Sunday In The Park With George: A Rough Guide for the M.D. Part II

Villanova University’s 2023 production of Sunday, directed by Dr. Valerie Joyce

Before You Start

Listen to the Original Broadway Cast Recording

Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters are such distinctive and unusual performers that every subsequent performer has to find a way forward that doesn’t imitate them. But the show is built around them, and their shadows loom very large over the show itself. The mix on the recording is odd. Some singers seem far away, and instrumental timbres are often unclear. But it’s still an amazing document. 

Listen to the 2017 Jake Gyllenhall/Annaleigh Ashford recording

This is a really fine record of Sunday in the Park with George. The orchestra in particular is very well recorded, and there are a number of things that can be heard clearly here that are somewhat obscure in the original recording. I was initially skeptical about Gyllenhall’s casting, but I’m sold. Annaleigh Ashford is quite good, although these old fashioned ears sometimes wonder about vocal choices here and there.

Listen to the 2006 London cast recording

I believe this is the production that had some truly extraordinary projections that I suspect consumed a lot of the production budget and necessitated the drastically reduced and revised orchestrations. These sometimes are rather thin, and are after all, not the ones you rent when you license the show. Hearing the opening horn line on a saxophone is somewhat jarring. The first act uses UK dialects, which are often revelatory. After all, as long as we’re singing in English, even though we’re in Paris, why not explore other dialects? To my American ears, the dialects in Act II are far less convincing. This recording is a terrific way to explore new ways of singing these songs.

Watch the video of the original production 

Someone has helpfully put the whole production on YouTube, but I own a copy on DVD, and you might want to as well. There are a number of places in the show where something seems confusing in the score. The video very helpful shows how the music was originally integrated into the action. You will want to find your own way of navigating the show for your particular production, so it will be prudent to go to the video when you need clarification. 

You might treat yourself to a kind of hybrid experience by watching this delightful video.

Read James Lapine’s incredible book Putting it Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created Sunday In The Park With George. It’s a detailed and very candid behind-the-scenes look at the making of the musical, in which Lapine doesn’t shy away from unflattering details about himself. If you know Sunday well, you’ll be amazed by revealing stories about how the musical came to be, and if you don’t know Sunday… Well, you will by the time you finish the book. 

Should Your Organization Do this Show?

All Sondheim shows are extremely challenging. This one is difficult for the tech crew, but there are ways to creatively overcome the difficulties. You must have a George and a Dot; the other roles can be filled from a general pool of musically proficient actors. There are very challenging pit parts that may do in amateur musicians. 

As You’re Casting:

Georges/George

You will need to cast a very strong tenor with a good ear in this role, an excellent musician who holds the stage with ease and can handle the pressure of holding down a very technically complicated show. The role doesn’t have a lot of high notes, but it lies high for a baritone. First act Georges does a lot of unsympathetic things, so you will need a really likable actor. Putting It Together and the Fifi-Spot section are must-sings in callbacks. Perhaps some of Color and Light would be helpful too. 

Dot/Marie

The role of Dot is one of the great roles for women in the American Musical Theatre. She has a really difficult arc and a lot of difficult music to manage. (although I think the role is easier on the whole than George’s) In callbacks, you’ll want to hear some part of Move On that shows the ability to count, and some of Everybody Loves Louis. Sondheim used to joke that he envisioned George being a baritone and Dot a soprano and in the end they cast a baritone as Dot and a soprano as George. That’s an exaggeration, of course, but it’s good to have a somewhat earthy Dot. 

Old Lady/Blair Daniels

The traditional casting of the same actor in both these roles is fun and interesting, but not mandatory. The song at the end of the first act is very difficult both to hear and to sing in time, and it’s dramatically very important. This is a role for a good musician and experienced performer. In the right hands this number grounds the first act narrative in a really critical way. Casting a really fine actor in this role makes George’s journey more believable and gives him something strong to play.

Jules/Bob Greenberg

This is not a particularly vocally challenging role, (the higher notes are not sustained in the phrase) but you do need a good ear, and this actor needs some gravitas. The Jules/Greenberg pairing is dramaturgically very interesting, but you could cast it in a different pairing if you so chose.

Yvonne/Naomi Eisen

This traditional pairing of Act I and II roles doesn’t have any deep hidden meaning as far as I can make out. The scene between Dot and Yvonne is subtle and important. Like Jules, this requires a good ear. You will want to hear “It might be in some dreary socialistic periodical”. from No Life in callbacks. 

Soldier/Alex

This is a wonderful small comic role for a strong baritone or tenor. I was bewildered that quintessential baritone Robert Westenberg covered Mandy in the original production until we cast a wonderful tenor in the role for our production and I began to see the connection. The pairing of first and second act characters is a fruitful one in terms of themes, but you could pair it a different way if you needed to.  

Boatman/Charles Redmond

The Boatman stands in the outsider role that was so important to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musicals. He tells the truth nobody else wants to hear. The vocal part has some difficult timing. You will want to hear the “You and me pal” passage in The Day Off at callbacks. The pairing with Redmond isn’t very meaningful, and Redmond’s part isn’t any more or less difficult than any of the others in Art Isn’t Easy, so you could cast the doubling differently if you wanted.

Nurse/Mrs./Harriet Pawling

The nurse only has one brief singing passage, but it’s somewhat tricky, so you’ll want to hear it in callbacks. Ideally has some chemistry with Franz and is a sufficient foil for the Old Lady. This role is often double cast with Mrs. She doesn’t sing as Mrs., so you can cast to the funniest actor for the part. The role of Harriet in Act 2 doesn’t particularly resonate with Mrs., but she does interact with Marie, the ‘Old Lady’ of Act II, so you might want to keep the traditional doubling. Harriet sings higher than Nurse, at least as high as F, but even higher if you don’t alter her part in 29 P.

Mr./Lee Randolph

Not singing roles, so you should cast the funniest actor for Mr.’s scenes. The pairing is not necessary, except perhaps that Mr. and Lee are both involved in arts patronage.  

Franz/Dennis

Franz needs a decent German dialect and chemistry with the nurse. The pairing with Dennis is not necessary. Dennis doesn’t really sing in act 2, but he has a very important scene with George. If you do cast the same actor for Franz and Dennis, it’s a chance for a strong actor to play some very broad comedy and a rather touching realistic scene in the same show.

Frieda/Betty

Frieda also needs a German accent and chemistry with Jules, although this chemistry can be unusual, since their relationship is clearly made much more exciting through transgression. Betty sings very little in Act II.

Celestes 1 and 2/Waitress, Elaine

The two Celestes are essentially interchangeable. Ideally you have two very similar actresses who have good comic chemistry with each other and with the soldier. The Act II parts are both quite small. The waitress doesn’t speak. Elaine has 7 lines. (in a nice scene)

Louis/Billy Webster

Louis barely speaks; he’s almost an idea. Unless I’m missing something, the range I’ve included above is from his one singing line at the top of Act II. If you double cast with Billy, the range is wider, essentially the same as all the other singers in Putting it Together.

Louise

The trick to casting this is to get someone old enough to be reliable in It’s Hot Up Here, who is nevertheless young (or short) enough to read the right age for this part. Consequently, this is a role you may want to delay casting in a professional production. 6 months can make a big difference in height for young people the age you will likely be looking at. 

A Few Things to Note About the Music Director’s Materials

The original published score is very well laid out, as are all the Sondheim scores of this time period. I was nervous about the re-engraved piano vocal score that come with the rental materials, having played from the new engraving of the Into The Woods score, which is not an improvement on the original published score. This new Sunday is very good, easy to play from, and well cued to the orchestra parts. If you compare the two piano vocal scores, though, you will see hundreds of minor discrepancies, and a couple significant errors, which I’ll note below. 

The vocal/script books and orchestra books are also very good, with only a few minor errors I will also note. 

Going Through the Show Number By Number

I’m not the first person to note that the acts have a number of matching pairs.

ACT I	ACT II
Sunday in the Park With George	It’s Hot Up Here
Color and Light/Gossip Sequence/Finishing the Hat	Putting it Together
Color and Light	Chromolume #7
Finishing the Hat	Lesson #8
We Do Not Belong Together	Move On
Beautiful	Children and Art
Sunday	Sunday

This parallel construction obviously brings an internal coherence to the piece, made stronger still by musical material appearing in multiple songs, developing the ideas and characters in subtle transformations. But the parallels also highlight the differences between the acts. The painting sequences in Act I show how a disconnected George is bringing a vivid world of characters to the canvas. When we reach the parallel sequence in act 2, we find George talking to everyone. He’s the product now, not the painting. Finishing the Hat and Lesson Number 8 are both about artists’ problems, but they reveal two totally divergent states of mind. First act George is in a flow state. Second act George is blocked.

In any well made musical, a reprise helps us make sense of time passing, themes developing, and ideas changing. Apart from the finales, these are not reprises at all. They are echoes of situations and people in time. Stephen Banfield makes a lovely point about these parallels, noting that Sondheim and Lapine had originally meant to be a show made up of a theme and variations. 

“The whole artistic question of when to repeat and when to do something different… is what George’s crisis in act 2 is about.”

We see in the macro the ideas explored in the micro. This is a hallmark of many masterpieces, and a calling card for Sondheim in particular. 

1. Opening-Prelude

This fanfare has always read to me as a kind of idealized perfection of creation; the world as George wishes it. We will descend almost immediately into a state of imperfection, but this first gesture establishes George’s kingship over the world he is trying to create. This fanfare will undergo a number of important transformations, morphing into the horn fanfare in The Day Off, the melodic idea of both Finishing the Hat and Putting it Together and the underscore of We Do Not Belong Together and Move On. 

Right away there is more information in the old piano vocal score than we have in the new materials. The original score includes some instructions on the chords themselves for when things fly in. These are not terribly significant in the long run, though, because the tech for these elements will likely determine the timing. We performed this in a proscenium theater with a fly space, but flying in giant trees or pulling white drops back from tree legs is an all-hands-on-deck situation. You may discover you need to take quite a bit of time on each fanfare fermata. 

Measure 9 contains one of the most difficult passages for horn in the musical theatre repertory (more information on that when we come to talk about pit players)The part is extremely high and very exposed. The player will need to play it at a decent volume to get the note secure and in tune, but horns tend to sound a little thin up there, so the quiet dynamics in the other players will be very unlikely to be drowned out by the horn line. 

2. Flying Trees

This is, on the face of it, a clever theatrical joke, throwing us as an audience a curveball and letting us know that we are not watching a strictly realistic world. But it’s also a key to a major theme of the piece. 

It was one thing to open the show with an artist bringing a world to life. But that world, populated by presumably real people, is also being continually edited by the artist, and we watch it being edited. The Old Lady can see that the tree is missing. Are we in George’s mind or not? Is the Old Lady the only person who can see what George is editing? Their connection becomes more important as the act progresses, because the Old Lady is the catalyst that moves George from the devastation of We Do Not Belong Together to the triumph of the first act Finale. 

If you made it through the opening, you’ll be fine here musically. 

3. Sunday in the Park with George

Sondheim includes the monologue Lapine wrote at his request which became this number in his book Look, I Made a Hat. It’s well worth looking at this monologue, and reading his commentary about it. He would organize the number around her short attention span and her physical discomfort. 

This number has become so iconic and familiar by now that we may have to work to remember how unusual it is. It is almost as shocking as the beginning of Oklahoma would have been compared to normal expectations of a musical’s opening number. There is no chorus, the few characters on stage have shared an odd, mannered, rather low-key scene before the number proper. The percussive and spare accompaniment is packed with minor seconds, expressive of Dot’s discomfort, and her brief bursts of melody require our full attention to understand the form. In a costuming tour-de-force that is also totally grounded in the narrative, Dot unexpectedly steps out of her dress. The music begins gradually to leave ‘my-foot-is-falling-asleep’ angularity and creep toward something more ardent, and Dot introduces important themes: she is the first to say the word ‘connection’ and the first to raise the idea of permanency. Permanent expression. Durable. Forever. When Dot finally does break into full lyricism, we are given what will become the musical’s most rhapsodic and structurally important material, first:

“Your Eyes, George”

And then 

“Most of all…”

In these critical moments, we discover why Dot remains there: George and his painting are beautiful. 

As Dot steps back into her dress, we are thrown once again into claustrophobic paresthesia, and we experience her discomfort viscerally ourselves. It is a microcosm of the journey of the show from the beginning through the top of act II. 

If you read part one of this blog post, you will recall my saying Sondheim is a minimalist composer. One of the ways he uses repetition is to build phrases from small cells of notes. When his characters become stuck in a loop of pitches, they have invariably also gotten caught in a loop of thought, as Dot does here, when she sings:

“There are worse things than staring at the water on a…”

And then, of course, 

”There are worse things than staring at the water as you’re posing for a picture after sleeping on the ferry after getting up at seven to come over to an island in the middle of a river half an hour from the city…”

The melodic repetition makes us feel trapped with her in rumination, and the release is a kind of minor catharsis. Consider similar passages and you’ll begin to notice them all over Sondheim:

Another hundred people just got off of the train…

Pardon me, is everybody here, because if everybody’s here…

What if he knew who you were when you know that you’re not what he thinks that he wants?

Throughout the number, George does not sing, but instead intrudes on her thoughts with unwelcome corrections. Every expression of her physical self is rejected. 

“Don’t move, please” 

“Eyes, open, please.”

“Look out at the water, not at me.”

“Don’t lift the arm, please.”

“The bustle high, please”

“Don’t move the mouth.”

He is not, in fact, trying to get to the bottom of who Dot is. He is trying to make her appear the way he wants her to be. The number establishes immediately that our place is with Dot, trying to figure out George, and trying to find a place in his world. 

The pensive chords that accompany ‘Your Eyes, George’ melody are a motive that runs throughout the show. If you track the appearances of these ruminating chords sequentially in the show, you can see in brief the whole trajectory of their relationship, even through to Act II: 

“Your Eyes, George…”

“If my legs were longer”

“If I was a folly girl…”

“And he burns you with his eyes”

“If the head was smaller…”

“Hello, George, where did you go, George?”

“The bread, George…”

“We lose things, and then we choose things”

“Yes, she looks for me. Good.”

“Yes, George, run to your work…”

“What I feel? You know exactly how I feel.”

“Hello, George, I do not wish to be remembered like this, George”

“Alright, George. As long as it’s your night, George.”

“Say Cheese, George, and put them at their ease, George”

“Be New, George. They tell you till they’re blue, George.”

“Elaine, fix my chair so I can see Mama…”

“Charles has a book, Charles shows them his crayons…”

The more active pattern of sixteenths that follows, as Dot sings “But most, George, of all, but most of all.” is another motivic accompaniment pattern that we will hear less frequently through Act I. Tracking those:

“But most of all, I love your painting.”

[Scene Change from Old Lady into Studio]

“Well, Louis, and George, but George has George”

“But if Anybody could… Finishing the hat…”

When the motive appears in Finishing the Hat, it has been slightly altered, becoming an accompanimental grounding for George’s most important cri de coeur. More on that later. This set of musical ideas in the first complete song in the score strongly establishes the sound world of the musical. Now to more prosaic matters: 

The original score here marks the first measure Rubato, (quarter = 112 bpm) 

Measure 2A is marked Larghetto (quarter = 84) 

Measure 6 has a lyric error. (now THE foot is dead)

The triplet rhythm in vocal in measure 7 is not in the original score, and seems out of left field to me. 

Measure 9 is originally marked poco mosso (quarter = 82)

Measure 18 is originally marked Strict tempo (quarter =92)

Measures 34 and 35 are tricky. If you play it in your left, it’s somewhat awkward to get under your fingers, particularly over and over again. If you break it up between left and right, you may find it more grateful. I’m sorry to report that the orchestration doesn’t really help you. The figure in the left is split between the viola, the cello, and the double bass, and the timbre differences between the instruments keeps the figure from cohering really. The melody doesn’t ‘pass off’ from one instrument to another. I added the viola notes to the cello, which seemed to give it body. It’s a neat figure, and it covers some business, so the audience has little to do but listen! It’s also an awkward loop to escape, since when you leave the vamp, it sounds like the same measure until the end. I explained that my signal would take us out of measure 35, not out of measure 34. You will have to formulate your own solution to this little nub.

Measure 87 should be in 4. (quarter = 92) in the original score. You will have this figure a lot in the show. Sometimes it’s in 2, sometimes in 4. 

There is an error in the bass book in the last note of measure 107. That should be a G, not an F. 

4. Parasol

You’ll have to find out from your director what this fanfare actually illustrates. In our production it coincided with a parasol opening. (which is not the cue in the score) 

5. Yoo-Hoo

This is slower than you might imagine for musical ideas like this. It was originally a longer number, and was cut down on its way to Broadway. You can see the original lyric in the published libretto and in Look I Made a Hat.

6. No Life

We again see George through the lens of others. As usual, Sondheim is accomplishing many things: establishing the convention that we will see paintings appear from the world of the piece, establishing the values of the art world George is defying, establishing Yvonne’s attempts to be witty enough to please Jules, all over a stately promenade, to which the harpsichord lends a musty pall. 

In Sondheim’s notes, we see he was originally planning a series of promenades to connect the vignettes, an idea inseparable from Mussorgsky’s 1874 Pictures at an Exhibition, in which a recurring promenade leads us through an imaginary gallery, and each ‘painting’ is a characteristic piano piece. No Life serves such a purpose here, although Sondheim’s original intention to connect Act I using this device doesn’t go much further than this. 

This is one of the places where Sondheim is also clearly referencing French impressionism. (it’s a Satie Gymnopédie) It is very easy to overpower the dialogue and vocals here, lower the written dynamic after the repeat section by at least 2 levels. The English Horn in particular can be somewhat aggressive in that register. 

The passage beginning at measure 58 is not in the original piano vocal score, but it was in the original production. It also tends to overwhelm the dialogue, and can easily be cut or truncated. 

7. Scene Change to Studio

This is just a truly lovely scene change, particularly with the harp and celesta sounds. If your scene change is running long, you may well want to repeat the first 8 bars so as not to park on D minor for too long. 

8. Color and Light (Parts I-IV)

“If there is any song in the score that exemplifies the change in my writing when I began my collaboration with James Lapine, it would be ‘Color and Light’… I organized this song, and much of the score, more through rhythm and language than rhyme.” -Sondheim

Sondheim truly breaks new ground in musical theatre here. It might even be argued that he himself never again surpassed this sequence, and certainly none of his imitators have either. 

We have thus far only seen George as reflected through the lens of those around him. We haven’t heard him sing yet. But now we see and hear George for the first time from, as it were, his own perspective. We catch the excitement of flow, and we see him address his artistic subjects like a director or a dictator, even in their absence, editing their essences.. “So black to you, perhaps. So red to me” The subject of the painting has no agency in the portrayal. 

We also see Dot editing herself, her powderpuff in counterpoint with George’s brush strokes. She is trying to discover a version of her identity that bears significance, and one that bears significance to George. We come to see that George’s eye is his power not only to paint, but his power over Dot. The counterpoint between the two escalates until the climax, “I could look at him/her forever” The moment is made somehow more poignant by the clarity that these two are so deeply alienated from one another even in their most unified moment. The grounding musical motive that underpins this thrilling ending is a development of the Red-Red-Orange theme. 

This accompaniment pattern only appears three times in the show, but they are the most loaded expressions of attraction and alienation between the two of them.

“You look inside the eyes and you catch him here and there, but he’s never really there…”

“Let her look for me to tell my why she left me, as I always knew she would”

“What you care for is yourself. I am something you can use.”

The fact that the motive is built from the musical motive associated with George’s flow state makes the point quite beautifully. George’s artistic lifeblood is also the source of his alienation.

“I care a lot about art and the artist. The Major thing I wanted to do in the show was to enable anyone who is not an artist to understand what hard work it is.”, Sondheim told Craig Zadan. Color and Light is where that hard work is most clearly depicted. 

Compare this detailed depiction of artistic process and personal alienation to The Last Five Years for example, where we hear Jamie crow about the results of his success, and we even see him spinning a yarn in the Schmuel song, but we don’t get any sense of what his artistic process means to him. We also have no clear idea of what Cathy thinks of his work and her connection to it. This is one of the reasons most audiences don’t think Jamie is the protagonist of L5Y. It’s a choice between his relationship and his ego, not his art.

Here we are thrown deeply into the creative process itself, made even more vivid by the lack of traditional song or lyric structure. When Dot sings about the Follies, we flirt with a traditional song form, but the passage reads as a stream of consciousness. It’s a testament to Sondheim’s mastery of musical rhetoric that the piece doesn’t fall apart at the seams or overstay its welcome. It helps that Sondheim had written something of a conceptual rough draft in Opening Doors in Merrily, where Franklin Shepard is editing and editing the tune he’s writing as the world spins around him. It also helps that George isn’t writing music. The worst scenes in musical biopics are usually the ones where the composer is tearing his hair out at the piano trying to arrive at the tune the audience already knows by heart. But here we are not imagining the destination of what George is painting so much as sharing in his excitement of the work itself. We can’t even see what he’s painting, so our imagination has to take over. 

