick drum pedal.)
4. Horn 1/trumpet
5. Horn 2
6. Reed: piccolo, flute, clarinet, oboe

10.6 Transposition

Transposition may be needed to accommodate the range(s) of singer(s) or to improve continuity around a cut. At its most basic, you are simply taking each instrument’s part and moving it up or down by the chromatic interval between the original key and new key, which seems like the kind of tedious job that can at least be done by brute force. If you’re doing piano only or piano combo, this is is not too bad.

However, most nontrivial arrangements for multiple instruments are surprisingly sensitive to transposition; part of the arranger’s job is to voice the arrangement to make use each instrument in its most effective range for that song. Some passages may move out of the playable range of an instrument if transposed. Other passages may become very hard or impossible to play because of idiosyncrasies of the instrument, for example, a trill requiring major changes of fingering between the two trill notes, or certain glissandos that are impossible on a slide trombone. Sebesky’s book [Sebesky1984] does a great job of explaining all these cases, but the bottom line is that transposition is fraught with non-obvious pitfalls and should be undertaken with caution.

If you must deal with multiple instrument transposition, music typesetting programs like Finale and Sibelius (see section 11.5) can save a lot of time because they can basically do it automatically. They also take care of the inherent transposition required for instruments that read in non-concert pitch. (If you don’t know what this means, then you probably shouldn’t attempt transposition of a multi-instrument arrangement.) The only downside is that you have to first enter the music into the program, which can be time-consuming. The “pro” versions of music typesetting programs like Finale and Sibelius (see section 11.5, Technology) now allow you to scan printed score pages into them and play melodies in real time using a MIDI-capable keyboard, but both methods usually require manual fix-ups and may not save you any time over doing it by hand. Also, scores for many older shows (anything written before about 1970) have often been written out by hand by music copyists, which makes automated scanning impossible.

MD’s I know have varying opinions as to whose responsibility it is to write out the transposed parts—the MD, or each musician. I usually have my musicians do it, because they are very competent and because they are willing. Here again, your mileage may vary.

For all these reasons, if transpositions are absolutely necessary, they should be kept to a minimum and announced as early as possible so that problems can be caught and fixed.

Part IV
Appendices: Other Useful Stuff

Chapter 11
Technology

In the last 10 years, technology has taken some of the drudgery out of the less-glamorous parts of the MD’s job.

11.1 The Internet

If at all possible, you should encourage all cast members to check their email regularly; email is a much better way to disseminate information than its venerable predecessor the “phone tree.” For keeping the cast and orchestra informed, I set up a free Google Group ( http://groups.google.com) for use as an automatically-archived group email list and use Google Docs ( http://docs.google.com) to post PDFs and MP3s of practice tracks, arrangement sheets and the cast contact list. Other Internet portals provide a similar service.

11.2 Scanning

Many heavy-duty workplace copy machines now offer the option of scanning a document to PDF or a similar format, rather than just copying it. If you don’t have access to such a machine, you can scan documents using a flatbed scanner (slower), or, remarkably, take pictures of document pages with a digital camera. Most cell phone cameras in 2010 are almost good enough to take usable pictures. Of course it would be tedious to scan an entire score this way, but it’s great for making a “callback packet” consisting of a few pages from the Piano/Conductor Score or script.

11.3 Online Documents

More recent services such as Google Docs ( http://docs.google.com) allows you to keep simple word-processing and spreadsheet documents online in a way that multiple people can edit them (with the owner’s permission). This means that rather than re-posting and re-downloading a new document each time the schedule changes, there is a single copy online shared by everyone that is always up-to-date. In the case of Google Docs, the online version can even be viewed on cell phones and PDA’s, so cast members don’t even need a computer to see the schedule updates.

If you rely on emailing schedules as attachments, and sending a new email with a new attachment each time the schedule changes, you will have at least one situation where someone misses a call because they have an out of date copy of the schedule for some reason. I am so sure of this that I’ll give you a free ticket to any show for which I’m Music Director if you have a nontrivial rehearsal period that avoids this problem. My solution has been to use Google Docs, but not everyone embraces it.