Sondheim establishes a technique here that stakes out a major theme of the work: I like to think of it as Windows. He will use the idea again in Into The Woods to establish the options in points of decision. Into The Woods is about the unintended consequences of decisions. Sunday is in some sense about the distinction between the reality of being a human and an artist’s depiction of that reality. The musical geography is critical to Sondheim’s portrayal of that theme

Notice that George’s ideas have a lower accompaniment, Dot’s accompaniments are much higher. (this is harder to make out in the original piano vocal score layout) We ultimately hear Dot’s accompaniment becoming the pensive two chord idea she introduced in the opening.

“Your eyes, George”

These two musical locations, one low, and the other high, are placed in close proximity to one another so that we can experience the gulf between them. This back-and-forth is broken by the stage direction: 

[George steps around canvas to get more orange. Their eyes meet for a second]

In other words the dual world musical dichotomy is broken by an actual person-to-person connection, made just as the music shifts to the accompaniment they share troughout the musical. 

We will see later in the piece that this delineation of musical real-estate is a critical area of exploration. How much of what we are seeing is real and how much is George’s construction? It all has to do with these windows. (more on that later) 

If you’ve hired keyboard 2 (and I sure hope you have!) You will want to go through keyboard 1 and mark what you’re playing and what you’re conducting. It’s a great challenge to switch back and forth, and cue the singer where necessary. Getting into measure 92 in part 3 can be tricky; you will need to run it a few times to get the tempo to drop in correctly. The passage beginning in measure 112 is hard without a bass player, because neither hand is intuitive really. Take some time to work through measure 144, especially if you are conducting from the piano. If you know what you’re doing, it works well. If not, it will be a struggle. The top note in the right hand in measure 156 should be F natural. The timing in measures 200-204A can be tricky to line up with the vocals. You may have to move rather quickly through the whole notes and potentially cut the repeat of 205. The existence of 205A and 205B indicates this was an issue in the original production as well. The end of 8B is a really neat effect, rather like the subito piano at the end of Epiphany from Sweeney Todd. It is also somewhat unsatisfying because Dot leaves without a button and nobody can applaud her in what is one of her more beautiful moments. The very last measure of 8C is tricky to land. After goofing it more than once, I actually dropped out in measure 250, conducted, and played beat 2 of the last measure. There’s plenty of tutti there, and a clear button is essential. 

9. Scene Change to Park

This cue is almost all music we’ve heard before. The entrances of the Boatman and the Celestes are ideally cued to the phrases that begin on measure 11. 

10. Gossip Sequence

Having heard from Dot and from George himself, we are again amid the other subjects of the painting. Sondheim introduces ideas we will encounter later: The Celestes’ “They say that George has another Woman” will become:

“I mean, I don’t understand completely” 

“It’s not enough knowing good from rotten” 

Etc. 

The Old Lady and the Boatman show a certain misanthropic musical kinship here, although the Boatman accompaniment is 3 octaves lower with a more dissonant minimalist polyrhythm (see earlier post) 

Our appreciation of the larger meanings in the work will be deeper if we catch some subtle distinctions here:

The Celestes, the Nurse, and the Old Lady are trying to keep up with the romantic news; Dot has left George, George behaves unusually. They are uninterested in his work. “They have so little to speak of, they must speak of me?”, George asks at the top of the show, and he’s right. 

The Old Lady is pragmatic. You can’t make enough money to raise a family by painting. She also brutally assesses people with a single word: Noisy. Famous. Filthy. Deluded. Unfeeling. 

Jules and Yvonne are concerned with the oddity of George’s new technique and complaining about what George is painting. Boatmen and Monkeys are both inappropriate subjects.

The Boatman cuts through to deeper truths. He relishes his status as an outsider. The companionship he most enjoys is the friendship of the dog, primarily because the dog does not make demands and allows the boatman to be who he is, unexamined. To the boatman, the Celestes, The Nurse, the Old Lady, Yvonne, Jules, and George have all fallen into the same foolishness: trying to observe things. After all, what are these drawings even for?

The characters are so interesting and funny that we may miss a larger point: All of them are making judgments and assuming intent constantly, especially the boatman. Only George is permanizing the judgements. 

An interesting musical coincidence may be noted to Sweeney Todd:

These similarities in melodic contour are unintentional, of course, but they are examples of the coherence of Sondheim’s mature style, in which these odd melodic shapes are organized and re-organized to fit the same stream of consciousness the character is navigating.

The accompaniment is a little math game, and a tricky one at that. You’ll notice the right hand is playing a 4 note pattern. The left gives us a dissonant 2 notes, then 3, then the pattern repeats and gains momentum. By measure 6, the two hands settle on a 4 note pattern for 2 measures, but then the left becomes a pattern of 3 notes, against continuing four note patterns in the right.

Measure 19 is so interesting, you will be tempted to play it loud, but mark everything piano, because you’re playing under some dialogue here, and the scoring is heavy. If you’ve managed the earlier 4 against 3, then the passage beginning in measure 38 should start well. But then the pattern in the right starts to change…

Try and figure it out yourself. Left hand pattern remains unchanged, in a 3 eighth note pattern. But the right hand is being constantly reconfigured. Measure 46 on isn’t too terribly hard, relative to the earlier work you did. I cut the harpsichord part in measure 68 and 69, because it threatens to drown out an important line. In the new score, the vocal parts are not properly identified from 68-71. Here is the passage as it appears in the original score:

The last passage, at 71 is too long for the dialogue, I think. If you watch the original production, you’ll see that the lines are delivered very slowly and deliberately. The sequence is very mannered, an approach which may or may not work for your production. It is quite difficult to get this passage under the dialogue, just as it was at the end of No Life.

11. Cues in the Park

This number is three cues which are found elsewhere in the show. Easy. 

12. The Day Off (Parts I-VII)

Along with Color and Light, this is one of the most distinctive, conceptually daring and expressive parts of the musical, and a showpiece for the actor playing George.

We have another example here of musical spaces. Spot’s initial music is punctuated by a dissonant, rather low chord reminiscent of the Boatman.

In Spot’s second portion, Sondheim introduces a rhythmic motive that will ground the rest of the extended number.

There’s a chord in this motive that seems very much like a point of stasis, and sometimes Sondheim will linger on it. Banfield identifies this chord as a point of stasis, calling it a ‘freeze frame’ harmony. This chord gives a feeling of ‘lift’, which is mirrored by a reappearance in Putting it Together.

Sondheim has given us grooves like this since at least The Little Things You Do Together from Company, but this instance seems very situated to function as a resting spot, a place for a snapshot.

A third groove emerges to close Spot’s section:

When Fifi comes in, she is accompanied by two percussive and dissonant chords in a higher register.

When the two dogs alternate, we see Fifi’s percussive chords (now mere 2nds) sitting atop Spot’s third groove, like so:

Despite the boatman’s conviction that Spot doesn’t expect anything of him, Spot turns out here to have a few negative opinions after all about the Boatman. And Fifi is also very judgmental about her companion. 

Ultimately, though, I don’t think we can take this episode as reflecting any reality for the dogs themselves. These are George’s projections; he is play-acting the animals to get into their heads. We can tell this partly because the dog music George has constructed continues into George’s subsequent observations about everyone else. A transformation of George’s fanfare creative motive also appears regularly, which we may take as a musical indication that he is in his creative mode.

The Nurse and several of the subsequent subjects George encounters here SHARE simultaneous vocal lines with him. But they seem to follow these moments of agreement with their own distinct opinions,. apart from him. These shared lines include:

“One day is much like any other, listening to her snap and drone”

“Second bottle, Ah, she looks for me”

“You and me, pal. We’re the loonies. Did you know that? Bet you didn’t know that.”

“Mademoiselles, I and my friend, we are but soldiers!” 

We also get the first appearance of the Celeste’s motive

It’s telling that we first get this jittery musical idea as we’re talking about fishing, an evidently unintended prostitution reference, if the literature is to be believed.

A purely coincidental connection is also hiding beneath the surface. If you slow the motive down and swing the rhythm, you’ll see that this motive is also a cousin to:

The melody that holds the larger sections together is inflected in so many different ways that we might lose track of their derivation from the same musical contour. Sing these to yourself and you’ll hear the continuity.

Frieda and Franz open up another angle on the outsider’s view of the artist: The wastefulness and privilege of the artist. For Jules and Yvonne, George’s choice of subject in painting the lower classes is in poor taste. But Fritz, even though he affectedly poses for George from his very first entrance, is perhaps too common to paint. Fritz dismisses him. Art isn’t ‘real work.’ 

The accompaniment pattern in 12F ingeniously retools the original gossip theme to fit above the established Samba pattern. 

In measures 24 and 25, there’s a lyric discrepancy. In every production and in the original score, George sings, “Would you like some more grass?”, not “please, a little more grass.”

The passage in part one between 31 and 41 is very difficult to time to the meter. Mandy doesn’t follow the meter in the original cast, and neither do any of the subsequent recordings. We don’t particularly want to be tied up in counting these odd spacings when the actor needs to feel really freewheeling. This is not really a problem, except as you have to conduct it. Go over the vocal cues with the percussion, strings, harp, and horn, write some key words from the vocal into the parts, and cue the moments individually until you drop into tempo at measure 42. 

The button at measure 121 was Michael Bennet’s idea. Having seen Patinkin make such a strong impression, it seemed wrong to deny him applause. But the button falls (to my ear anyway) in a nonsensical place; at the end of a section, to be sure, but without a closing phrase that feels like an ending. 

In section 12B, in measure 37, the score is missing a new time signature. (¾, obviously) 

The shifting right hand passage in 12F at measure 23 is annoying when you first encounter it, but it sure is fun when you get it under your fingers. 

13. Everybody Loves Louis

Another iconic song where much is done with rather simple musical means. George has spent quite some time conjuring the world of the park, to the point where we may even have begun to question whether we are in fact seeing reality or George’s editorialized version. Bursting suddenly into this world is a perspective that truly challenges George and calls him to account. 

As we have seen, Sondheim thinks most clearly and speaks most effectively when he organizes thoughts into some kind of binary. This particular binary is stark and full of wordplay, made more effective by the fact that Dot almost doesn’t speak of George; the repudiation is by implication. As the number goes on, the comparisons are more and more personal and potentially hurtful.

Louis	George (by implication)
Everybody loves him	Nobody likes him
Simple and kind	Complicated and cruel
Loveable	Difficult to love
Really an artist	A false artist
Not the smartest, but popular	Too smart, unpopular
Bakes from the heart	Too cerebral
Makes ‘bread’	Doesn’t sell his work
Kneads her like dough	Is less attentive in bed
Pleasant, Fair	Unpleasant, Unfair
Present, Generous	Distant, Stingy
There	Gone
Easy to follow thoughts	Impossible to understand
Art not hard to swallow	Art difficult to digest
Makes a connection	Disconnected

The crux of the song is of course her moment of vulnerability, set to the gently alternating chords Sondheim keeps returning to for these critical junctures: 

We lose things, 

and then we choose things

And there are Louis’s

And there are Georges 

Well, Louis’s 

And George

But George has George,

And I need someone

Louis. 

To a certain extent, at least, Dot hasn’t really moved on yet. There may be many people like Louis. But if the one-of-a-kind George is unreachable, Louis will have to do. When we see this dynamic at work, Dot’s description of Louis develops a new dimension. She is not merely trying to make George feel bad. She’s trying to depict Louis in a way that elevates his art to a level where he bears comparison. Again we find a character framing reality to suit their own narrative. George is not the only artist. 

(I was confused by the pluralization of Louis as Louis’s, and discovered to my dismay that this is in fact the correct way to pluralize singular words that end with a silent ‘s’. Try pluralizing ‘chassis’ and you’ll see the problem.)

There are passages throughout the score where no performer sings the notes on the page. The ‘Louis it is!” at the end is one of them. Try it once and see how alien it sounds! 

The original piano vocal score and probably every other iteration you have played of this song contains the jaunty woodwind passage in the right hand. It’s hard to play this lick from the new licensed piano vocal score, but the polka piano part you’ll play in the show is easier to play ultimately, and much easier to establish tempo from, which is truly the most important aspect. 

Measure 38 is a real conundrum. The three dots after ‘but…’ are impossible to convey to the audience if you plow directly into the next measure. Here are how the various cast recordings have solved this problem. 

Annaleigh Ashford sings the rhythm that’s on the page, and we lose the feeling of the ellipsis entirely. This graphic with the tenuto marking is from the original score. In the new parts, that chord is marked staccato.

Bernadette adds a measure, singing something like this on the original cast recording and on the video:

Jenna Russell also adds a measure, but the piano retains the staccato chord, like this:

You will have to choose an approach and convey it to the orchestra. There isn’t any solution that honors both the music and the text in the score.

Measure 107 is a passages, now in 4, which here in particular needs to be in the correct tempo, because at 113, we find ourselves with the two musical ideas superimposed. You’ll want to think of 107 in the tempo of the Everybody Loves Louis chorus. I don’t think the fermata at the end works. You do what you like. 

14. The One On The Left

This was originally a much longer number. Sondheim explains it in Look, I Made a Hat. The last line of the original number is one that any other writer would have killed to keep in the show. You can hear the number as a bonus track in the 2006 recording. But the characterization in the shortened version is so strong that we don’t really need a much longer number to establish who they are. 

The fact that the other soldier is a cardboard cutout is a wonderful and theatrical device, but it also justifies and draws connections to the George cutouts in act II. When we see them in Putting it Together, they haven’t appeared out of nowhere. 

The fanfare melody of the soldier is one in a long line of fanfares going all the way back to Marcus Lycus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and continuing through at least 4 or 5 other scores. Sondheim uses this kind of figure to indicate silly, hypermasculine men. This particular version also owes a little to Stravinsky’s L’Histore du Soldat.

Work with the Soldier in 83 and 84 to really count the full measures, or the cue coming out of 84 will be tough with the orchestra. 

Budget a little time to talk through measures 85-87 with the pit; the entrances in the parts are not particularly intuitive. 

The bass part at the end of the number is just wrong. I’m attaching a correction here. It’s an ingenious little minimalist phasing: The right hand is in 4, the left essentially in 5. As it is in the licensed parts, that distinction goes away. 

15. Finishing the Hat

It took me far too long to realize that the order of the phrases at the beginning of Finishing the Hat are the reverse of the order they appear in The Day Off, even reversing ‘pastry’ and ‘chicken’ from their original order. Again these points of suspended time in the groove from The Day Off serve to underscore the quasi-reality of George’s recollections. 

In a show full of superlatives, I have to trot out another. This number has meant so much to so many people. It is in a way the photonegative of Being Alive, another Sondheim ballad that has resonated with many people’s life experiences. Being Alive is about someone realizing that embracing the messiness of other people is the first step to finding authentic relationships. George, by contrast, is a person who is far more lost, because the true animating force of his life is the window to his imagined world. The imagined world will always supersede the real world of actual people. 

This is the second appearance of the motive which will find its ultimate fruition in We Do Not Belong Together. Here it accompanies the revelation that George has had a number of women, and each of them was unable to deal with his temperament. She was supposed to be different, though, and when he gets to the line;

“But if anybody could…”

We hear the “But most of all, I love your painting” underscore, which becomes the basis of the accompaniment for the remainder of the song. The pattern here is not the same as it has been elsewhere in the show. Since I came to this number first, I thought this pattern was as it appears everywhere in the show, and I had to relearn it.

Here’s the way the figure appears in Everybody Loves Louis:

And here’s how it appears in Finishing the Hat :

They are, quite clearly, the same accompaniment pattern. But they are also fundamentally different. It doesn’t take much thought to find a dramatic significance to the musical detail.

Again, there is a kind of delineation of musical space, here actually on the word ‘window’, which stops the rolling accompaniment pattern in its tracks twice before the first major climax.

This climax, “and how you’re always turning back too late” is an extremely clear distinction, musically, between the two warring states of mind George is describing. 

In Sondheim’s classic manner, the song then descends back into repeating patterns in both music and lyric, until George’s music eventually opens into a kind of a clearing to make the window metaphor explicit. This is followed by a repeat of the earlier delineation of musical space. 

On the way into George’s final alienating observations, Sondheim uses the complete vocabulary he has established in quick succession:

Throughout this passage we get further into the nub of the issue with one of Sondheim’s central insights, one we find throughout his musicals, but particularly reminiscent of Buddy’s Blues from Follies. George actually wants to be in a relationship with a fully formed person, but that sort of person wouldn’t deal with the distant person that he is. This insight is what allows us to empathize with him; he recognizes his own unsuitability to any woman with self respect. 

From this final desperation, George again descends into repeated phrases, the solace of the work. We can see that he has no intention of solving this problem. The hat doesn’t complain. 

The original score has “I give all I can give” in measure 80. No singer actually sings that. Every recording, and the new score has “Well, I give what I give.”

At the end there’s an odd discrepancy. The Jake Gyllenhaal and Daniel Evans versions are performed exactly as the licensed vocal score now lays out the ending. But in the original production and vocal score, there was one more measure. The current score indicates two measures, but it really only cuts one as far as I can tell. Reinstating that measure would be fairly easy if one were so inclined. I’m not sure what is gained by cutting it. 

16. Bustle

This is one of the two chaotic sections which are very dependent on the staging. It isn’t clear from the score that the orchestra goes out of sync with itself as it accelerates, to a kind of cacophony, which is cut off abruptly at the bustle reveal. This section is aleatoric, a premonition of the Chaos to appear 7 cues later. One of the major questions in Sunday involves whether what we’re seeing is reality or George’s editorializing eye. At this moment, George is not in control, and the world is unorganized, formless. The one to stop this chaos though is Dot, as she reveals her pregnancy, again using a costume creatively to drive the action. 

17. Scene Change to Quartet (originally entitled Scene Change to Studio)

I found this scene change surprisingly difficult, because the ending isn’t really very easy to memorize, so I had to read the music. But the cue to end was on a lighting change, so I had to keep my eye out for the change. I ended up memorizing the last measure. The original score had another repeat, of measures 9 and 10. If you reinstate that repeat, you may have an easier time of it. 

In the extraordinary scene that follows, we see a terribly revealing moment. George addresses the painting intimately. 

“He does not like you. He does not understand or appreciate you. He can only see you as everyone else does. Afraid to take you apart and put you together again for himself. But we will not let anyone deter us, will we?”

He has forgotten that Dot is even in the other room. 

18. We Do Not Belong Together

This is the emotional climax of Act I, and the moment that I think most necessitates Act II. Sondheim had been using leitmotiv for a long time, especially in Sweeney Todd, but here the deployment of accompaniment patterns is simple and calculated, to devastating effect. 

We begin with the ruminating two-chord pattern, which has been reserved so far to accompanying lyrics involving George’s vision and the effects of that vision on the self worth of the people around him. 

“Your Eyes, George…”

“If my legs were longer”

“If I was a folly girl…”

“And he burns you with his eyes”

“If the head was smaller…”

“Hello, George, where did you go, George?”

“The bread, George…”

“We lose things, and then we choose things”

“Yes, she looks for me. Good.”

When Dot accuses him of caring about things and not people, the music shifts to the third and final iteration of this accompaniment pattern:

Dot is more pointed and unguarded here than at any other point: George is using her. He only cares for himself. We find ourselves in another whirlwind of repetition, which Dot releases in a brand new section we have never heard before:

“You could tell me not to go.”

George doesn’t join here in this new material, but retrogresses into the earlier musical material. “You know I cannot give you words”

All this has been leading up to a brand new idea, the transformation of George’s opening fanfare to a turbulent, roiling accompaniment in D minor. 

Compare the right hand of that figure to the second fanfare from the opening of the musical (both hands in treble clef in E flat major):

If the opening image of the show was George’s mastery of his world, this is the beginning of the disintegration of that world which will shortly lead to Chaos, a kind of ‘darkness on the face of the deep’

George is helpless. He can’t see it from her perspective. She knew what she was getting into. This music will take on new meaning in Act II, but here, George’s attempt to command the narrative fails because Dot again reasserts her argument with another new motive that he does not participate in. The new motive is based on the first iteration of the opening fanfare. 

Sondheim did all this very deliberately, of course. 

“It seemed effective to use rhythm to reflect putting dots on the canvas, to show his distraction as well as his concentration. But that, of course, becomes motivic, that rhythmic idea. There are two basic rhythms, actually: There’s the arpeggiated rolling rhythm that is set up right in the opening arpeggios and eventually becomes Finishing the Hat and the kind of rolling vamp in Sunday in the Park with George, then there’s the painter’s theme, which is sharp and staccato and jabbed. That, combined with the rolling vamp, becomes Move On. 

The line, “I am unfinished with or without you” is troubling, but also brutally honest. Leaving an unhealthy relationship is leaving a diminishment, while also being itself a diminishment, because you leave part of your identity with the other person. 

I think most people respond viscerally to the lines, 

“No one is you, George, There we agree,

But others will do, George. 

No one is you and no one can be,

But no one is me, George, 

No one is me.”

She is developing her earlier thought:

“There are Louis’s and there are Georges,

Well, Louis’s and George.

But George has George, and I need someone”

But now she’s arrived at the fact that she is herself a singularity worthy of respect. 

By the time she begins these lines, George’s fanfare motive has disappeared from the accompaniment. 

The creation fanfare comes back as she changes tactics to affirm his mission: 

“You have a mission, a mission to see.”

Sondheim denies Dot a button to applaud, and as she leaves, the fanfare motive disintegrates as George is left onstage. We transition back to the ruminative motive, and George is alone with his mother. 

I’m not sure it’s possible for a production to truly capture everything that’s bubbling up in this number, but in terms of the structure of the musical, George has lost control of his world, and he has no tools to reclaim it. Against this backdrop, Sondheim is poised to explore the ephemerality of all art. 

There’s an awkward violin voicing in measure 50 and 51. (the 5th at the top of the first violin) The voicing does appear in Cecil Forsyth’s orchestration textbook, which is where I suspect Starobin got it. Let your players do what seems best to them, but I can think of a couple of workable solutions that preserve the idea well.

19. Beautiful

I usually skipped this when I was listening to the CD as a kid, but when I was working on the show, I came to find it one of my favorite moments. It’s critical to the exploration of the artistic process, and even though it slows the action of Act I, it can ONLY be here, where it will say the most to us. 

The Old Lady, as the script calls her, had earlier been reluctant to sit for George, but now she consents to be depicted, and the script describes her as having ‘a kind of loving attitude, soft and dreamlike’. She begins by recalling a past that George disputes. We sense that George may be factually correct, and that his mother has edited the past to make the memories more pleasant. George’s mother lives in the past. As she looks, she sees a world counter to the imaginary past of her memory. Towers, noisy children, they’re all a kind of aberration. Like Jules, she resists change. But where Jules resisted artistic change, the Old Lady resists reality changing. 

We discover telling details about George’s distant and unfaithful father. But as tantalizing as those details are, I think another dynamic is more fascinating still. The melancholy disappointment of George’s mother opens up a place where George can speak a truth that is key to the entire piece. The people, the relationships, the joys of life, the landscape itself are constantly in a state of becoming something else. This is a beauty in itself. What gives the changing thing any meaning at all is what it comes to mean for the person who sees it, who remembers it. This is a lovely parallel to the method George is trying to pioneer. The eye of the viewer literally constructs the colors of the painting. 

Any depiction of this changing world will always be a revision, just as George’s mother is continually revising the past. 

“I’ll draw us now before we fade, Mother. 

You watch, while I revise the world”, George suggests

“Quick, draw it all, Georgie… You make it beautiful.”

“Look! Look!”, George says. 

This is perhaps the only true connection George actually makes with another living person in the first act. But as the number concludes, George’s mother slips back into nostalgia. “How I long for the old view”. 

Following this song, the promenade of characters slips out of order. Fights start, each relationship is in danger of splintering. This number with his mother begins the last big shift of the act, as George names and inhabits his role of idealizing and permanizing the world.

I recommend you copy the Piano Synth part and give it to your Keys 2 player. That will free you to conduct, Keyboard 2 doesn’t have much in it, the Piano Conductor score is missing some important Keyboard 1 music, and in all likelihood, your singer and your players will appreciate seeing your hands getting through the tempo changes and ritardandi. The harp part has one rather awkward pedal change. To manage that, your harpist may want to do the number slower than your singer would. With practice, the pedal change becomes manageable. I wouldn’t bring it up with the harpist, but I would be aware of the difficulty.

Measure 14 in the licensed materials has a lyric error: It should read: 

“I see Towers where there were trees” 

Measure 59 in the new score is missing a left hand part; it ought to read as measure 55 would. 

20. Soldier Cue #1

This is tricky to cue because the cue line is in the middle of a lot of overspeaking dialogue. Ears open! 

21. Jules and Frieda

This is in keyboard 2, but you may as well play it yourself, if you’re conducting from the first book. It’s disorienting music, and it keeps the bizarre seduction scene from reading fully as comedy, which I think is intentional. 

22. Soldier Cues #2 and #3

Again, a very simple cue

23. Chaos

This is the second and climactic chaotic section, cued clearly to the action. (George frames the scene) Each production is going to cue this slightly differently. 

Dot’s final break with George has somehow broken a delicate equilibrium. Each character is involved in an irreversible disruption. All relationships are being broken. 

If we’ve built up the right kind of momentum in the act, we will experience the beginning of the next number as a jolt, as the Old Lady tells George: “Remember!” 

24. Sunday-Finale Act I 

Sondheim explicitly tells us that the chorus here are figments of George’s imagination. I’ll let you read in Look, I Made a Hat about the fragmentary expression, what made Sondheim cry in this number, and more. I won’t deprive you of the pleasure of discovering those things yourself. 

The first act finale draws together all the threads of exploration we have explored over the previous hour, as George arranges out of the chaos an idealization of these people and this place. Dot is somehow with Jules. No one faces the painter. Louise loses her glasses. Dot gets a monkey. 

Near the top of the show, George had casually said that he was drawing the monkeys, not their cage. This depiction is an idealization of the monkeys (these characters). It doesn’t depict the cages in which they find themselves, socioeconomic, interpersonal, and otherwise. 

I think one of the things that makes this song so meaningful for people is the juxtaposition of the painting’s perfect order with our memory of George’s loneliness and the entire cast’s alienation from each other. In George’s idealized world, no one looks at him or one another. Some have written that Sunday is a perpetuation of romantic stereotypes about the tortured artist. I think this reading misses a lot of nuance. Everyone in the piece is disconnected. Everyone in the piece is reframing the reality around them. George is just the one who creates an artifact; the painting. The piece doesn’t particularly ask us to pity George (who is generally rather unpleasant) or rail at an unfair world (George gets a pretty fair shake). It asks much more troubling questions about how each of us sees the people around us. It further asks us why we are so moved by these particular idealizations. 

The piece doesn’t answer these questions.  

Banfield notes the striking harmony before ‘of the grass’, where a c sharp in the right hand rubs against a strong C natural immediately thereafter in the bass, implying secondary dominant and the subdominant at basically the same time. (we are in G here)

There are a variety of convincing tempi for this number, but you may have things flying in and out that require a particular timing. Keep that in mind as you teach it.

If you listen to the original cast, you will discover that the cutoffs indicated in the score are not observed; Nearly all the choral moments are cut off on the downbeat of the next measure. I did not do this in my production, but it is a change I recommend, since the cast is by necessity looking offstage right, not at you, and the cutoffs as indicated in the score are not intuitive. 

At the end of the song, the violins are conscripted into the percussion section. Have a look and figure out what you want to do there. 

The licensed materials have an error at the end of measure 58. That last ‘bum’ shouldn’t be there.  

25. It’s Hot Up Here

The opening of Act II is the counterpart to Dot’s opening number, the opening section a tritone away in key. (as far as we can go) We used to be in Dot’s uncomfortable world, literally chafing against the confinement. Now ALL the characters must conform eternally to George’s vision, and they don’t care for it. 

This number is the true close of the story of act II, but it could really only go here, at the top of a very different act. 

The original cast recording was organized to be like a cantata, a freestanding musical journey. That has sort of blunted the original intention of this moment. We are meant to be uncomfortable. When the curtain comes up after the act break, take some time. Let the audience wonder if something has gone wrong. 

The stage direction reads:

(Lights slowly fade up. Long pause. Audience should feel the tension as they wait for something to happen. Finally, music begins)

When you begin, leave a lot of space in the first fermata. The number lands better coming from this place of discomfort. 

While the accompaniment pattern derives from Dot’s Act I opener, the melodic material is new. The chorus that follows is totally new, although the melody is an elaboration of ‘It’s hot up here’. The accompaniment is a rough draft for the title number of Sondheim’s next show: Into The Woods.

The centerpiece of the section keeps it from being merely a comedy sketch:

“Hello, George, I do not wish to be remembered like this, George”

The accompaniment, melodic contour, and harmonization have changed, but this is clearly a continuation of the act I thematic idea, which is always about their relationship, and how he sees her. 

As impressive as Dot’s long phrase is at the end of her first number, the group version at the end of “It’s Hot Up Here” is more so. Budget a lot of rehearsal time to solidify the passages from 36-43 and from 81-88. Initially the challenge is to make the entrances one after another. But this is live theatre, and the true goal here is to know where your part goes EVEN IF ANOTHER ACTOR MISSES THEIR CUE. 

In the tutti sections, as after measure 15, it’s about crisp diction. Make some decisions about where those cutoffs go and drill them from the very beginning. (in particular the ‘t’ of ‘what’ in measure 22) 

The nurse has a line “I put on rouge today too” somewhere around measure 85 in every version of the script, but in no versions of the score. I can’t hear it in any of the cast recordings. If anyone knows where that’s supposed to go in the melee, please put it in the comments. 

There’s some rather ineffective scoring in the passage beginning at 108. The horn, (stopped) and cello have an offbeat pattern that plays against the bass and the left hand of the piano. Those instruments don’t really blend, and can’t properly establish the musical idea, so it sounds like they’re playing the piano left hand part incorrectly. I don’t have a solution, but to my ear, it doesn’t really work.

It’s unclear how the (s)he’s in the lyric at 106 is supposed to work. I read it as each character being annoyed at their antagonist, and the characters choose the correct pronoun for the person who annoys them. 

Carefully drill the timing at the end, so that the ‘t’ at the end of the final ‘hot’ is exactly in the right place. They will all be looking offstage right, so you will not be able to cue them. 

26. Eulogies

The printed script I have from 1991 and the version included in Lapine’s new book include a long monologue for George after It’s Hot In Here. It depicts from George’s perspective childhood memories and then eventually what seems to be the beginning of his final illness. The monologue is not in the video of the original broadway production. I don’t think this monologue should be reinstated, but it is interesting that George says:

“A mission to see, to record impressions. Seeing… recording… seeing the record, then feeling the experience. Connect the dots, George.”

Sondheim and Lapine were, I think, starting to lay the groundwork here for the key questions of act 2, and to draw them back into act I in a way, to remind us of Dot’s need for connection, something Louis made and Act I George could not. The idea of trying to make connections permeates all Sondheim’s work and in particular looks forward to Assassins. “Connect! Connect! Connect!” (Everybody’s Got the Right to be Happy)

The music of Sunday is kind of a grab bag of 20th century techniques:

French Impressionism in No Life and Beautiful 

Aleatoric music in Chaos

Stravinsky in The One On The Left and in the 3 dissonant notes before the vamp begins in Sunday

Minimalism in Color and Light, Gossip Sequence, Putting it Together, and elsewhere

Electronic Music in the Chromolume 

Jazz in the Cocktail sections of Putting it Together

The notes of the first section underscoring the monologues are a 12 tone row, although Sondheim doesn’t develop them. After the initial statement he repeats on a synththem getting faster and faster.

The nerd in me wishes there were some significance for each of the 12 pitches to the 12 people exiting the stage, but there isn’t any clear correlation. 

The row repeats in measure 13. I made that loop as an audio cue, which is, I think, the only way to do it effectively. If you can play that 12 tone loop at speed getting faster and faster, you’re a better musician than I am. 

27. Chromolume #7 (Part I)

This part of the show disappoints some viewers, (see my earlier post) but I think it was shrewd of Sondheim and Lapine to make George’s art non-representational. It takes off the table the first act’s questions about seeing and being seen, whether the artist should have license to edit the world. This leaves the field open to be able to talk about the complicated world of selling the art you make. 

I was so carefully looking for patterns in our production, I suddenly became convinced that Naomi Eisen was somehow an anagram. Some grad students were concerned for my mental health… (thanks, Sloan and Alison!)

I started by playing this on my keyboard with a pad, but I found the drop with the pitch wheel didn’t go down far enough to sell the instrument breaking down, so I built an audio cue with a lot of crackling nonsense sounds at the end in addition to the drop. I found this much more effective. 

28. Chromolume #7 (Part II)

I built this in an audio program using free synth plugins that imitated the analog synths used in Stranger Things. For the first 21 measures, You’ll see that the patterns essentially layer on each other. I made all the layers, each in their own tracks, and then I exported the stems so they were on the click together. The sound designer then pulled those stems into Qlab and set up the cues so each click would unmute a new stem. 

The process begins again at measure 22, but without cueing, so you can just time it out the way your production needs it. My sound designer wanted to manipulate the individual synth loops in the 3D soundscape, so I gave stems for that as well, which he sent to various speakers. It was a neat effect. 

All this was originally performed by pit players activating synth loops from backstage. Pre-recording a track  is much less stressful, I would imagine, and has the same effect. 

My production really wanted a button at the end as well, so I built a synthy conclusion. 

29. Putting it together (Parts 1-17)

For an extensive analysis of this number, please see How Sondheim Found His Sound by Steve Swayne. Sondheim had been chasing a number like this for a long time. Its antecedents can be traced in Yatata Yatata from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Allegro (for which a very young Sondheim had been a gopher) 

Most recently, Sondheim had written a very extended and somewhat similar party scene called The Blob in Merrily We Roll Along. But the previous attempts pale in comparison to this number, which accomplishes so much and is so satisfying. 

The material not associated with George echoes Jules and Yvonne’s No Life and the Celestes in the Gossip Sequence. The responses to the new art will always be perplexity masked by boredom. The marked difference between the gossips of Act I and these gossips are that none of the Act II gossips are concerned with anyone’s personal lives. Instead they argue in vague terms about the art itself. Alex has taken the place of Jules as a jealous artistic antagonist, and there is a running theme that art is inscrutable and that fashions change all the time. In that respect, the art world depicted here is quite different. 

Jules in Act I: 

“(getting angry) Always changing! Why keep changing?”

Later, George offers this counter to Jules:

“Why should I paint like you or anybody else? I am trying to get through to something new. Something that is my own.”

In Act II:

Greenberg:

“It’s not enough telling good from rotten 

when something new pops up every day. 

It’s only new though for now, but yesterday’s forgotten”

Redman: 

“And tomorrow is already passé”

Greenberg:

“There’s no surprise”

It’s a curious inversion of the dynamic of Act I. The Act I world at large was constantly being revised, but the art world resisted change. Here the art is constantly changing, but the outside world seems oddly familiar. Again we find ourselves discussing the ephemeral and the malleable. But Act II George is no longer lost in the wonder of the creation; he is too busy on the promotional end of the art. George’s entrance is heralded by the same fanfare as in act I, but he is not the same George. 

Mandy didn’t realize it until many years later, but George’s melodic contour in Putting it Together mirrors his melody in Finishing the Hat. This underscores the fundamental problem of Act II George: His energy isn’t in creation, but promotion, which is unsustainable. It’s hard not to conclude that this insight is related to Sondheim’s disillusion with commercial theater after the failure of Merrily. 

The inclusion of George’s multiple cutouts is a stroke of theatrical genius that is a parallel to Dot’s dress exit in act I, and just as central to the narrative. Dot’s stepping out of the dress allows us to see her as George is depicting her and also as she is in her own identity. George’s multiple versions of himself reveal that the locus of George’s creative energy isn’t the chromolume, but his public persona. He is the product, not the art. 

This is by far the most difficult number of the show. As I was rehearsing it, I wondered if I was, in fact, capable of playing it! Slowly, solutions became possible, and I actually developed quite a facility in executing the patterns. Don’t despair, but do plan to practice! 

The cocktail piano versions are in the same rather unimaginative lounge style we also find in Merrily We Roll Along, but don’t go too crazy embellishing or improving them, because they all sit under dialogue, and you don’t want to draw focus. 

The end of Part 4 had a break in the original production. (see video) You’ll have to decide how to manage it.

The original production did not tie into measures 4, 6, 8, and 10 in part 6. Instead, measures 3, 5, 7, and 9 were just 3 staccato chords each.

Part 7 is much faster than the metronome marking. The original production plays the underscore around 90 beats per minute for the dotted half, and even at that clip, they almost don’t make it by the end of the dialogue. You will also notice that the part is simplified. It might be wise to write in chord symbols and find your own simplification on the fly.

29K is a fingering conundrum. I don’t think it makes sense to go into too much detail because each hand will be different. I will say that however you divide the pattern between the hands, you’ll probably need to adjust it at some point.

In part 13 (29 N) The 5/4 bar originally went with a camera flash. I think trying to establish that extra beat is a waste of time, especially since nothing happens in the bar musically. Think of it as a lift, and tell the players to do the same. 

Measures 24 through 27 of 29 O were particularly awkward to play for me, although in looking at them, I can’t make out why. Measures 34-36 are hard for the singer to feel. Try and orient them to the Bass line as you rehearse it. I toyed with the idea of cutting a bar out, but the patterns are impossible to truncate; if you cut anything, the next passage doesn’t line up correctly.

The opening of 29P is hard to time against the dialogue. Learn to play it yourself, and cut the second keyboard (they don’t really add anything to the proceedings here) 

Measures 57 and 68 of 29P is another place where it isn’t worth it to try to get the 5/4 accurate. Think of them as a little lift.

From 71 on is the most difficult part of the show. Sondheim reserves these all-cast cacophonies for very particular moments: God That’s Good comes to mind, A Weekend in The Country from A Little Night Music or the Interrogation in Anyone Can Whistle. The cast recordings naturally have George’s vocal in the forefront, so most people have never really heard the other lines well. They are VERY fast and come in at difficult spots. Your right hand can go on autopilot, but your left has a very specific offbeat pattern that is difficult to execute. If you have the time, get a nice loud metronome (through a sound system?) and teach the parts at a fraction of the speed. Once you have the parts roughed in, increase the speed by a few beats a minute each time until you get near the indicated tempo (half=116) You really can’t cue this from the piano as you play. They just have to know it. In truth, the most critical part of the ensemble singing is the downbeat of measure 93A “That is the state of the art” Teach your singers how to listen for George’s line OR the bass. Hearing the half note in measure 90 and then the subsequent 3 bars can really help land that tutti entrance. In measure 92, Harriet’s part goes quite high. I think that 2 measure phrase should really be down the octave.

30. Children and Art

This is another number that is difficult to get excited about when you’re listening to the cast recording, and frankly in performance. According to the stage directions, three times in the piece the singer nearly falls asleep, and the lifts at the end of each measure are part of that sleepy disorientation. This means the vibe can be dangerously narcoleptic, a relief after the adrenaline of Putting it Together, but not exactly what you’re hoping for in the middle of a second act. 

But when we see it as a bookend with Beautiful, not necessarily thematically, but functionally, Children and Art really starts to pull a lot of weight. Marie is beginning second act George’s journey from disconnection to healing. In order to get there, George has to ground himself in the heritage of act I George. Marie has to introduce her to his grandmother, because the way back is the way forward. Marie is not the kind of character to sermonize, though. That happens later. This lyric is oblique to the main thrust of the narrative, and diffuse compared to the dizzying specificity of the lyrics we’ve just heard. 

I was bewildered by Sondheim’s frequent references to this as a Harold Arlen song. What could he mean by that? I think I finally cracked it while playing the run of the show. Arlen’s torch songs, like Come Rain or Come Shine, The Man That Got Away, or This Time The Dream’s on Me have a kind of slow burn repetition that suspends time in an odd way, that reminds one of slower songs in general, and this song in particular, as foreign as the style may be. 

The last chord seems to be hard to voice because of the dynamic levels in the ranges of the instruments as they are laid out. Play around with it at the sitzprobe until it sounds balanced.

31. After Children

The cue for this is “Connect George, connect.” It takes us into the final scene of the show, on the island as it is in 1984. 

32. Lesson #8

This was the last song added to the show. The original title was ‘primer’, which I like quite a lot. As the song stands now, we may lose a little of that connection. Dot was learning how to read, and now George needs to learn something too. 

Sondheim’s writing here is again somewhat oblique, but that seems only to increase its effectiveness. Patinkin evidently even prefers this moment to Finishing the Hat, a number I would imagine is much easier to act. George doesn’t have any epiphanies here, it’s a moment of despair. As Sondheim describes it: 

“He has no center. He has no vision. He’s not connecting. He’s feeling empty.”

The action accomplished here is the conjuring of Dot. 

Only the 2006 recording has measures 7-12 as rhythmically notated. It’s one of the easier numbers in the show to play, so you and the actor can really find the trajectory and the phrase rhythm of the piece. 

33. Move On

Sondheim told Criag Zadan:

“The way the score was constructed was based on the relationship of the two central characters. Theirs is a continuous and continuing love song that isn’t completed until the end of the show. In the song “Sunday in the Park with George”, Dot, in one section, begins a lyrical theme, which is her affection and her love for George. This is picked up later in “Color and Light,” and it develops and starts to reach a climax, and just at that point, they break off and they speak. Then in “We Do Not Belong Together” it’s picked up and further developed as if it’s almost where they left off, and ends with an unrhymed line where she sings, “I have to move on.” And when their love is finally consummated, which is the end of the second act, it all comes together and becomes a completed song in “Move On.” “Move On” is a combination of all the themes involving their relationship, including every harmony and every accompaniment; it’s where everything culminates. Only it’s over a period of four major scenes covering a hundred years. It’s one way of threading the theme through time.”

Ghosts are important in Sondheim. When they appear, the past breaks into the present to accuse or to encourage. Sunday, Assassins, Into The Woods, Passion, and Follies all include interactions between the living and the dead. This ghost is a spirit of reconciliation and mentorship. 