11.4 Recording Practice Tracks

For recording practice tracks, I use Audacity, which is an excellent open-source (free) audio recording program that runs on Mac and Windows and lets you record from the mic built into your laptop or from an inexpensive mic plugged into your PC. You can save the resulting tracks in popular audio formats including MP3, post the MP3 files on a service such as Yahoo Groups or Google Groups to which all cast members subscribe, and have actors download the files and use a program like iTunes ( http://www.apple.com/itunes) to play the files on their computers or transfer them to MP3 players or audio CDs. Personal digital recorders are also available as standalone devices from companies like Tascam, or as plug-in options for iPods; these range in price from about $50 to $200, and most generate MP3 files automatically that can be transferred to your computer.

This same method can be used to record “Karaoke” tracks, which can be used during rehearsal in your absence. A karaoke track contains exactly what the rehearsal pianist would play for particular songs. If there are tricky sections of songs, such as a 32-bar dance section that is likely to require a lot of rehearsal, you can split that karaoke material into its own track for convenience. If music is needed simultaneously for a vocal rehearsal and a dance rehearsal, karaoke tracks are lifesavers; more than once I’ve ended up making an entire karaoke CD that could practically be used to run the whole show in rehearsal if I’m absent.

Music Theater International, one of the “big four” US-based licensing companies for musical theater works,¹ now provides a “RehearScore” with many of their shows—a MIDI file which, combined with a software-based sequencer, can be used to generate karaoke tracks and certain vocal practice tracks. I haven’t personally used these but my understanding is that the process of turning the RehearScore disk into usable practice tracks is nontrivial and time-consuming, so I’ve stuck with this lower-tech approach to date.

11.5 Music Notation, Transposition, Arranging

For notating arrangements, I use Finale ( http://www.finalemusic.com/). This extremely versatile program is available in a variety of levels, including a free entry-level version (“NotePad”), a $50 intermediate version, a ridiculously overfeatured professional version, and a free viewer program that can view, play and print (but not edit) files created with any of the others. Even the entry- and mid-level products are useful for the kind of work discussed in this book. I have colleagues who use Sibelius, which is Finale’s main competitor; I haven’t used it myself and I am not making any attempt to compare the two, but it is likely that for the relatively straightforward applications I’ve discussed, either would be fine. These programs have the side benefit that you can simply generate PDF files of your arrangements, and email these to musicians/actors or post them on a groups service. In general, if you have just one simple arrangement (or transposition) to do for one or two instruments, it may be faster to do it by hand, since both Finale and Sibelius have steep learning curves; however, for anything but the most trivial tasks, using such programs will save you time and frustration in the long run, so it is worth getting familiar with them. The most recent versions of these programs can even generate MP3 files of your arrangements using synthetic instrument sounds. They also allow you to connect a MIDI-capable keyboard and play melodies into them in real time for transcription, but a lot of settings have to be tweaked in order to get a usable result, so don’t assume this works magically.

Appendix

Sample Posting for Recruiting Musicians

Glossary

callbacks

The second round of auditions, typically used to make final casting choices from among a subset of first-round auditioners.

concert pitch

The pitch that actually sounds when an instrument plays a note, as opposed to the pitch written in that instrument’s part if it is a transposing instrument. For example, since alto saxophone reads in E-flat, a written C when played will sound the pitch of concert E-flat.

first-round auditions

The initial auditions for a show. A subset of first-round auditioners will be called back to a second round for final casting decisions.

licensing agencies

The performance rights for a given musical or play are usually managed by a licensing agency, which is responsible for contracting with groups that want to perform the work. The “big four” agencies that control most musicals are Tams-Witmark, Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization, Music Theatre International, and Samuel French. Their Web sites contain useful information for people evaluating shows.

music copyists

Professionals whose job is to prepare the final musical scores for the performers and orchestra. This includes, for example, preparing the parts for transposing instruments from the conductor’s original manuscript, which is often in concert pitch.

transposing instruments

A transposing instrument is one for which the written pitches do not match the concert (sound) pitches. For example, a written C on clarinet comes out sounding as B flat, so the clarinet is said to transpose in B-flat or read in B-flat. Nearly all the wind instruments transpose, but to different keys. The term concert pitch refers to the actual sounded pitch.

Bibliography