It does take some mental gymnastics to get where Dot takes us. Was George really giving Dot the gift of mindfulness? No matter, that’s the lesson she evidently took, which she tries to give back to Act II George. 

At the top of the number we hear as underscore the music from We Do Not Belong Together. This music originally underscored:

“You know exactly how I feel. 

Why do you insist you must hear the words

When you know I cannot give you words

Not the ones you need”

Act II George will once again be unable to give her words. The first thing he sings is:

I’ve nothing to say. 

Well, nothing that’s not been said.

Under this we have the music derived from the opening fanfare, but this time instead of being in a roiling D minor, it’s in a lush C# major. When Dot first says, “Move On”, it modulates DOWN to B major. For a song about moving on, it is surprisingly static harmonically. There is a B pedal for a full 28 measures before the texture thins and we move to the subdominant. The entire song moves deliberately to a particular tonality and stays there for a while; a minimalist trademark in an often minimalist score. 

The answer to George’s artistic stagnation is, as it turns out, his subjectivity. George needs to make a choice from his own perspective and go with it. 

“Anything you do, 

Let it come from you

Then it will be new”

The truth of the expression lies in the subjective experience of the artist as they move and change with the world that also moves and changes. 

Laura Hanson points out that “It is only through women, first Marie, then Dot, that George is able to trace his lineage and find the nurturing link with his artistic heritage.” 

The passage from 111 through 131 Sondheim thinks of as sounding like Rachmaninov. It lands spectacularly in another extended B major passage. 

I believe the cue at the top of the number should be “What did I give you?” The timing for the singers can be tricky. I could be wrong, but I believe the 3/2 bar (measure 24) is not in the original broadway cast or the 2016 cast, but it is in the 2006 recording. 

Ask your 2nd violin to play down the octave at 27, and later at 131. it’ll sound fuller, and I think it will be easier to tune for the first. 

At 103, have your singers learn this exactly in tempo and when it’s really solid, loosen up the phrasing. There is a bootleg of Mandy in his last performance utterly breaking down in this section which is very endearing. 

Two of the three reed books have what a number of pro players have told me are essentially unplayable passages. I am not a woodwind player, so my knowledge of the clarinet break is limited to orchestration textbooks, which all have some variation of this: “The clarinet break is something you should know about, but it doesn’t really matter because an excellent player can make it seem like nothing.” Well, in this case we have a number of passages that continually go over the break in a way that at the very least doesn’t pay off in sound what it demands in difficulty. I rewrote two of the three books and came up with something that worked for me. It isn’t ideal, but it’s better than the players fumbling these passages. You’ll find it here and here.

34. Act II Finale

This second iteration of Sunday is shorter, but no less impactful. George’s mother has entered, mistaking Act II George for Act I George. 

George’s opening words are repeated: Order, Design, Tension, Composition, Balance, Light, Harmony (The word tension is not in the opening, the list of words has altered each time it has appeared) They act as another incantation, summoning the rest of the painting. 

The inhabitants of the original painting bow to George, who we now realize is a sort of ‘eternal George’. 

Sunday concludes with a striking admonition to keep exploring new things from a subjective point of view and then immediately reminding us of the connection we share with the people who have come before us. The encouragement to be true to your own vision feels progressive, but the connection with the heritage of the past feels profoundly conservative. This tension is, I believe, one of the secrets to Sondheim’s success as a writer. The striking novelty and conceptual daring of his work is grounded in basic principles conveyed to Sondheim by his mentors. He encourages us to be a part of that too. 

The video of the original production has the ending as it appears in both the old vocal score and the new one. The original Cast recording, the 2006 recording, and the 2017 version have a slightly different opening here, which is essentially the first three measures of the show transposed down a minor 6th.

Depending on your production’s tech needs, you may have a lot of things that need to fly in to make this number work, which is going to determine potentially how slowly you will need to play this. The notes from the first act finale all apply here, except for the slight changes for this now shorter version. Because George is speaking during most of this, the Soldier takes his vocal part. You may find you need to augment that line with some of your stronger singers to get the balance working correctly. 

35. Bows

This is a neat bows. Oddly, there is no part in the bows or the exit music for the bass. I wrote one I’m including here. There is an anecdote in Lapine’s book that Michael Starobin asked the sound op to turn up the band for the bows, but they were already using the stage mics to make the applause sound louder when the show was struggling to find an audience. 

36. Exit Music

Here is the bass part I wrote for the Exit Music. The orchestration does not have one either. You will find the Sunday music a lot less powerful without the chorus. Violin 2 has a suspended Cymbal roll at the end that you might have to deal with. The horn once again has a high concert G right at the end. Say a prayer for them. 

Piano things to woodshed before you start:

Playing and conducting 9-16 of the opening Prelude

Measures 34 and 35 of 3. Sunday in the Park With George

The end of 8A Color and Light Part II, particularly the timing of very last note.

10 Gossip sequence polyrhythms

12F The Day Off Part VII changing right hand patterns

18 We Do Not Belong Together coordination of left and right hands after measure 80

29J

29K Experiment with the distribution of notes between the hands before you settle on a fingering.

29N

29O From measure 28 on, you may find you can move your right hand thumb and play the other two notes of the pattern with fingers 2 and 3

29P measure 28 to the end.  (block out a lot of time for this one)

33 Move On 13- End Coordination of right and left hands

Pit Orchestra Considerations

This orchestration was Michael Starobin’s first Broadway show. He had already orchestrated a few other things, including March of the Falsettos, but this score has the ambition of someone who doesn’t know what can’t be done. When it succeeds, which it does most of the time, it’s one of the most gorgeous scores in Broadway history. But there are many things about the score that make it a real challenge to play well. You will need to hire the best players you can afford in your market. 

Horn Part

This horn part is for thrill seekers only. At both ends of the show is one of the highest notes you can play on the horn, totally exposed, and virtually unprepared. I hired the horn player first. I have heard of productions moving the high horn parts to a flugelhorn.. When you hire your player, send them this picture and say, can you do this reliably every night? 

We encountered an interesting problem that you might consider as you plan your pit configuration. I initially seated the horn player in the center of the pit, right in front of me. One of my reed players, seated in the corner of the pit, had some difficulty hearing the other reeds, so I swapped the two of them, placing the horn in the far end of the pit. This worked out great for the reeds, but the horn player was no longer in the center of the action. He had trouble hearing the pulse, particularly at the top of the show where the texture is flowy and indistinct. In trying to hear what was playing, he had to lower his volume, because he was drowning out the rest of the group. But playing quietly at the top of the range makes an already quite difficult passage nearly impossible. The solution we arrived at was to make a special headphone monitor mix just for the horn. However you work out those details, hire the best horn player you can, and make sure they are set up to play as confidently as possible. 

Reeds

This was originally a 2 reed book, and they’ve fortunately split the book to three reeds, which is good. When they updated this orchestration, though, they did not fix the biggest problems in the books, which are the awkward passages for clarinet. There are also a few chords where the dynamic ranges of the instruments go somewhat against the proper balancing of the chords. 

Percussion

There is a little bit of set work in the show, but this book is really here to add color and detail to the rest of the score. You should pick a player who likes to find all the right sounds; this isn’t a book where you sub out the sounds for other things. A ship’s bell needs to sound like a ship’s bell, otherwise it doesn’t make any sense. The mallet stuff is also very specific and color oriented. We used a Malletkat, but it wasn’t ideal.

Keyboard 2

The Keyboard 2 book is helpful in terms of taking some of the heavy lift off the first keyboard, but it isn’t as helpful as you might want it to be in, say, Putting it Together. Handing off the crazy passagework is almost more difficult than playing straight through, especially if you’ve figured out how to do it in rehearsal. There is a recurring ensemble patch which seems to be just a pad that sits behind the first keyboard part, and which makes more sense to just incorporate into the Keys 1 book as a layer. Keys 2 originally had the bass part in it, so if you’ve hired a bass player, you will have to clean out those lines; they aren’t necessary and the bass does a much better job of covering the ideas. 

Harp

Boy is this harp part helpful, and fairly well written for the harp, as these things go. When the harp is prominent, there is absolutely no substitute. Beautiful is somewhat difficult at speed (which I’ve gone into above) 

Strings

The string parts are a fine challenge for pro players. There are some awkward parts your players will want to tweak, but unless you’re a string player, I would leave it up to them to solve the problems.

If you decide to actually have the string players play percussion at the end of act I, you will want to organize the pit to make that possible. 

The Bass book was not in the original, so you’ll be tempted to drop it, but it is really quite helpful where it establishes the groove, and the synth bass in keyboard 2 is really not a good substitute. There are some notable errors in the books which I’ve explained above, and there is no bass part for the bows or the exit music, which is bewildering. Did someone have a train to catch?

Have a wonderful production!

Sunday in the Park with George: A Rough Guide for the M.D. Part I

Villanova University’s 2023 production of Sunday, directed by Dr. Valerie Joyce

I’ve decided to break up my exploration of this musical into two parts. This first part is a deep dive into Sondheim’s place in music history and this piece in Sondheim’s output. This first part will appeal perhaps to the folks who read my blog for big ideas I may have stumbled into. The second part will be devoted to more practical matters: the actual nuts and bolts of putting the show on.

A personal story

During the fall of 1992 I went on a 4 hour bus ride to the Curran Theatre in San Francisco with my High School choir to see Les Miz. (I feel confident that Robert Westenberg was playing Javert, but I can’t find any record of that online, so I may have hallucinated it) I was aware of Into the Woods at the time, and would play Rapunzel’s Prince the following Summer, but I was just beginning my exploration of Sondheim. Not far from the Curran Theatre at that time there was a little record store, and in that store I found the original Broadway cast recording of Sunday on CD. I grew up in Redding California, and there was a little music store in the mall where we lived, but they didn’t have a great selection of recordings outside the top 40, so I needed to take whatever opportunities I could to get my hands on new music. My friends were at the time very excited about Les Miz, but I didn’t share their enthusiasm, partly because I had recently gotten into opera, and Les Miz seemed by comparison weak sauce to me. The other reason was that I was a snob, and I didn’t want to enjoy anything that was popular. Sondheim was different, somehow; none of my friends were into his music or even knew who he was. 

I listened to the score in the bus on the way home on my portable CD player and was instantly very taken with it. It was like nothing I had ever heard before. I brought the CD to my french horn teacher, who was the conductor of the local community orchestra I played in. He was one of my lifelines to the world of high culture. I was curious to hear his thoughts. The next week when he returned it to me he said that he liked what Sondheim had done with minimalism; Minimalism was another thing I had never heard of. 

In retrospect, the musical was both helpful and harmful to me as a young person. I loved high art, I loved the craft of music and musicals, and although I was a popular kid who led something of a charmed life, I didn’t have a lot of close friends, and none of my friends shared my obsessive enthusiasm for opera and musical theatre. I couldn’t readily access lyric theatre or even much classical music where I lived. Sunday in the Park was about someone with an obsession to create who, like me, was alienated from the people around him, and the musical urged him (and by extension me) to keep at it, to find something new. I recognized myself in George, and he made it okay for me to feel like an oddball. I felt in George a kindred spirit. The musical validated the identity I was staking out for myself. 

The musical also did a great deal of damage, which I only came to realize later. George’s disregard for the feelings of the people who love him is posited as an unfortunate necessity for the creation of his art. Like a lot of people, I was particularly moved by George’s line:

“And when the woman that you wanted goes

You can say to yourself, ‘Well, I give what I give’

But the woman who won’t wait for you knows 

That however you live, there’s a part of you 

Always standing by

Mapping out the sky

Finishing the hat.” 

It’s that “Well, I give what I give”, that’s the rub. Once you’ve decided that your pursuit of your art allows you to disregard other people, you’ve given yourself license to behave rather badly. Like most young people, I made some choices I sure wish I could go back and change, choices I justified by my sense of artistic alienation. So when I was finally able to music direct Sunday at Villanova this year, it was a bittersweet experience. Sondheim is always rewarding to work on, but my time working on Sunday was also a season when I needed to come to terms with the ways I had internalized a negative message. It was in many ways painful to face those truths about myself. 

And yet George’s story isn’t the only one to listen to. Others have taken courage from Dot’s story, particularly where she movingly says:

“You could tell me not to go. Say it to me. Tell me not to go.”

And then,

“You are complete, George

You all your own

We do not belong together.

No one is you George, there we agree

But others will do, George.

No one is you, and no one can be, 

But no one is me, George, no one is me.”

The magnetism of George’s artistic energy is thrilling and alluring, but you can’t build a lasting relationship with someone like that. Moreover, you can’t find the best version of yourself with a partner who doesn’t value you on your own terms for who you are as a complete self. Dot ultimately discovers her value as a person and follows that value across an ocean.

One of the great joys of working on a Sondheim musical is that there are many depths to plumb. The story is about complicated people, and there is more than one moral to discern. I discovered a different moral while working on the show. As much as George is working alone and alienating people around him, and as lonely as we find Act II George in pursuing his craft, the Georges don’t actually live in isolation. Success is found in connection with those living and dead. Our task as artists is to have the courage to push through to something new, hopefully without sacrificing those we love on the altars of our craft. Our task as people living around artists is to leave them room to create, and to respect ourselves enough to know when to find our own paths without them. 

Groundbreaking, and not to everyone’s taste

Sunday in the Park with George seems to catalyze people’s polarized opinions about Sondheim and his work. A number of my friends strongly dislike Sondheim, and Sunday seems to activate many of their most heated negative opinions of his work. Conversely, people who love Sondheim find Sunday the essence of everything they enjoy about him. 

These strong reactions are to be expected for a figure like Sondheim because he broke from the strongly established musical and dramatic language the general public had come to enjoy, striking out in a new direction that had far fewer reference points for a general audience. Gluck, Beethoven, and Wagner elicited similarly strong positive and negative responses, because what they were doing seemed to many a rejection of the things they most valued. The subsection of the audience that disliked the new direction found the new ideas these writers presented pointless, boring, or perverse. 

My friends who dislike Sondheim are not just bewildered by my enthusiasm, they seem angry at me about it. It reminds me of my experience as a child, when everyone was looking at Autostereogram or ‘Magic Eye’ pictures. They were marveling at the 3D images they were seeing. I couldn’t seem to make it work, and their excitement annoyed me. It seemed to me they must be making it all up. If you’re reading this, I suppose you are likely one of the folks who can see the ‘Magic Eye’ picture in Sunday, at least to some extent. If you can’t see it, nothing I say here is going to change your mind, and that’s really quite fine. Plenty of wonderful things bewilder me. I no longer need all my friends to agree with me about such matters.

Lapine’s recent book, some incredible podcasts, and even TikToks are beginning to peel the layers of this endlessly fascinating musical, so I don’t feel the need to say everything that might be said. I’ll limit my thoughts to four areas:

1. Sondheim’s relationship to the ‘Golden Age’ Musical, Serialism, and Minimalism
2. The way Sondheim trained his audience to understand his storytelling language
3. How that distinctive language has been diluted into a much less interesting lingua franca for contemporary musical theatre
4. Does Act II work?

In part II, as I’m discussing the many practical difficulties in the show, I’ll be discussing some brilliant and idiosyncratic aspects of Sondheim’s craft, so you’ll want to check that out even if you don’t have any intention of being the music director.

In this exploration, I hope to humanize Sondheim somewhat: to place him in his time, among us as fellow artists and as his audience. As long as he remains a god, we can’t see our own part in his story or his part in ours.

But He Combines All These Different Trends: Sondheim, the ‘Golden Age’ Musical, Serialism, and Minimalism

From the outside, Sondheim appears to have emerged with a singular perspective alone in his generation. Trailblazers are like that. But the reality is of course far more complex, rooted in some heated cultural arguments from the mid 20th century, when Sondheim was formed as a writer. If we place Sondheim properly in that world, we can see that he is part of an interconnected web of ideas, not a lone wolf. This doesn’t diminish his achievement. We see the questions he was driven to ask, and we can ground his answers to those questions in the world of his contemporaries. George isn’t really alone, and neither is Stephen. 

Sondheim had two mentors, Oscar Hammerstein II and Milton Babbitt. I have a feeling most folks know about Hammerstein, but Babbitt is much less well known to theatre people. It would be impossible to find two more disparate influences. They stand on opposite sides of a deep divide in 20th century culture. 

Milton Babbitt (1916-2011)

Babbitt was one of the most important composers and thinkers of the Serialist (twelve tone) school of composition. He is particularly famous for an article included in every anthology of 20th century music writing: Who Cares if You Listen? It would take much too long to really explore what this often cited and much misunderstood article was about in a page like this. But Babbitt became a very public example of a composer advocating for music the public was never intended to understand. If this sounds very like George’s ‘I do not paint for your approval’, you’re catching the drift. 

My ethics as a professor compel me to add that Sondheim studied showtunes with Babbitt, not Schoenberg, that Babbitt loved musicals and was writing one when he and Sondheim worked together. Babbitt was not the pointy-headed, audience hating academic people have portrayed him to be. He did, however, represent the high-modernist aesthetic at its height. His was music of rigorous mathematical construction, explicitly rejecting the populism of the general public’s fickle tastes.

Oscar Hammerstein II (1895-1960)

Hammerstein was Babbitt’s polar opposite. Hammerstein was doggedly interested in communication, and he was so good at it, he built an entertainment empire and inaugurated the so-called ‘golden age’ of Broadway. Hammerstein experimented and took risks. When the risks paid off, (Oklahoma, Carousel) he risked even more. When the risks failed (Allegro), he would turn back toward what he knew would connect with the audience. (South Pacific) Sondheim saw the failure of Allegro firsthand as a 17 year old gofer. It was a seminal experience in the development of his concept of what a writer does. 

Mentored by these two giants, Sondheim fused their approaches in a kind of perfect Hegelian synthesis. Sondheim’s work as a composer is marked by motivic interrelationships and calculated development of small musical ideas. This is the Babbitt legacy. His work as a writer is about clarity and communication. This is Hammerstein’s legacy. 

To reconcile the opposites, Sondheim needed to temper Babbitt’s purely musical logic. As an example: In the initial planning stages for Sunday, Sondheim was struck with the idea of the elegance of Seurat’s palette:

“I thought: Isn’t this interesting that Seurat had, on his palette, eleven colors and white. And I thought, eleven and one make twelve. And how many notes are there in the scale? Twelve. And I thought, isn’t that interesting? So I thought I would utilize that in some way, shape, or form.”

There is a twelve tone row in Sunday, but it isn’t structurally important, because Sondheim decided the idea was unworkable. 

You have to think like Babbitt to come up with that idea. And you have to think like Hammerstein to reject it. 

When we situate Sondheim’s output in the context of that mathematician/storyteller dichotomy, we can begin to understand him as someone very like other creators of his generation. His descriptions of himself begin to make more sense in this context as well. Without this context, it’s difficult to make sense of quotes like these:

“In philosophy of art, generally, I’m a conservative. My beliefs are conservative, but my work is not.”

Why would Sondheim take such care to identify himself as a traditionalist? Can anyone hear Sunday in the Park as a conservative work? What might he mean when he distinguishes his beliefs from his work?

The key lies in the divide I’ve been describing. When Sondheim talks about being a conservative composer, he isn’t speaking with reference to other American musical theatre composers. He is positioning himself in the world of tonality as opposed to the school of serialism as classical composers do. 

It’s important to keep that dynamic in mind when reading any of Sondheim’s remarks about Babbitt. 

“I haven’t studied atonal music. When I studied with Milton Babbitt I asked him if I could study atonality, and he said, ‘you haven’t exhausted tonal resources for yourself yet, so I’m not going to teach you atonal.’ And he was absolutely right; I’m still in tonal… Oh, I listen [to atonal music] but I’m not particularly fond of atonal music. I’m really very tonally oriented. I’m very old fashioned- I’m about 1890. I’m still early Ravel- that’s my idea of terrific. I know something about these things but I rarely use them.” 

-Sondheim interviewed by Mark Eden Horowitz

In an interview with Tim Paige, Sondheim claims no association with the sound of Babbitt: 

“I hear a little of Oscar [Hammerstein], not a lot, and I hear nothing of Milton.” 

Despite his careful efforts to distance himself from the work of his famously thorny teacher, Sondheim’s music reveals a composer more indebted to Babbitt’s approaches and methodologies than he is admitting. Sondheim’s innovations in Sunday are out of step with every other Broadway composer of his time, but are very much of a piece with the work of his generation of classical composers. Sondheim, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, La Monte Young, and Terry Riley were all born between 1930 and 1937. These composers began their musical training in the high modernist tradition, but they found themselves working just as Sondheim was to find intellectually stimulating methods that were nonetheless accessible to the general public.

When my French Horn teacher returned my CD of Sunday all those years ago, he said, “I like what he’s done with minimalism.” That’s almost right. Sondheim wasn’t using the ideas of minimalism to depict pointillism. Sondheim is a minimalist composer, maybe the most successful one of them all. 

Minimalist composers still enjoyed the creative task of organizing pitches in mathematical ways. But they wanted the audience to be able to enjoy the game. The movement which would come to be known as Minimalism was not a total rejection of the values of serialism. This music is still carefully structured around processes. Composers didn’t simply write whatever struck their fancy. They treated collections of notes as artifacts to be manipulated, run against each other in interesting ways, repeating, expanding, phasing, contracting, modulating, altering and expanding groups of notes in ways that were interesting to think about and intellectually rigorous. What distinguished these young innovators and made this new music so exciting in the classical sphere was the fact that these composers re-embraced tonality. (which you might think of as being in a key) They further made sure the processes they were employing could be clearly heard, even without any prior explanation. 

In 1968 Steve Reich wrote about what he found interesting in musical processes:

“I am interested in perceptible processes. I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music… In serial music, the series itself is seldom audible…What I’m interested in is a compositional process and a sounding music that are one and the same thing… The use of hidden structural devices in music never appealed to me. Even when the cards are on the table and everyone hears what is gradually happening in a musical process, there are still enough mysteries to satisfy all.”

Minimalist composers made a point of exploring repetitive Southeast Asian and African musical practices. (When Steve Reich first met Sondheim, he expressed an admiration for Pacific Overtures) The Minimalists also drew inspiration from the repetition at the center of the popular music they were listening to. It was easy for naysayers to ridicule the ever repeating patterns of Philip Glass’s music, but minimalism’s intellectual underpinnings were broad based and anything but simplistic. The music had many points of reference that made it intelligible to an ever larger audience. Repetition was something a 20th century audience implicitly understood from decades of acclamation in popular music, and as Robert Fink has demonstrated in his wonderful book Repeating Ourselves: American Minimalism as Cultural Practice, the repetitions of Minimalism reflected the repeating patterns of 20th century life. We hear in this music the rhythm of the advertising industry and the repeating multiplicity of branding that so intrigued Warhol and the other pop artists who were working at the same time. 

To an older generation of classical music enthusiasts, Minimalist music was mindless or worse, nihilist. Reich’s Four Organs famously drove a Boston audience to a fury of boos, which started when the audience began to realize the repetition would continue indefinitely.

But the minimalists had the last laugh.

In time the musical language of Minimalism made such a cultural impact that today film scores, advertisements, and popular music are suffused with minimalist gestures. The normalization of this musical language is one of the great success stories in Western Art music, and this popularity has obscured Minimalism’s experimental and process based roots. The shadow of Serialism looms large in the fractal patterns of Glass, Reich, and their many imitators. Without serialism’s insight that music could be organized in patterns and processes, the music would never have developed the way it did. 

Lara E. Housez has a remarkable exploration of some of the ideas I’m talking about in the fascinating new book Sondheim in Our Time and His. Housez names both the serialist influence in Sunday and the minimalist techniques very well, but stops short of naming Sondheim a minimalist as I have here. You should read her chapter if you find this connection interesting. 

Like the other minimalists, Sondheim uses process transformation of melodic ideas as the basis of his later work. Influenced particularly by the music of Steve Reich, Sondheim developed his stylistic language to answer the Musical Theatre crisis of the late 1970s in a way that hadn’t yet occurred to anyone. The way he used repeating structures was driven by the drama, but some of his musical ideas are are very similar to common minimalist procedures.

The passage below comes from Gossip Sequence. The right hand is a pattern of 4, the left is a pattern of 3. The two parts phase against each other. You could think of this as a polyrhythm, but because the pattern sits in a single set of pitches, it sounds much more like Reich than Jazz.

Here’s the beginning of a celebrated piece by Reich: Piano Phase

Two pianists play the same little pattern over and over. They slowly go out of phase with one another until the pattern is displaced by one pitch in one of the players. Then the process continues. Each re-alignment reveals a new combination of pitches in the pattern.

Sondheim uses this method throughout Sunday, but here specifically, the repeating and obnoxious needling performs a dramatic function; like the Pick-a-little-talk-a-little ladies if they were all singing different patterns that contradicted each other.

The chords that begin the musical are repeating with variations in a very minimalist gesture.

Compare this newer masterpiece of minimalism, Promises by Floating Points and Pharaoh Sanders:

If you were to play the first page of Sunday repeatedly for 45 minutes, you’d have a credible minimalist concert work.

I can anticipate enthusiasts of minimalism taking issue with my assertion that Sondheim is a full-fledged minimalist on various grounds. After all, repetition is not necessarily minimalist, and Sondheim doesn’t park for long on any idea. But Sondheim’s increasingly motivic melodic transformations in the vocal lines themselves are driven by the same musical imperatives as the minimalists and are even explicitly minimalist in their expression. (a little more on that in the next post) What distinguishes Sondheim from the other minimalists is that the totalizing commitment to the process is always sublimated in his work to the needs of the drama.

As it happens, other minimalists were writing operas. Glass’s seminal third opera Akhnaten is also from 1984. But because Minimalists are generally so invested in playing out the possibilities of musical ideas on musical terms, these operas tend to have large, static, pulsating sections of text setting, and they don’t move dynamically and fluidly with stories in real time. They feel like pageants, a series of thrilling tableaus, or like a baroque opera, impressive and inert. Even in a season as light as 1976-1977, it would have required someone of extraordinary vision to see Glass’s Einstein on the Beach in one of its two New York performances and predicted it as a way forward for the Broadway musical. Sondheim is too canny to publicly dismiss minimalist opera, but he did write in Look, I Made a Hat:

“When I first heard that the libretto of Philip Glass’s 1979 opera Satyagraha was written in Sanskrit (by him and Constance de Jong) I giggled inwardly at what I deemed its pretentiousness, and delightedly reverting to my snotty adolescence, made many a witty remark at its expense. Then I saw it. Not only was I mesmerized for most of it, I was brought up short by the realization that Sanskrit was the best possible language for an opera libretto. It has the two necessary qualities: it utilizes predominantly open vowel sounds (listen to the title) and it doesn’t invite you to try to understand the language, which is something you automatically do at the opera if you know a smattering of German or Italian or French.”

For a lyricist of Sondheim’s caliber, complimenting a libretto for not inviting comprehension gives a sense of what an audience might value in minimalist opera: Spectacle, not narrative. This was not Sondheim’s way. 

Sondheim occasionally joked about stealing ideas from Reich, as in 2012, in recorded remarks for an award ceremony honoring Reich:

“Steve’s experiments with phase music and the musical use of spoken fragments have alone opened the ears of many younger composers as well as some elderly ones like myself.  In fact, stealing ideas from him is one of the more satisfying pleasures that I’ve had.  I only wish the opportunity arose more often, but, unfortunately, it’s not always appropriate.”

But it should also be noted that repeating and transforming patterns appear in Sondheim’s work as early as 1965’s Anyone Can Whistle, when Reich was just beginning his tape experiments in near anonymity, and that repeating patterns became the organizing principle of large sections of Company and Follies in 1970 and 1971. This is an important point to make, because Sondheim is not exactly copying the minimalist style, as some have described it.  He arrived at similar ideas independently and in tandem, working out of the same cultural influences as the composers of art music. To understand him correctly, Sondheim needs to be seen as a minimalist composer himself, not a copycat who pulled minimalist ideas opportunistically into the world of Musical Theatre.  

In an interview in 2015, Sondheim claims the first piece he heard of Steve Reich’s was 1979’s Eight Lines, and he “Immediately went to Jerry Robbins and said, ‘you gotta make a ballet out of this’, and he did.” The very minimalist score of Pacific Overtures predates this familiarity with Reich’s music by a full 3 years. 

In a July 1985 WNYC interview, Sondheim says: 

“It’s not so much that minimalist music influenced me as [that] I got into it, I’ve been an admirer of Steve Reich in particular, and Glass over a period of years, and I found that I realized that as I was trying to musicalize I realized the kind of so-called pointillist painting application of many many tiny strokes of color was not unlike the application of tone clusters, that is to say he would  pure tones of color next to each other in order to make another tone, and that’s often so to speak as a matter of fact”

Sunday is therefore both a continuation of Sondheim’s general development as a minimalist himself, and also a specifically Reichian musical language Sondheim sensed would be a good analog to the ideas of the work at hand. 

Gathering Supporters and Adherents: The Way Sondheim Trained his Audience

Another drawback to thinking of the artist as an isolated hero is that it neglects the importance of the audience the artist is addressing. The traditional narrative of the trailblazing creator focuses naturally on the progression toward the work we have come to recognize as significant. We want to get a sense of how these breakthroughs came to be, and how the writer thought up their greatest ideas. We consequently lose the sense of the artist slowly bringing themselves and the audience along from work to work, acclimating the audience to the means of expression and setting the terms for what they might expect. A writer with a body of work is in a kind of negotiation with an audience. When a writer with a particularly long career writes a work that represents a new mastery or synthesis of ideas, that not only means that the author has had enough chances to write a piece that they have a deep well of technical skills. It also means that the audience has had enough experiences with the intervening steps toward the capstone work that they can process what the author was trying to say. Without many such points of intersection between the writer and the audience, this dynamic can’t take place. 

For example:

To tell the full story of Show Boat is to acknowledge that the audience for the Princess Musicals had learned from Kern’s body of work how to hear the kind of musical storytelling he had in mind; to expect fewer musical trifles and more content, to expect the music to help tell the story. 

To tell the full story of Oklahoma is to correctly place the audience’s understanding of what a musical might be in the story of its innovation and success. That audience had partially learned from Hammerstein himself how to hear what he was trying to do. 

If Sondheim had written Forum and somehow figured out a way to write Into The Woods without writing, recording, and releasing any of the intermediate shows, the audience wouldn’t have understood the language of the musical enough to enjoy it as they did. 

It was fortunate for Sondheim’s career trajectory that he had moderate successes and daring failures in almost equal measure from the beginning, and that all his shows (even the flops) were recorded and publicly released. In this sense Sondheim’s body of work is one of the first to benefit from the readily available distribution of recordings. A subsection of the audience was able to listen again and again to the scores and in doing so develop an understanding of his language. 

Gottfried Van Swieten (1733-1803)

In the 1780s and 1790s, Gottfried Van Swieten, an Austrian diplomat and imperial librarian, privately introduced Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven to the music of Bach and Handel. Each of these composers were deeply impacted by this music, known at that time only to a tiny group of connoisseurs.

Sara Levy (1761-1854)

Not long thereafter, a Prussian Jewish woman and amateur musician named Sara Levy also collected this music and shared it with her friends. Her library would eventually make possible the Bach revival led most famously by her great nephew Felix Mendelssohn. Composers who were exposed to this music began incorporating more complicated polyphony and dramatic baroque gestures into their own compositions. Listeners in turn began to appreciate this density and excitement, and to be aware of the Baroque antecedents. This is a case of a very small but well placed audience slowly disseminating a complicated and partially forgotten musical language until eventually the circle of appreciation led to the middle class and the general public. The process took more than half a century. 

Wide distribution and consumption of cast recordings accelerated a process like this tremendously. Now anyone with a turntable could memorize shows that didn’t run the length of a week, and one didn’t need to live in New York or afford tickets to be aware of the latest developments in the field. 

The cast recording of Oklahoma! In 1943 was the first ‘Original Cast Recording’ and sold over a million copies. This proved the potential profitability of recording every Broadway show that had any public appeal. By 1960, the Original Cast Recording of Camelot was so successful as an album that it significantly boosted the fortunes of the troubled stage show it documented. By 1969, composers like Andrew Lloyd Webber realized that they could exploit that dynamic deliberately, writing the shows to work as albums first, then figuring out how to stage them after they were already popular. In less than 30 years, the tail of recording was wagging the dog of the production itself. 

The economics of the theatre was still very challenging for a composer like Sondheim, who wasn’t courting a broad audience like Lloyd Webber. A new show still had to convince enough New Yorkers and tourists to buy tickets and pay off the investors. But that was becoming a separate issue from the development of one’s individual voice, which could be established and disseminated to people who never even attended any of the musicals. I grew up in rural Northern California. The first show I ever attended on Broadway was Sondheim’s Passion, in late 1994, but at 19, I had already purchased and memorized Sondheim’s entire recorded catalog.  

A number like Changing from Act I of Sunday is incomprehensible in the language of a ’50s musical. But if one has heard Too Many Mornings from Follies, Another Hundred People from Company, Every Day a Little Death, and Liaisons from Night Music, and Kiss Me from Sweeney Todd, one not only knows how to hear what the piece is about, one expects such a number from Sondheim. 

This is also a major factor in the careers of Minimalist composers. Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and John Adams released their music on Nonesuch Records, a prestige label known for releasing beautiful recordings of exciting new work, stylishly packaged to look terrific on your coffee table. It wasn’t necessary to have one’s work programmed by a major orchestra to get musical innovations into the ears of the public. The minimalists built an audience that had to be reckoned with, irrespective of their popularity (or lack thereof) in traditional venues. 

This relationship of composer to audience via the medium of recordings is self-selective, which is another of the reasons why Sondheim’s music speaks so well to some people and so little to others. Those in the know chose to be in the know and put in a great deal of time to learn the language.

Now they’re just becoming more and more about less and less: Contemporary musical theatre and the dilution of Sondheim’s Language

Even as early as the mid-1990s, Sondheim’s musical language was so well known among musical theatre fans that it was becoming a major part of the vocabulary of most young writers. In 1995, when the style had begun to permeate the new shows, Amanda McBroom wrote a song entitled ‘Everybody wants to be Sondheim’ Part of the lyric reads:

Listen as they hammer out one chord.
Listen ’til you’re ready for a lunatic ward.
No wonder Sweeney Todd went out of his gourd,

And later:

And yet the epidemic can’t be curbed.
Even Stephen would be disturbed
To see what he has spawned universally.
‘Cause everybody wants to be Sondheim.
Everybody wants to finish the hat.
Everybody wants to be Sondheim but…yours truly.

Everybody wants to assault your ear.
Don’t send in the clones – they’re already here.
Everybody wants to be Sondheim,
Primed every time to rhyme internally,

Everyone’s coming up Sondheim but me.

Today composers use insistent chords in the right hand with jagged offbeats in the left hand; it is as ubiquitous as the Alberti bass in the 1780s. Slowly pulsating quarter notes like the closing number of each act of Sunday are the underscore of most musical theatre ballads. The style is fairly easy to combine with the repetitive accompaniments of pop ballads, (which are also the musical cousins and grandchildren of minimalism). The triumph of his musical language, now drastically simplified and stripped of its rigorous motivic construction, reduced to a set of clichés, has put him in an odd position. His musical style is now in many ways in the position the ‘Golden Age’ stood when Sondheim was first remaking his style.

By the 1970s, the musical language of Broadway had developed an insular vocabulary. It sounded like itself, and only rarely did a song escape a show to be covered by a popular artist. One immediately knew from the style of the writing and the kind of singing that one was listening to a showtune. The bracing rock language of Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar came as a welcome relief, even if at times the new sounds weren’t yet up to the task of telling the story. We feel that excitement in our day when a Hamilton or a Six offers us a glimpse of a stylistic diversity Broadway no longer has. Repurposing songs from outside theatre is not the answer to the artistic cul-de-sac either, as we’ve learned after decades of jukebox fare.

This is where we are now. In the diluted Sondheim language, sarcastic introspection and biolerplate piano accompaniment somehow lose their exploratory quality. It’s white noise, something to be pushed back against if we are to find a new way of making musical theatre, just as Sondheim himself did.

I Hate These People: Does Act II work?

In Kyle Marshall’s excellent podcast, he has been asking guests this season if Act II of Sunday is necessary. Most of his guests are saying it is. But from the very beginning, many have said that Act II doesn’t work. I never felt that way, probably because the encouragement I got from the show is virtually all at the end of Act II. It remains my favorite part of the show. 

From moment to moment, number for number, it would be tough to top the second act. It’s Hot Up Here is utterly delightful. Putting it Together is a tour-de-force; one of the most difficult and impressive bravura numbers in Musical Theatre. After a brief scene, there is a slow number that I will admit is not a highlight of the show. But then Lesson #8, Move On, and a reprise of Sunday, three numbers that often bring audiences to tears. So what’s the problem?

I identify a number of factors that make the act hit-or-miss for folks, and I believe all of them are simply unavoidable given the kind of piece Sondheim and Lapine were attempting to write. 

It is a principle of musical theatre writing that in the first 15 minutes of the show, the writers tell the audience what they might expect, who to root for, and what’s the main point of the show. If you drastically change the tone or style of the show or introduce major characters past that first portion, the audience feels cheated somehow. At the top of Act II, we briefly see the characters we know, and then they go away, replaced by an entirely new group of people who are exhausting and present brand new problems. The mental energy it takes to process this shift makes some audience members lose patience with the piece. After all, the first act of Sunday requires a very active mind of the audience, especially if one is seeing the piece for the first time. The top of Act II is just a bridge too far for some viewers. 

If your strongest connection with the piece is to Dot, not George, the second act is a real let-down. The empowerment Dot experiences at the end of Act I is reversed. Dot comes back to assure George that what he did was all for the best, as long as he made his art his own way. 

A third issue people identify is the Chromolume. The Chromolume isn’t meant to be particularly good work. Second act George is stalled out, and we need to see that. The tech for the first act of Sunday can be very complicated, leaving fewer time and resources to solve the chromolume’s technical issues. And these days the creative team also has to access ideas believable as artifacts from the 1980s. The audience has to make sense of this immediately upon meeting George in Act II. The scene where the machine breaks down is very funny, but it’s difficult to piece out how much of what is being portrayed is George’s stalled out art and how much is the decisions made by the production. To process all that while experiencing the show for the first time is a daunting task. 

Each of these issues stems from something intrinsic to the message of the show, and in fact, intrinsic to Sondheim’s understanding of himself in his world. 

The parallel construction of the two acts (more on that in the next post) tells us over and over again that as much as the world seems different now, these people are locked into the same patterns and playing essentially the same roles as people have always played. Second act George is a different person, but is essentially the eternal George, to the point where first act George’s mother recognizes him as her son. (After initially ignoring her actual son in the first act) When Dot concludes the show, “they are your words, George”, she is asking George to claim his legacy as the ur-artist. The history George discovers at the end of the show is meant for him to participate in and embody, not to imitate. This is how Sondheim himself saw his world. His artistic legacy is wrapped up in his heroes and mentors, who represent an idea of the artist’s struggle and quest in which he is meant to participate. The past nurtures the present and the future. 

Incidentally, Sunday is an explicit change in that narrative, In Follies, A Little Night Music, The Frogs, Pacific Overtures, Sweeney Todd, and Merrily, the past in some sense reaches forward in time to condemn the present for losing its way. In Sunday and in Into The Woods, the past reaches into the future to extend grace. In Assassins, the past goes back to being malevolent. But in Sondheim’s work, the past is always an active participant in the present and the future. 

There is no way to tell that story in this instance without a second set of characters in another time. The audience’s difficulties in processing the new characters are unavoidable.

Dot’s journey in Act I is refreshingly empowering, and we are sad to see that actress subsequently sitting in a wheelchair and an old-lady wig, draped in sweaters or blankets so that we can’t see that she’s still wearing a corset. She sings an intentionally meandering song and then re-emerges as Dot. Except this Dot has lost all the frustration and humor we loved and now exists as a kind of fantasy of maternal encouragement. (I have given here the unkindest possible reading)

But Sondheim is ultimately writing about George. He doesn’t truly know Dot’s world, and neither does Lapine. The core dramatic questions are artist questions, not relationship questions. In the first act, Dot’s pain is the price we see them both pay for the glory of George’s art. As much as we want to see more of first act Dot, her story has reached the only resolution that makes sense when she leaves him. For a satisfying conclusion to the story, the two must be reconciled, “We will always belong together”. But that reconciliation can’t happen with any honesty in their real relationship. It can only happen metaphorically. 

Finally, as Sondheim and Lapine are trying in Act II to draw explicit comparisons to the modern world of art, they have to show new George as a participant in the newest artistic exploration, he must have some success at it, or we don’t know whether he really should be doing this at all, and the work can’t be incredible, or he can’t have a crisis. They have to show this work that has potential, but isn’t all that good. 

This is an example of a problem we encounter a lot in art about art. When a character is supposed to have written the perfect song, a composer has an impossible task. And when a character is supposed to have made bad art, it’s an almost equally difficult task for the creator of the fictitious art. Normally artistic presentation leaves it up to the audience to passively decide if something is good or bad. When the piece sets up the quality level of the work as very good or even slightly bad, it invites unwelcome metatheatrical questions. The work in Act I is a famous pointillist painting, so the decision about the quality of the work has already been made by others, and the audience doesn’t have to ask the question. 

Again, the piece faces an intrinsic, almost insoluble problem. 

It makes sense to me that people don’t enjoy the end of Sunday. But I think what we have is the best possible completion given the placement of the writers in their world. To complete it differently would have required other writers with other stories to tell.

What the Eye Arranges is What is Beautiful

Sondheim usually brushed off questions about whether he was writing about himself:

“A lot of people think that a lot of the songs I write are autobiographical. And they think that the characters I write about are me. They think I’m George in Sunday in the Park with George, or I’m Bobby in Company. But in fact, there’s only been one autobiographical song I’ve ever written, and that was “Opening Doors” in Merrily We Roll Along”

In truth, though, all writers write about themselves. The things that are worth saying grow out of experiences, and you can only have your own. Sondheim is like the Georges and like us. We have inherited a way of seeing our world from the past, full of quarrels and contradictions. We take that inheritance into a world that is constantly changing, where many of the things we love are torn down to build towers. Whoever we may be, it’s up to us to construct a new world in the chaos that brings forward the best of what we’ve been given, even against a never ending parade of naysayers. It won’t do for us to live in the past. I’m changing, you’re changing. We revise the world whether we want to or not. The second acts of our lives may not make sense to some folks, but we can only say what we know how to say. 

Curtains: A Rough Guide for the M.D.

Logo from 2022 Villanova Production, directed by Fr. Peter Donohue

Curtains is an audience pleasing, traditional show-biz kind of musical with a large cast and impressive effects. I have been involved in two productions, one with an extremely small stage, and another in a large state-of-the-art proscenium space. If you are doing the show on a tight budget or in a small space, you’ll have to think creatively to replace the technical elements that are embedded in the plot. If you are doing the show with all the bells and whistles, it is logistically a big lift!

As always, in this blog, I’ll start by talking about the show in the context of other shows in the history of the work of the authors and American musicals in general and then I’ll move on to very specific tips and advice for music directors: How to navigate the materials from the licensing agencies, what to bring up in the production meetings, what to watch out for as you teach the parts, and how to conduct the show. 

Before You Start: 

1. Listen to the 2007 original cast recording. 
2. Have a look at this explanation of the show’s history by the dramaturg of our Villanova production Nic Ecker. 
3. Don’t watch this video which definitely isn’t Curtains. 

Some Background:

If you’ve followed my Before You Start instructions, you’ve already looked at Nic Ecker’s rundown of the history of the show. It took a very long time to get to Broadway, and it underwent many iterations and configurations before reaching the version now licensed and performed.

I’d like to devote the first part of this post to Kander and Ebb, since this is the first of their shows I’ve covered on this blog. 

Kander and Ebb: Do they have a personal voice?

In his important 1972 book Words With Music, Lehman Engel wrote these rather uncharitable words about Kander and (by extension) Ebb:

“I would like to speak for a moment about the wavering musical style of a very talented theatre composer named John Kander. I do this because I respect him, care a great deal about the danger I think he is in, and I want to see him go as far as I believe he can go, provided….

Look at three consecutive Broadway scores by John Kander. I cannot understand why so much of Cabaret sounded like Kurt Weill. Was it because Weill’s widow, Lotte Lenya, was cast as the old lady? Was it because the setting was Berlin? Either explanation contains a worldful of fuzzy reasoning. The Berlin of Weill was about fifteen years earlier than the period of Cabaret and nearly half a century before this production. What has casting to do with the style of a musical score? Why also did the Zorba score make a pale attempt at imitating Greek music? In the end, this sort of thing must fail since at best it is only an imitation, as is the “Spanish” music of Man of LaMancha. In the case of Zorba, the sound more nearly resembled Israeli music. The Happy Time sounded like an imitation of French-Canadian folk songs. 

It’s time that John Kander began to find John Kander, who, in my belief, is infinitely worth finding. Let’s never forget that style should be the property of the copyright owner and said owner should not pretend he is the pianist for a silent-screen performance- changing from cowboys to Indians to Chinese with the greatest of ease and with the same unimportant results that one has in unwinding a roll of toilet tissue. While these elements- personal style, suggestions of time and place- may make contributions to all shows, personal style is of greater importance. This is because without a distinctive musical personality and a special manner of expressing things musically and lyrically, the end product must lack characteristics which differentiate the work of this writer from that of all writers now living or long dead.”

Lehman Engel is a very important figure in American Musical Theatre. His insights into how musicals are constructed and function were revolutionary in their time, and the workshop that bears his name has birthed countless writers and pieces. But I think with more than 50 years of hindsight, we can see that he is fundamentally mistaken about Kander. A page later in the same book he writes:

“Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Le Nozze di Figaro, both set in Spain, are as Spanish (nor did their composer even dream of their being) as the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna.”

He’s conveniently leaving out Carmen, also set in Spain, which tried very hard to sound Spanish at every turn and succeeded to the extent that for quite a long time, Carmen’s musical vocabulary became the de-facto definition of Spanish music, even though Bizet was French, writing at a time when many accomplished and actually Spanish composers were living and writing good music. I think by the definition of most people, Carmen is a successful piece of lyric theatre. 

He’s also mistaken about Cabaret. The musical is based on Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, which are set from 1930-1933 in Berlin. Cabaret’s musical vocabulary largely comes out of The Threepenny Opera, which starred Lotte Lenya, and premiered in 1928 in Berlin, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, which premiered in 1930 and The Seven Deadly Sins, which premiered in 1933. Weill fled Germany in 1933. So it’s a very sensible connection to use Weill’s musical language for a piece set exactly at the height of Weill’s early success and with his most famous collaborator (and wife) in the cast. And to a certain extent, Cabaret would do for Weimar republic Germany what Carmen did to Spanish music. 

Kander was intentionally trying to absorb the flavor of Weill’s music. Stephen Citron quotes him saying,

“I listened and listened and listened and then put them away and forgot about them. So when it came to writing the songs I didn’t think in terms of writing pastiche or imitations. Somehow or another, the flavor had soaked in just enough.”

But was he too close to Weill? Citron further quotes Kander: 

“I remember telling Lenya that I never intended to imitate Mr. Weill at all. She took my face in her hands and said, ‘No, no, darling. It is not Weill. It is not Kurt. When I walk out on stage and sing those songs, it is Berlin.’ And I thought if she felt that way, to hell with everyone else.”

I went through my score of Threepenny looking for direct links to Cabaret and the ‘Weill’ sound of Kander and Ebb when I was writing this blog, and was surprised that I could find very few direct stylistic links. Weill’s harmonic sense, which is truly distinctive and unclassifiable in his German work, doesn’t reallly figure into the Kander and Ebb sound. The modernistic German angle on American Jazz we find in Weill’s work with Brecht is refracted in Kander’s music back through the lens of American jazz to regular rhythmic formulas in an aggressive but very accessible synthesis of ideas. For most of us trying to conjure up in our minds a musical voice of Berlin in the 30s, Kander’s score to Cabaret comes to mind, even though it’s essentially a fantasy of Kander’s impressions of Weill’s work. Further, Weill’s music is itself a very particular and idiosyncratic subset of a much larger musical ecosystem that was active in the Weimar republic. All history is editorial. In this case, Kander was the unwitting editor.  

But Engel’s argument is really just fleshing out his larger point; that the musical voice of the author is more important to the success of a piece than any particular flavor of time or place in the musical itself. For my part, I think an author’s ‘personal voice’ is very real but impossible to pin down. Engel is essentially saying that he doesn’t hear anything particularly interesting in this music, and that what he does hear sounds like somebody else. Allowing that people will always differ in matters of taste, I argue that Kander and Ebb do in fact have a distinctive musical voice. When one hears the scores of Cabaret, Chicago, or even minor works like The Rink or 70, Girls, 70, we do hear something that registers as Kander-and-Ebbness. 

I don’t agree with Mark N. Grant about everything, but I think he’s speaking for many musical theatre fans when he writes: 

“The songwriting style of John Kander and Fred Ebb is a rebuke to Lehman Engel. In almost every Kander and Ebb show virtually every song is some variant of camped-up neo-Jolson razzmatazz, no matter what the specifics of character or situation. In defiance of Engel’s wisdom, they have written revue songs for book shows, they have de-constructed the golden-age writing style, and they have been one of the consistently successful teams of the last quarter century” 

Complicating the matter is something I haven’t heard folks talk about very much. Kander and Ebb were involved with two visionary trailblazers, Hal Prince and Bob Fosse. Prince and Fosse were driven by big ideas and personal vision. I think musical theatre fans naturally assume that Kander and Ebb were driven to create work with the same deeply personal, inimitable voice, since their output is so intimately connected with other idealistic creators. They’re thought of in a way as a more show-biz centric, less cerebral version of Sondheim. But I think it’s better to believe Kander and Ebb themselves when they explain that they just loved working together. Do they have a distinctive sound? Of course. But whereas creators like Stephen Sondheim, Bob Fosse, Leonard Bernstein, or Jerome Robbins were dedicated to blazing brand new trails, the voice of Kander and Ebb grows out of who they are, what they loved, and what they discovered organically together. They found their voices while doing what they loved most: writing songs and hanging around theaters. 

So even though Cabaret and Chicago are the most culturally significant shows in their work list, in another way Curtains is most strongly representative of the Kander and Ebb world, unencumbered by the darkness of their collaborators in their more ‘important’ work, and thereby freed to express their joy of working in the theatre without the darker admixture of Fosse and Prince. It’s strange that though Curtains has the most murders of any of their shows, it is perhaps also the least cynical.

The Beating Heart of Curtains

Watch the cued part of this interview with Kander and Ebb. 

Then consider this section of I Miss The Music, music and lyrics written by Kander, after the death of Ebb.

Kander was unable to satisfactorily complete the song until he realized he needed to write it about Ebb. He commented in a Playbill interview in 2007:

“I didn’t know that’s what was doing when I was writing it. When we came to New York, I expanded it. First I had to recognize that, yeah, it really was about Fred, and then I could write the rest of the song.”

In a preface to an anthology of their music, Ebb answers the age old question Cioffi asks in Curtains (which comes first, the words or the music?):

“We work in the same room at the same time. I can improvise in words and John can improvise in music. Out of that improvisation comes our product. We work in the same room at the same time. When we walk into our music room, I am Fred Ebb, and he is John Kander. When we come out, we are Kander and Ebb.”

These are two men who put up with all the nonsense of musical theatre production for the pleasure of being with one another and writing songs together. And that’s why at the center of a piece that might evaporate into a whirlwind of clichés, the most compelling part of the show is really the most old-fashioned part; writers who want to write together, singers who want to sing, producers who want to produce, and an audience that wants to watch a show succeed. 

That’s why even though the show treats its many murders rather cavalierly, it can avoid being cynical by focusing on the wide eyed wonder of the characters, who I believe reflect the wonder of Kander and Ebb themselves. ‘Can you believe they let us do this?’ That may not be as sexy or as transgressive as the more prominent and critically acclaimed work they are most remembered for. And yet, I think it might reflect more of their essence as creators. 

As Ethan Mordden wrote in a New York Times piece on Steel Pier in 1997: “At the center of their art lies a love of the talent-take-all wonder of entertainment.” 

Some Musical Markers of Kander and Ebb

It’s difficult to articulate what constitutes a musical voice. Because Kander and Ebb start with an idea and arrive at form together, they don’t fall into the same patterns of formal construction that other writing teams often do. But contributing to the Kander and Ebb sound are a number of devices one encounters again and again. I’ll lay out some of them below.

One of my favorite Kander and Ebb devices is an interior line that sneaks up by half steps from the 5th of the I chord through the 7th, which leads to the IV. It’s rather like what Richard Rodgers does in his big ballads, but pared down to the essentials. Kander and Ebb reserve this harmonic move for the big yearning or resigned number.

Maybe This Time from Cabaret

Funny Honey, from Chicago

Nowadays, also from Chicago

Here heading to the ii area instead of the IV chord, in But The World Goes Round from New York, New York

You’ll notice that in each of these examples, the melodic line is insistently repeating a motive that releases, with the accompaniment line adding tension against a static pedal bass which resolves at the release of the phrase. In two of the four examples, the melody also includes the rising line as part of the contour. When you hear any of these examples, you are immediately aware of the Kander and Ebb world. Kander doesn’t actually do this trick in Curtains, although he comes close in Thinking of Him.

Many of the tunes in Curtains circle around a few half steps

Here in What Kind of Man

Here in the Verse to Show People

Which later morphs using the same pitches into the main melody:

It’s a little less obvious, but the E D# and C# B# half steps drive the melody of Thataway!

Half steps are also the thrust of the accompaniment.

If you’re not convinced yet, try the melody for It’s a Business, nearly all half steps:

Some of you skeptics might counter that everybody uses half steps; does the end of the bridge of Castle on a Cloud sound like Kander and Ebb? But sample these:

From Cabaret:

From Chicago:

From The Rink:

 From Woman of the Year:

From Funny Lady:

I could go on, but I think you get the idea.

A lot of Kander’s tunes also get in a rut, but a rut that’s really exciting to park in 

From Cabaret (note the minor second melody here too):

From Chicago:

From The Rink:

Sometimes the tune stays the same while the harmony goes somewhere interesting  

Like this bit from Zorba:

There isn’t a lot of this in Curtains, but we get a taste at the end of He Did It when the 3 part canon occurs, or the ‘Stomp, hop slap step slap step stamp stomp’ section of A Tough Act To Follow.

Vamps are really important to Kander and Ebb

Ethan Mordden wrote in the New York Times:

“There is a strutting profile to a John Kander vamp, a show-off’s entrance music. It’s so endemic to the Kander and Ebb sound that the vamp becomes as familiar as the vocal melody. Think of the musical intros to ‘Willkommen,’ ‘All That Jazz’ or ‘New York, New York.’ This is music that has the hots for itself: alive, needy, working it.“

The vamp is essentially the way in for the creation of the song itself. Watch Ebb describe that process here:

We’ll discuss some important vamps in this show later. (heck, there’s even a 5 measure piece entitled: Vamps) But the fact that you can probably in your head immediately think of the vamp for Cabaret, All that Jazz, or New York, New York without me including a notated musical example is proof of Kander’s overwhelming skill at creating these introductory earworms.

Quarter note triplet melodies are common in downtempo numbers. 

This feature you really don’t notice until you compare a number of Kander and Ebb Ballads, but quarter note triplets often intensify an emotional moment or emphasize an idea:

From Cabaret

From Zorba

Also from Zorba

From Chicago

From New York, New York (film)

From The Rink

From Steel Pier

From The Skin of Our Teeth

In Curtains, we find this at play in Thinking of Him

Notice that in many of these examples, we see the repetition of an idea, and how in more than half of the examples, the melody includes flat 6th and/or 7th scale degrees.

Ragtime and Stride piano parts abound in Kander’s scores

Kander must be quite a good stride pianist, because stride figures occur all over his scores.

From Cabaret:

From Chicago:

From The Act:

From Woman of the Year:

From The Rink:

From Steel Pier:

A few from Curtains:

Notice the accented, often rolled downbeats and Earl “Fatha” Hines style right hand tremolando. Stride piano sections of Kander and Ebb songs often speed up gradually or dig in spectacularly. Many times these moments are meant to evoke old-fashioned ideas or ‘show-biz’, but Kander obviously understands and enjoys these sounds, and you can feel that he must enjoy playing these shapes. It’s also worth noting that Kander has found many different shades of stride. One hears great subtlety in their deployment, stride is a vocabulary, not a placeholder.

To tag and identify these few of many markers of ‘Kander-and-Ebb-ness’ is not in any way to reduce what they are doing to a bunch of show biz clichés. Musical theatre is a culture with a vocabulary, and mastery of that vocabulary was the most important skill for writers in the heady days of the 60s and 70s. Kander and Ebb are among the greatest masters of this deep vocabulary.

Should Your Organization do this Show?

This is a BIG show. I played it in a tiny theatre once and it was a blast, but the folks who did it had to be really creative to work around the technical difficulties the show presented, like hanging someone from the fly space, trapdoor, falling globes, and characters and cats coming out of the pit. There are a lot of chorus parts, which is awesome if you’ve got lots of people, but remember that you have to costume them. If you have a few really good chorus people, that’s great, but they’ll be running all over creation and changing costumes a lot. So count those costs before you start. 

It’s also a show with a lot of parts, mostly for guys, although there are two outstanding women’s parts and a number of smaller male parts that could easily be re-gendered or made gender non-binary. 

From the audience perspective, the main issue is the length. This is a murder mystery, and that necessitates a lot of talking; monologues for the detective, lots and lots of monologues. The show feels long, but it won’t help to cut songs, the musical part of the show is a very normal length. It’s all the scene work that takes so much time. And that scene work is moving forward a pretty complicated plot, so if you cut it down, you might make it a senseless story. 

So if you have an audience that loves classic style book musicals, a large group of talented performers, and lots of technical resources, you’ll have a great time with this fun piece. 

As You’re Casting:

Lt. Frank Cioffi:

This is the role built around David Hyde Pierce. It plays to Pierce’s comic strengths, so a good candidate needs to be immediately likeable by the audience, sing ‘well enough’, have a very strong memory and a good sense of how to pace long speeches. In the audition, you might hear the beginning of Cioffi’s part in Show People, to see if those lower notes ring, in addition to some of the other important solo sections

Range:

Niki Harris:

Needs to dance well, sing well enough, and make sense opposite your Cioffi in terms of age. A good sense of comic timing is important. Niki should be able to hold a harmony part, so hear In The Same Boat #1 at auditions with singers on all three parts, and hear Tough Act To Follow. 

Range:

Georgia Hendricks:

Georgia has one of the heavier lifts in the show. She has to play comedy and more serious scenes, she dances and sings quite a bit, and needs to be able to hold a harmony part, so hear In The Same Boat #1 at auditions against the two other parts in addition to one or two of the bigger solo moments. 

Range:

Carmen Bernstein:

This is a part for a strong singer and personality. The low E flats at the beginning of It’s A Business might prove too low for some singers, you may want to hear it in the auditions in addition to a section or two of the larger numbers Carmen has to carry. 

Range:

Aaron Fox:

If possible, this actor should be able to play the piano, although there are ways to work the piano playing to bring it within the range of a pianist with only moderate abilities. Plays both comic and serious scenes, and has an important ballad that you should certainly hear at callbacks. 

Range:

Christopher Belling:

Belling is really about the personality, the singing demands are moderate. 

Range:

Bambi Bernet:

Comic actress, singer and strong dancer. Needs to be able to hold a harmony part, so hear In The Same Boat #1 in the audition. 

Range:

Oscar Shapiro:

Oscar is an important part, but not a large one, and the singing demands are minimal.

Range:

Bobby Pepper

Bobby needs to be able to dance, and should also be able to carry a three part harmony. Hear In The Same Boat #2 at callbacks

Range:

Jessica Crenshaw

Jessica has to sing very badly, but I think the part should be played by a belter who actually can sing. They just sing the part very out of tune. As I point out below, this is harder than you may expect. 

Range:

Randy Dexter

Needs to be able to carry a three part harmony, so hear In The Same Boat #2. Randy has a pretty extensive solo at the top of Kansasland that you’ll want to hear. (but be sure you use the alternate text)

Range:

Harv Fremont

Needs to be able to carry a three part harmony, but this is the least demanding of the three smaller featured male roles. Hear In The Same Boat #2 with the other 2 roles.

Range:

Sasha Iljinsky

This blog is for music directors. If you’re music directing and conducting the show, congratulations, this character is you. I don’t see any reason why Sasha couldn’t be a person of any gender. 

Range:

Johnny

Johnny actually has a sung line in The Man Is Dead, even though the name isn’t listed in the range section of the score. B below middle C to B flat. Could be played by someone of any gender.

Chorus

This is a matter of personal preference, but I think the setting of this show in 1959 requires a period vocal production, not a brash 2022 Broadway belt with no body in the sound. Compare the original Broadway cast recording of Curtains with the sound of the chorus in Destry Rides Again, Saratoga, or Redhead. It’s still a forward placed sound, but it has more weight, and more legit sounds from everyone involved. 

If you’re looking for a musicianship test for the chorus, you might do well to teach the round at the end of He Did It and run auditioners against each other. 

When you teach all the chorus parts, I strongly recommend you teach all the various versions of In the Same Boat, He/She/They Did It, Wide Open Spaces, Thataway and so forth back to back. It’s not just a time saving device, but you want to really make it clear how they differ from each other. There are quite a few large splits in the chorus parts. I go through how to trim those divisi down in the breakdown below.

This is the table I made for myself to prepare for the audition process and the first rehearsals. There may be some discrepancies between the ranges as listed in the score, because I tried to track down all the places the characters sang. (and I may have made some mistakes) I don’t know that I used all these sides, but they may be useful for you as you plan your casting:

	Numbers	Range	Callback Piece	Notes
CHORUS WOMEN	2, 2b, 2c,4,5, 6, 13,15, 16,18,19, 22d, 22e,23, 24,25,26a,27,29	Middle C to 4th space E(higher Ab or Bb above the staff)	16 mm. 143-168
CHORUS MEN	2, 2b, 2c, 4,5, 6, 13, 15,16,18,19,22d, 22e,23, 24,25,26a,27,29	Middle C to 4th space E (higher G or Bb above the staff)	16 mm. 143-168
Jessica	2b,	Tone deaf, irrelevant
Carmen	3,5,6,16,17,26,29	E flat below middle C to 4th space E	17 mm. 1-12,171-end	21 for chemistry with Aaron?
Aaron	3,4,5,10,11,16,21,29	G below middle C to G flat above the staff	10, all11 38-79Check G flat.	Piano? Fake Piano?
Georgia	3,4,5,6,8,9,13,16,24,24,25,26a,29	G below middle C to 4th space E	4, mm 25-459 (all)	Close Harmony
Oscar	3,5,6,16,29	G below middle C to 4th space E	6, 118-134
Bobby	5,16,16a,24,29	D above middle C to 4th line D	16a	Close Harmony
Nikki	5,9,16,22,22a,24,27,29	B below middle C to 4th line D	9 (all)Middle6, 118-134
Christopher Belling	5,6,16,29	B below middle C to F above	6, 118-134
Johnny	5,16,29	B below middle C to Bb	6, 118-134
Bambi	5,9,16,24,29	D above Middle C to 2nd space A	9 (all) Lowest	Close Harmony
Cioffi	6,7,16,22a,24,27,29	Ab below middle C to 4th space Eb	7, mm.29-49
Sasha	15,29	B below middle C to 4th space C	IT ME!
Randy	16a,18,24,29		16a, 18?	Close Harmony, Rap at the top of Kansasland
Harv	16a,24,29		16a	Close Harmony

 

A Few Things to Note About the Music Director’s Materials:

The Piano/Vocal Score

This is a very playable book, giving important information about instrumentation where appropriate but mostly geared toward playing rehearsals. You can’t really play the keyboard book in the show from here, and I wouldn’t anyway unless I hired very few players. If you were conducting the show and not playing, you wouldn’t want to use this book. 

The Piano Conductor Score

This is also a well constructed book, but it isn’t as playable as a rehearsal piano part, and unfortunately also isn’t playable as a keyboard book from which you play and conduct. I did, however, play the show once from this score, in a production with a really small pit in which I was improvising a second keyboard book. I played from the non-keyboard instruments as they appeared, switching patches on the fly from my old RD700. If you’re doing things like that, this book is great because it has almost all the notes. 

If you’re not a full-score kind of person, you could well conduct from the piano conductor score, but the full score is much better for that purpose, if you know how to navigate it. If you were trying to play the keyboard from the full score, you’d turn pages too frequently for it to be worth your effort.

Unfortunately there are a number of small discrepancies between the two piano based scores, and I’ll let you know the ones I found as I come to them. 

The Full Score

The full score is very well laid out, and it comes in 4 volumes, to be printed on 8.5×14 paper. If you print it on 8.5×11, you’ll be squinting a lot. Oddly, book 2 doesn’t end at the act break. I printed mine as a reference, and my only gripe is that 1) I couldn’t really bind it or get it into a binder, and loose leaves in the pit was tricky and 2) The dialogue cueing is inconsistent and pretty small, so if I were to conduct from it, I’d need to get a pen and write all the cues in larger. 

Keyboard Programming available through licensor

The patches are really well put together, and they advance perfectly. In some spots, they have the last patch of a song as the first patch of the next, but you’ll find all those easily, because they’re marked, as in the graphic below. I found the tack piano patches much too loud in comparison to the other patches and too garish to actually read as a honkeytonk piano. Here’s how to edit those sounds in Mainstage:

In the Workspace area of Mainstage, Select Tack Piano as circled on the left. I adjusted the volume of output 1-2 to around -10 to bring it roughly to the level of the other patches. Then select ScanVib on the right to access the sounds in question. This is what you’ll see:

Play with the parameters to choose the sound you like. I went with this:

There may in fact be a faster or better way, which somebody will tell me in the comments, but this was how I managed it. I went through each individual Tack Piano patch and edited. If someone is aware of a way to edit them globally for an entire act, I’d love to hear how.

Going Through the Score Number by Number:

1. Overture

Cueing the top of the overture is tricky when you’re also playing the keyboard book, because you have to give the beat in your left hand while you white hand glissando in the opposite direction with your right. Best to give a full measure ahead of time, reminding everybody that NOTHING happens in the first beat. Lock in the tempo you want for measure 8, the earlier passage makes sense a little slower, and then you’re stuck. 

The balance in 8-11 is poor, you just can’t really balance xylo and piano against the rest of the orchestra. (this is probably why the piano is marked ff with a ‘loud’ indication) 

The transition into the softshoe at 82 can be tricky. It may help to think of the 4/4 as basically a l’istesso from the old tempo, with the new quarter note being equal to the old half note. The poco ritard. right before it muddies those waters a bit; but you might ignore that rit. and go straight on. Woodwind 4 can be a little sluggish on the bari sax, cut those measures if they bog down the new tempo. 

There is an error in the piano book in measures 111 and 112; the fourth note in each measure should be a B. 

The horn rip at 115-116 is really evocative, ask the players to bring it out. 

The keyboard strings make one wish for a real section, in a way that they don’t in the rest of the show. I actually made a book for a single violinist, which played along with all the string patches, and it really added a bit of verisimilitude to the patches. And since the score has mostly pads and pizzicato passages, the violin book turned out to be fairly easy, notwithstanding the show keys. 

2. Wide Open Spaces Opening Vocal

If you’re playing the keyboard book, you’ll be playing the last measure of the overture, and you’ll have no time to switch to the two-beat. But it’s the same tempo, really, so just tell everybody to keep the tempo going. This makes it pretty important that you be in the wide open spaces tempo from 109 in the overture. 

The bass book has an error in measure 45. The last beat should read F, not Bb.

You should work carefully to disambiguate the various versions of the number as you teach the vocals. It happens over and over and over again, with slight variations each time. 

2A. Wide Open Spaces Opening

This is pretty easy going. If you didn’t hire a guitarist, this will be very bare, you’ll have to reassign the comping to the keyboard and leave the string patch out. The gunshot cue is in the patches that come from the licensing organization, but you may prefer to leave it to the sound designer. They have to do a gunshot anyway at the end of the Kansasland Dance, so you’re not really adding more work. 

2AA. Robbin’ Hood Revealed

In the piano vocal score, measures 2 and 6 are laid out oddly. I moved the G flat into the left hand and crossed it out in the right. It’s laid out more sensibly in the Piano-Conductor score. 

2B. Wide Open Spaces Reprise

I recommend cutting the highest tenor part here. It’s seconds against the altos and doubles the soprano part. You won’t miss it, and you won’t have parallel major seconds to tune. 

Jessica has to sing badly out of tune here; it isn’t really enough for her to sing wildly erratically, the joke works only when it’s almost right. It turns out it’s actually pretty hard to sing intentionally out of tune. You may want to have your singer find a pitch to start on and then sing that same note even as the melody changes. 

A big dynamic drop at 43 with a steep crescendo works really well. 

The four part split at the end may be a little ambitious. If you’re cutting notes, I’d cut the A in the tenors and basses in measure 46 and the E in 47 through 49. In the Sopranos and Altos, I’d cut the Fs in 46 and the G in 47-49. Always best to have the space close to the bottom of the male voicings and have the chord in close position in the sopranos and altos. 

The rit. symbol in measure 45 is in a different place in the piano conductor score and the piano vocal score. I think the piano vocal score is correct. (this also agrees with the placement in the full score)

2C. Wide Open Spaces Bows

Photo by Paola Nogueras

This is one of the places where you will need to be paying close attention as the production is being blocked. Ideally “That was the conductor” comes right before the crescendo in measure 29. 

Again, if you didn’t hire the guitar book, you’ll need to figure out who is going to comp. I rewrote the beginning of the number in our tech rehearsal because the staging change required more time. The dialogue times out pretty well from measure 14, but if the scene change before that takes more time, there isn’t a safety to delay measure 30, and you’ll step on the punch line. A natural solution is to repeat 6-9 and 10-13, but when vamped, that music wears out its welcome quickly. Just be aware that timing may be tricky, and train the chorus to come in no matter what in measure 30. 

2D. Exit Music (Thatway)

The Piano vocal has fermatas on the first three notes, but the piano conductor does not, and neither do the full score or parts. It’s easier without the fermatas, unless you’re trying to stretch that transition for some reason. 

Again, you may have trouble with this timing, because it segues directly into 2E. Here, though, there are natural places to build in vamps. 

2E. Vamps

Measures 2 and 4 are listed as fermatas in the Piano Conductor score and in the full score, but not in the Piano Vocal. The measures don’t really need a fermata, and it’s actually more confusing to play them as such, because the measures don’t last long enough to warrant one. I’d try to get the actors to deliver their lines in the spaces without losing time, and tell the players to cut the fermatas. 

3. What Kind of Man

Brian Jacko, Erin Coffman, Amy Acchione Myers, and Nathan Irwin Diehl in Villanova’s Curtains. Photo by Paolo Nogueras

This is a really fun number that the audience enjoys. It was one of the numbers written early in the development process that stayed in the show in each iteration. Kander remarked in an interview that the original lyric was “much longer and much more disgusting”

The cutoff in measure 11 is fun to try and time out. 

The only real vocal challenge is remembering the difference between measures 9-10 and 18-19. 

Check which lyric your director wants at 33-34. 

At measure 47, the lower part is played on the bass clarinet in an awkwardly high register, and the percussionist has to switch instruments and play 3 notes on the xylo with very little time to change. This is an intentionally goofy fun-house sound, but it is a scary moment, and you may want to just add the cue for all of it to the toy piano 2 measures earlier so you’re sure it lands. 

The subito piano in measure 58 is a great touch. 

4. Thinking of Him

Erin Coffman in Villanova’s production of Curtains, Photo by Paola Nogueras

This is another of the songs that was written early and has stayed in through multiple drafts. 

Aaron’s piano part is not impossible for an amateur pianist to play. If it proves challenging, have Aaron play the top (melody) line of the introductory accompaniment and have the pit pianist play the rest of it. 

It took me too long to realize that Aaron is cueing Bobby’s entrance in at measure 46. It’s a nice dramatic moment too, because it’s Aaron both acting as composer and telegraphing that he still loves Georgia. 

The chorus ending here is comes out of nowhere. The piano vocal has it, with the women’s part cued on the bottom and the men’s on top, which feels odd. The Piano Conductor score has it laid out the way we’re all used to. It doesn’t appear in the Script/Vocal book, so you’ll want to copy that one page out of the piano conductor score before you teach it. 

5. The Woman’s Dead 

This is another of the songs that have been in the show since the earliest drafts. 

The Piano Conductor Score is missing the hairpins on the oo passages. The Piano Vocal and the Full Score have them. 

Ask your director which lyric you’re using. There are two options in measures 30 and 32-34. The audience’s opinion of you as a music director/conductor will rise or fall based on the cutoffs to the last 4 measures. A crisp ‘d’ with a shadow vowel after it will work like a charm. If you’re conducting from the piano, you can leave out the keyboard part here, all the notes are well covered elsewhere, and your hands will be better used coordinating the cutoffs. 

6. Show People

The cast of Villanova’s 2022 production, photo by Paola Nogueras

This is another of the numbers that went into the show early and stayed through multiple iterations. 

We’re in Cabaret territory here, but with a twist:

The upper example is from the intro to the title song from Cabaret, transposed into F minor for comparison. The lower example is the vamp from Show People. Notice that it’s essentially the same gesture, but with the hard edges shaved off. One dynamic lower, fewer accents, a genteel thumb-line added in the left hand and a less dissonant version of both the tonic and the dominant-functioning chords. This is an example of what I referred to earlier about a vocabulary of gesture. This idea is capable of lots of different kinds of expression. Kander is capable of shading it to his needs at a given moment; here it is aggressive, commanding, but not terrifying, as we needed it to be in Cabaret.

The opening passage of the number proper is pretty low if your Cioffi is a tenor, but there isn’t much to be done about it, since the whole number keeps going up and up, so you can’t just move it into higher territory without causing other problems. 

Again, ask your director which lyric you are using in measure 43. Start the tempo at measure 45 very moderately; it will make the accelerando much more effective. 

Ask your director which version of measure 44 lyrics you’re using.

Measures 205-212 will take some getting used to for your orchestra. Obviously it’s much easier when you’re conducting. The l’istesso tempo at 213 is very easy once you learn to feel it, but you will crash and burn the first time you run this with the players. 

This is also one of the spots in the show where there’s a big rallentando into a kickline tempo. This can be tricky, particularly if you’ve never conducted one from the piano before. (If you’re conducting with a baton, you may have an easier time of it) 

Head-bob folks, try and develop a little extra head bump to subdivide the 2/4 beat, and practice coming out of the piano part into measures 224-225. 

Baton people, remember that bigger isn’t always clearer. Subdivide the beat and be crisp, not big. 

There are fermatas on the last two notes of 224 in the Piano Vocal, but not in the Piano Conductor scores. The rallentando situation isn’t identical in the two scores either there, but it all amounts to the same thing. 

Drill the chorus in dropping that dynamic at 241 way down. Again, the crescendo will be much better coming from a very quiet dynamic. Don’t let all your sopranos sing the high A at the end. 

7. Coffee Shop Nights

This is a number where you really wish the orchestra had strings, but the winds are beautifully scored here, and the combo of bass, guitar, marimba, and fake Pizz strings is a really lovely sound in the mellower sections. 

It’s on the cusp of being in 4 or in 2. If your singer tends to rush, conduct it in 4. If your singer drags, conduct it in 2. Or do whatever you want! 

8. Georgia Can’t Dance

The faster the better really. Teach the chorus this section right after you teach ‘Thataway’, so they can hear the difference between this and the same spot in Thataway from 242-250. 

This will probably land better if you give a full measure of prep. 

9. In The Same Boat #1

Taylor Molt, Meghan Dietzler, and Erin Coffman in Villanova’s 2022 production, photo by Paola Nogueras

This is such a fun little number for the trio. The tighter the ensemble, especially in rhythm, cutoffs, and dynamics, the better this gem will hit. 

10. I Miss The Music- Intro

It is preferable for the actor to actually play the piano. The part can be simplified, or you can play the tough parts from the pit and let the player get the easy parts from the stage. Even people who don’t really play can be taught a version of those arpeggios hand-over-hand. Some of the larger left hand stretches can be brought into close position up an octave and made much more playable. 

The piano vocal score is missing the woodwind parts in measures 22 and 23. Piano-Conductor score has it. 

At the end, I find the railroad tracks (caesura) sort of contradicts the segue as one direction, and chose to just ignore the caesura. The dialogue doesn’t really fill up the 3 measures at the top of the next number, so you will want to get things moving. 

11. I Miss The Music

Brian Jacko and David Cregan in Villanova’s 2022 production of Curtains photo by Paola Nogueras

The B section of this song is the heart of the show, and it’s a very similar accompaniment to the opening of Coffee Shop Nights, a connection I can’t quite make sense of. If you’ve read my introductory paragraphs you know how poignantly the lyric describes Kander’s partnership with Ebb. What I’ve left out until now is how it musically references that partnership. In measures 47 and 48, Aaron plays 2 measures that strongly suggest Kander and Ebb’s first great success together:

B Section of I Miss the Music

What a lovely and touching tribute.

Measure 39-41 in the marimba in the Full Score is terribly laid out and makes no sense. In the part, though, it’s exactly as it is in the piano vocal score right hand. 

47 and 48 are easily playable by almost any actor who is playing this part. 

Measure 86 has a very acrobatic piano part, but you can get it if you work it a little bit. (if you’re looking at the piano conductor score, the right hand octaves are played with two hands) Since we’re in G flat here, if you hit a black note octave in each hand, you can be wrong and still sound pretty good there! Heck, you could even do a big black key gliss up and down the piano. But that would be tasteless. 

12. Before Thataway

No surprises here, just a fun dance number. Keep it fast. 

You can simplify the piano part in 22 and 26 by dropping the lower octave on the last 3 notes of the measure and keeping it in basically one hand position. 

The saloon piano is fun to play once you get your hands around it. 

13. Thataway

Erin Coffman and cast, Villanova production of Curtain 2022, photo by Paola Nogueras

Again, start nice and slow so that the accelerando can be gradual and meaningful.

The straight/swung eighths marking is inconsistent. 

Straight eighths appears in 16 and 17 in all the conductor and piano scores and for the WW 2 and 3 (the only players who have eighths)

After that, the markings seem to be aimed at clarity for each player, but not clarity overall. 

As I understand it, basically, the woodwinds have dotted-eighth-sixteenth style swing where we’re supposed to swing, and straight eighths otherwise. The brass have swung eighths all the time (even where the piano vocal indicates otherwise). The piano vocal keeps changing the swing feel, and none of the other parts include these changes. In measures 28 and 62 the top 3 woodwinds are clearly playing the same figure as the brass, notated 2 different ways at the same time. 

The piano vocal score marks: 

Swing eighths at 26

Straight eighths at 32. (not marked in brass) 

Swing eighths at 60

Straight eighths at 66 (not marked in brass)

Swing eighths at 70 (not marked in woodwinds)

Straight eighths at 84 (not marked in bones, but reiterated in woodwinds)

Swing eighths at 108 (not marked in brass)

Straight eighths at 114 (not marked in brass) 

The truth is that your band will hear the rhythm section and adjust accordingly. But if you’re a stickler, you should go through and make decisions, maybe before you send out the books. 

This number is where you’ll miss the banjo if you didn’t hire the guitar player. 

You’ll want your drummer to have 4 temple blocks for mesures 8 and 9. If they don’t have it, ask if they can get 4 different sounds on different rims or by other means. 

35 through 50 is one of the harder piano parts in the score and it’s very exposed. One night I accidentally advanced two patches and made a hash of this section, so atone for my sins by practicing that transition assiduously. 

At 118, really drill the closing consonants and rhythmic accuracy for the tenors and basses. It’s a very effective passage. 

Unless you’re a really good stride pianist, you may struggle with 134. But the bass is covering the lowest part, so you can play the off-beats instead if that makes it playable. It’s the right hand that’s important. 

The piano passage at 184 is also tricky; budget some time to woodshed it. 

The voice distribution at 223 and 224 is goofy. The high tenor part is the same as the women’s part. Unless you have crazy numbers of tenors, eliminate that top line and split the men’s part 3 ways instead of 4. 

At 253 and 254, if you’re looking to cut down the divisi, cut out the top note in the men’s part, and the second note from the top in the women. Or just cut the second note from the top for everybody, if they’re having trouble hearing it. The piano conductor score is missing the Rit in 253, which is a critical marking! It’s a rall. in the full score, hiding down above the guitar part, so if you’re conducting from the full score, write it in on the top of page 61! This is the second big rit into a slower tempo and my comments in show people also apply here. You could conduct with your right while you play the left on the piano, or you can leave it up to the 4 instruments playing that line. 

Conduct 255-258 in 4, speeding up to 259, where you switch to being in 2 again. 

Again, if the cluster chord at the end gives you trouble, cut the second note from the bottom. Or cut the second note from the top for the men and the second note from the bottom for the women. It’s the parallel seconds in adjacent parts that are the trouble. 

You have a line here. After Cioffi says “…Union Oyster House”, you say “Is it Manhattan?” to Cioffi. 

13A. Act One Curtain

Boy is this fun (and funny). 

Let the actor actually cue the band, they come in on the ‘eight’ of ‘five-six-seven-eight’. 

If you’re doing what the script indicates, you’ll have to fly an actor, which means you’ll play this a bunch of times in tech as they get the lift figured out. Without making an ass of yourself, remind folks that the curtain is really supposed to hit the ground at the bottom or the left hand line, and be fully up at the top. Depending on your theatre, this may be easier said than done. 

ACT II

14. Entr’acte

It wouldn’t be the end of the world to cut this Entr’acte, if for no other reason than that the show runs long. But it is a nice arrangement, and does a good job of building excitement after the intermission. You also don’t save that much time by cutting it; it’s very short. 

The passage at measures 5 and 6 isn’t easy, particularly if you’ve been conducting and have to close off your fermata while playing and establishing the new tempo. It may take quite a bit of rehearsal. If your bari sax and guitar can’t feel the new tempo, cut them and have everyone come in at measure 7. If the part just won’t fit under your hands, there are a couple of ways to keep the exact sound and drop a note or two. 

15. The Man is Dead 

Yours Truly, as Sasha. (photo by Paola Nogueras)

The singer is you. Be very involved in the production meetings to determine where you’re singing this, and how you’ll get there. If you perform it as written, you will cut off the fermata from the entr’acte, establish the new tempo, and have 4 measures to stand up and turn around, in my case to climb a ladder and get in position to be seen by the audience from the pit. You could also delegate someone to conduct the entr’acte without you, but that may present other problems. 

Sasha is presumably Russian, but in the original cast recording, the accent is not really definable, except that it’s foreign. At any rate, the lyric doesn’t give you a lot of sounds that you can ‘Russify’. 

If you’re playing the keyboard book using the patches they sell you as you conduct, you’ll have to delete the 3 sounds you don’t use when you’re singing or advance past them 

In Jennifer Ashley Tepper’s book, The Untold Stories of Broadway, David Loud talks about this number. 

“At the top of the second act, I would rise up on this podium and turn around and sing a song! It was such a funny idea that I would always get great laughs, even though I wasn’t particularly funny. The idea was so clever, and Scott Ellis, our director, and Rupert Holmes, our writer, made it so unexpected and delicious.”

16. He Did It 

He Did It went into the show in the second draft. 

Coming out of your solo in The Man is Dead, you will need to establish the new tempo: fortunately it’s l’istesso from the previous movement, so you can let the orchestra start it without you until you get back. 

The trickiest thing about this number is getting out of the vamps. Depending on the staging, you should be able to get through with only 2 times through each vamp. It’s better to end early than late. If there’s music after the last line in each section, it spoils the effect. Drill the chorus that an actor says, “he/she/they did it” then the three notes of the ⅜ measure happen, and everyone says “Ah!” on the downbeat of the following measure. If you do it enough times, it will be foolproof. 

There’s a caesura (railroad tracks) in the piano-conductor score and full score between measures 6 and 7 that isn’t in the piano vocal score. I don’t know whether it’s important really, but you’ll want to know about it in blocking rehearsals so you can tell the band whether to play it or not. 

You’ll also want to be part of the staging discussions on is the Surprise! Sections in 13, 57, and 101. The ‘shock’ moment needs to come on the loud hit, and the blocking relates to that. Again, the ‘surprise’ marking and the cues to start the dialogue are in the Piano vocal score, but not in the Piano-conductor. 

The arco bass solo at 50 is HARD! You may decide you want to give it to another instrument. 

In measure 94, the parts and full score all have a fermata. The piano vocal and piano conductor scores do not. (and I don’t think it needs one) 

Lots of diction/consonant drills for the chorus sections, get that whispery tone quality and mind the crescendos. 

Do your best to split the chorus groups into even numbers for the last section, and drill each part of the round with the accompaniment, and then adding them together, starting with the first, doing groups one and two, then all three. It’s not as hard as it sounds, but you do really have to know the part and hold it against the others. 

16a. In The Same Boat #2

Tomas Torres, Sheldon Shaw, and Joshua Gold in Villanova’s 2022 Curtains Photo by Paola Nogueras

Musically this In the Same Boat again reminds me of Cabaret. If I’m not mistaken, this song was originally written early in 1967 for a 1968 Ford Motors event, immediately on the heels of Cabaret, which had opened late in 1966. This might feel like a stretch, but this comparison really points up how some of the ideas in Cabaret are really more vaudeville than Weimar.

I’ve transposed the Cabaret example for comparison:

The little cymbal splash/choke makes that vaudeville flavor really pop.

17. It’s A Business

Amy Acchione Myers in Villanova’s production of Curtains, Photo by Paola Nogueras

This number went into the show early and stayed through subsequent drafts. 

There are a lot of words to memorize here. 

The trombone 2 glissando coming from 12 into 13 is important. Here’s my recommendation. After the caesura (railroad tracks), give a downbeat in the tempo of the cut time you’re about to go into. The trombone gliss, which is technically beat 4 of the old tempo, is a half a measure worth of the new tempo. Once you do it, it’ll make sense. Giving 3 in the old tempo and then switching immediately after one beat to a new tempo seems needlessly complicated. 

The vamp at 77-80 looks easy enough on the page, but it can be confusing from the standpoint of the pit players. You might actually set a number of repeats for measure 77 and go on deliberately to vamp 79 and 80 in the normal way. It sounds like the bass that changes in 78 is the last time through the pass, and that could cause your trumpets to come in wrong in the following measure. 

The stagehand parts are not a walk in the part, particularly where they’ve split into 3 parts. If you’ve cast any female stagehands, (and I think you should) you’ll want to get creative about how to assign parts. Having women sing that E flat up high in head voice isn’t really the vibe, but the low G might not have a lot of body if you have them sing it in the lower register. 

In the Piano/Vocal version of the score, the right and left hand step on each other in measures 206 and 207. Just play the right and the descending bass there, leave off the back-beats.

The Ka-Ching sound effect that comes with the mainstage files you buy from the licensing people is really cool, and is on the A and B at the bottom of the keyboard. You’ll have to get the band to cut off really short at the top of 210 if you want the audience to hear it. You also have to let your banjo player and your first trumpet know that you need beats 2 and 3 clear, because the banjo has a gliss and the trumpet has a doit, which both players may instinctively start before beat 4. 

18. Kansasland

Another place where you wish there was a fiddle in the pit. 

The harmonica patch in the keyboard book is really fun to play, and the combo at 41 is one of the most delightful sounds I’ve ever gotten to play in a pit. 

I’m not interested in getting into arguments here, but I strongly advise you to use the alternate text for Randy and eliminate the Native American character in the dance break. The lines they send you don’t line up exactly with the original text, you’ll need to make some choices about how they go. 

Then this Saint Louis Woman came a-knocking at the door

A former farmer’s daughter gussied up in Haute Couture. 

At first the mounted cavalry thought she was hot to trot

She picked bad guy Rob Hood to tie his noose or tie the knot. 

(it’s that last line that doesn’t really scan right. Bad Guy sits wrong on the stress of the measure, especially at speed) 

18A. Kansasland Dance

This is a great dance break, but if you find it’s too long, there are plenty of places to make sensible cuts, because it organizes itself into very discrete sections. 

19. She Did It (Reprise)

This is one of my favorite reprises; it’s such a fun joke. 

20. I Miss The Underscoring

Again, we wish we had real strings. Very straightforward cue. 

21. Thinking of Missing the Music

Yet another spot where we wish we had some strings! 

Note that the lyric is ‘the music I make with you’ this time around. 

22. A Tough Act to Follow

This number is a cousin of Singin’ in the Rain. (transposed for comparison, transcription is mine, the iconic intro for the Gene Kelly version is not in the published sheet music)

Tough Act to Follow went into the show early and stayed through multiple drafts. I think they were fond of this number because it is included in the 2004 Kander and Ebb anthology as the only song from Curtains, which was then in development.

The various scores disagree in notating swung eighths versus dotted eight-sixteenth note swing. The effect is the same.

Our Cioffi found the opening of this number too low, so I moved it up a step, switching back to the show key at 22A. If you do that, though, Niki has to sing C# for the first note of 22A.

22A. A Tough Act to Follow Dance

This really is a beautiful dance sequence, very fun to play and well orchestrated. The sax choir at 149 is terrifically scored. 

The transition into 3 at 100 will take some getting used to, both in dance rehearsal and with the orchestra. If you’re conducting from the piano, The harp figure that leads into 100 is probably a two handed affair, which will leave you with only a head nod to get the point across. If I’m not mistaken, though, the new quarter is pretty close to the old eighth, if that helps your players. 

At 121, it says dictated, but unless the choreography is trying to hit something very particular that need to be out of tempo, I’d just conduct it really clearly in 4, to set up the tempo primo at 123 correctly. 

From 147-169, the keyboard part is in that classic piano obbligato a la Ferrante and Teicher. If you are an improviser, there are some ways to open these out a little even, provided you stay in the spaces the orchestrator has made for these phrases. 

The chorus vocals at the end are mislabeled in the parts. They are correctly labeled in the Piano Vocal score, with the women on the top part and the men on the bottom. You’ll save yourself a lot of time in the music rehearsal if you tell them to relabel that right away. 

We found this choral part a little difficult, because we didn’t have a huge chorus, and this section needs a big MGM sound. If you have the resources to put backstage voices on this, you should, but of course this show is huge and you’ll probably be strapped for mics as it is. They’ll need to be on monitor to be in time. Just another of the many places you’ll want to be really engaged in the production meetings. 

If you choose to cut a note here and there from the harmony, I recommend taking a note from one of the seconds. Obviously, if you have the voices (and the ears) it’s better to have all the parts covered. 

Stomp, Hop, slap, step, slap, step, stamp is really tough to say! Make it part of your warm-up! 

22B. Eerie Sounds from the Pit 

It isn’t important that the actual sounds you hear from the pit are the ones listed. You can have fun here, as long as you don’t overdo it. Ideally you have a pit with access from the back, technically an actor should emerge from there. 

22C. Johnny’s Death

Clarity is important here. Don’t be afraid to cut a player if they can’t play the passages cleanly; there’s a lot of doubling. If you’re conducting from the keyboard, you might leave out the organ chord in the first measure and try for a clean beat instead. 

22D. In the Same Boat #3

This is supposed to be pre-recorded. It’s a better effect if you do, but you’ll have to do it at an orchestra rehearsal, and that will require some legwork you’ll need to bring the sound person in on. Again, another thing to bring up early in a production meeting. It’s only the drums, piano, bass, and chorus, so you could in fact bring the drummer and bass player in early and do it without the other pit players there. 

22E. In the Same Boat #4

This will also need to be pre-recorded. See notes above. 

23. In the Same Boat #5

It’s tough to establish the new tempo at measure 3. Get your drummer on the same page and hope for the best. Again, if you’re conducting from the keys, you might lay out for at least the first two measures to make the tempo clear. 

23. Something Fast 

Another brief number with a ridiculous premise. Play as fast as you can play cleanly. The piano part could come in the second time to add some variety if you liked. 

24. In The Same Boat- Complete

Fr. David Cregan and cast, Villanova Curtains production 2022, photo by Paola Nogueras

Kander at one point commented that this number does double duty as the 11:00 number for both Cioffi and the show within the show.

If you have Cioffi sing what he’s assigned on the page, it’s the most difficult part of the show for him, and quite difficult to remember, particularly in context with all the other things he has to remember. But you could also just have him improvise bringing everything together. He’s essentially toggling back and forth between all the various versions.  You’ll have to break them into 2 parts at 84. I chose to put the sopranos and tenors on group 1 and the altos and basses on group 2, for range reasons. If you’ve taught the earlier versions well, these parts should fit together like a glove, except at the modulation point at 114. That will take a little drilling. 

25. Wide Open Spaces-Sung Bows

This is similar, but not identical to the other versions. For one thing, Georgia sings it correctly! 

25A. The Company Exits

The timing of this underscore takes a little finessing; it doesn’t quite line up with the landmarks the way it appears on the page. There’s very little happening at 9, it’s easy to get disoriented somehow. From 25 on, particularly at 40, the balance with the guitar is tricky to manage. When the piano comes in at 44, playing a viola pizz patch, you’ll feel like it’s barely holding together. I like an underscore that stays in the background, but this one is so minimalist, you might feel like it isn’t there at all. 

After the number is over, you have a line. 

“We are excused, Inspector General?”

26. Show People Reprise

That opening note may just be in the brain of your Carmen, but if not, you’ll need to find a way to cue it subtly. 

26a. Transition to Stage

This is pretty straightforward. Your brass will feel like that MGM passage up top needs to be big, but you’re trying to stay under the dialogue. If that proves impossible, put a fermata on the timpani roll in the first measure with an fp marking, and just delay measure 2 and following a little to clear the dialogue and give Cioffi more time for his costume change. 

In measure 49, the timing is different for the chorus. 

There’s another gunshot cue in measure 64 you may want the sound people to take care of. 

26b. Robbin’ Hood Revealed 

Very very similar to 2aa, except for one odd trombone measure in the middle, and the substitution of Trombone 2 for Reed 4 to make time for an instrument change. 

27. A Tough Act Finale

Again, there’s ways to cut notes, particularly in measures 8, 23, and 24. You can cut the bottom note for the tenors and basses in measure 26 a d the top note in 27 and 28 if you like. 

The timing for the chorus here is unfortunately not the same as the other version, so you’ll have to work to get those two versions straight. 

TOUGH ACT DANCE: 

YOU and I

WE could be a

TOUGH act to follow

(rest) can’t you see?

TOUGH ACT FINALE

(one) You and I

(one) We could stay a 

TOUGH (rest) act (rest) to follow

(rest) in every way! 

If you run these back to back, particularly in the week before you open, things will go much better. 

28. Bows (short Version)

Photo Paola Nogueras

I remember the first time I conducted a group of pros in a pit and I came across one of these woodwind passages like we have here at the beginning of this number. I chose a midtempo because it looked hard to me. An old pro said, “You know, Peter, we play this lick all the time, it’s really easy. Go ahead and do it fast”. The nice thing about a cliche is that everybody knows it. 

These bows are set up to go with characters. The characters are listed in the Piano Vocal and not in the Piano Conductor Scores or Full Scores. Record this and let your director or choreographer know who is supposed to come in where. You can cut from 115-123 if your Cioffi isn’t a household name. 9 measures is a long time to bow if you’re not David Hyde Pierce. 

29. Bows Vocal 

The transition from 28 into 29 can be daunting. Everyone is amped up and they may miss the cue. You’ll want to drill measures 129 and 130 in no. 28. 129 is a big set of four upbeats to the big downbeat on 130. But remind the chorus that there’s one more note, in the bari sax, timpani, and floor tom on beat 2 before they come in.  

The last long note is one of the spots where I play the chord and tell everyone to pick a note in the chord that feels good and sing loud. 

30. Exit Music

Fast is best! 

Measure 41 is hard for the pianist, but if you can improvise at all, there’s other things you might do here. 45 is fun if you do it hand over hand. 

Pit Orchestra Considerations:

For Villanova’s production I was fortunate to be able to hire all the books for this show. Or perhaps I should say almost all the books. My keyboard 1 player took another job at the last minute and I had to conduct from the piano. This is totally doable, but if you are using the patches the Keyboard 1 book requires, you will have to cobble together a new score from the part and the piano conductor score, because the piano conductor score does not contain every note and patch change included in the keyboard book, and the keyboard book does not contain a great deal of the information you need to cue the show. It took me about 3 hours with the copy machine, tape, and scissors to make my book. If you don’t hire every other book, though, you will need to enhance the part to fill in some of the missing parts. 

The drum book is essential, but the percussion book is not critically important. We rented a malletkat, because bringing in all the mallet instruments would have taken up a third of the pit space. An acoustic bass is also pretty important in a dance show like this. Although the guitar book enhances the rhythm section considerably, particularly when the banjo comes in, the show would work pretty well without it. Reed 1 and 3 are full of very important things. Reed 2 and 4 are less critical. Reed 4 has bassoon in it, and reed 2 has oboe and english horn. I tried very hard to get doublers in Philly but couldn’t contract anyone, so I moved the oboe and english horn to clarinet and the basson into bass clarinet. I transposed them for the players, and I’m pretty quick, but it took a while. The books work well that way, but we miss that classical sound of the double reeds, especially in the absence of any strings. Someone out there is wondering why I didn’t ditch the clarinets and saxes in those books instead, but this show is really a sax clarinet show with a smattering of double reeds for character, not the other way around. If you were to hire two extra players to play the double reed parts of those books, they’d be very bored for most of the show. Trombone 2 has some important slides in various places, and although it’s marked to have a tuba doubling, that is in no way necessary. The horn parts are colorful and have some characteristic rips in the Kansasland sections. As always, you have to think about the brass as a unit; you don’t want a trumpet blasting away up high without anyone filling in things below. The balance is bad. 

I hope you have as wonderful a time in your production as we did! 

How did they do school shows back in the day?

I’ve recently found some old sources about how to put on a school show. This blog originally catered toward people putting on school shows, and I thought some of my readers might get a kick out of how much things have changed, and how they also absolutely haven’t changed at all. There seems to have been a real vogue for school operetta from the late 1920s through 1940, and most of these quotes come from that era.

Cast of the Junction City High School Operetta 1911

Oddball Advice

Have all your rehearsals onstage.

“Have your rehearsals conducted as often as possible upon the stage on which the contemplated performance is to take place, for in an operetta you will in all probability have groups to deal with. If available space is not taken well into account, it will be found necessary at the last moment, perhaps, to dispense with the services of some who have worked hard in preparation, and who have possibly gone to the expense of purchasing a costume. This, to a boy or girl is heartbreaking.” -Joseph Despicht, The Practical Teacher, 1898.

Despicht goes on to explain that if you can’t have all your rehearsals onstage, you can tape out another room to make sure you don’t need to dismiss half the chorus when you realize they don’t fit on the stage. I love that this advice sounds like it comes from bitter experience.

Kids are cool and will basically get all your casting decisions.

“The director should be unbiased in choosing his principal characters. His chorus must know that he is governed in his choice by the desire for a successful production. Students are generally fair minded and will abide by the directors decision.” -William J. Watkins, Producing a School Operetta, 1937

Where is this school? Has anyone experienced this calm reaction to casting, ever?

Scenery is Overrated.

“Perhaps the wisest plan is to trouble very little about [scenery], for it is far less essential than many people suppose…” -Joseph Despicht, The Practical Teacher, 1898.

If you need publicity, that’s what the English department is for.

“The English department will handle the publicity.”-William J. Watkins, Producing a School Operetta, 1937

Or you can do it the old fashioned way: (I’m pretty sure this picture was meant as a joke in the book)

Frank A. Beach’s Preparation and Presentation of the Operetta, 1930

Wow, Things Have Changed!

Those gas lights can be a pain.

“Let some adult be in charge of all lights and fires about the premises. He should have no other duties. Lastly, don’t lower the gas in the auditorium so that visitors can neither read their programmes nor the Book of Words.”-Joseph Despicht, The Practical Teacher, 1898.

I know this is the way theatrical lighting has been for most of the history of theatre, but it’s a miracle everyone wasn’t immolated at every production.

Need electrical lighting equipment? Make it yourself!

“A home-made dimmer may be constructed at a comparatively small cost. In making a dimmer, consideration should first be given to the resistance, voltage, and candle power of the light to be employed. Ordinarily a resistance equal to four times the resistance of the lamp load must be placed in series with the foots or borders, or with both, in order to dim completely either or both of these circuits. The bulletin, L.D. 146 A of the General Electric Company, on stage lighting suggests…”-Frank A. Beach, Preparation and Presentation of the Operetta, 1930

“A set of four or five dimmers can be made for five dollars. Common drain tile is used. A copper slug is cemented to the bottom of the tile, with an electric cord attached to the slug leading out the bottom. To the other end of the cord is attached another copper slug. The second wire is unbroken and runs down the outside of the tile. The tile is filled with water and the closer the slugs come together the brighter the light will be…” – Gwynne Burrows, Light Opera Production For School and Community, 1929

“The following homemade dimming device is very satisfactory for small stages. In recommending this we want to again caution the amateur to be very careful, for there is always danger in handling live wires. Take two old dry cell batteries and extract the center pole by breaking away the packing around it. This center pole is a stick of carbon. Next cut one of the wires of the electric cord leading from the current source… fill a large earthen jar three-fourths full of water…” – Kenneth R. Umfleet, School Operettas and Their Production 1929

Hold up. To save money, we’re chopping up batteries and floating things in water?? After theatrical lighting went electric, it’s still amazing everyone wasn’t killed!

An opposing view is expressed by Mr. Jones:

“While it is quite possible to make improvised dimmers, it is not advisable on account of the fire risk and the danger of electrocuting the stage crew.” -Charles T. H. Jones, Musico-Dramatic Producing, 1930

Have half the rehearsals during the school day.

“It is always desirable to make the rehearsals a part of the classroom work…”-Clifford A. Caton, How To Select and Produce Operettas, 1930

“In this schedule at least one-half the time required should be taken from the regular school day. The arrangement of such a program will conserve the strength of the participants, avoid conflict with scheduled and extra events, encourage cooperation, and avoid serious encroachments upon the leisure hours of the student and the director.”-Frank A. Beach, Preparation and Presentation of the Operetta, 1930

But when would they do the standardized testing?

Costumes? Make the girls sew them.

“…when a performance of any dramatic piece is contemplated a committee of ladies should be formed to carry out this department of the business. The ordinary theatrical costumer does not care for the work unless he may charge an enormous price. The school staff, assisted by lady friends, do the work better, and at much less cost.”-Joseph Despicht, The Practical Teacher, 1898.

Well, the bit about theatrical costumers charging a lot you have to agree with. But surely there must have been some boys who wouldn’t have minded helping?

Don’t choose shows with all that tawdry jazz in it.

“It is a cause for regret that so many [published operettas], consisting of cheap and tawdry verses set to commonplace and drab, or jazz-colored melodies, masquerade as worthy operettas, and as such are admitted into good standing in the musical repertoire of many schools.”-Frank A. Beach, Preparation and Presentation of the Operetta, 1930

No Cello? An Alto Sax will do. They can just transpose.

-Charles T. H. Jones, Musico-Dramatic Producing, 1930

This is just a terrible, terrible idea. No, no, no.

I’m just going to leave this here…

Both of these come from Frank A. Beach’s Preparation and Presentation of the Operetta, 1930

These are from Charles T. H. Jones, Musico-Dramatic Producing, 1930, who says “The only real black-face makeup is done with burnt cork.”

“Irish, German, blackface, and similar characters usually involve a certain amount of dialect, and actors must be especially careful not to overdo it. The colored porter in ‘Peggy and the Pirate,’ the Swedish maid in ‘Sailor Maids,’ and the Irish comedian in ‘Belle of Barcelona’ are funny only if they are heard.”-Clifford A. Caton, How To Select and Produce Operettas, 1930

Let’s hope those days are all behind us.

Some Things Never Change

Pick a worthwhile show.

“If the supervisor or amateur director, then, realizes and accepts his responsibility and opportunity in connection with the selection of an operetta, he will be confronted by two questions: first, ‘What will the singer do to the operetta,’ -second, and equally important, ‘What will the operetta do to the singer?'”-Frank A. Beach, Preparation and Presentation of the Operetta, 1930

“…our first admonition is to select an operetta worthy of serious production, one that will enlarge the interest in life itself, that will instruct and deepen the sympathies, and lead to a better insight into the motives of men.”– Kenneth R. Umfleet, School Operettas and Their Production 1929

Use Understudies.

“The presence of well-trained understudies also serves another purpose- that of keeping each member of the cast alert in the matter of attendance, interest, and effort; for the knowledge that someone else stands ready to step into his place is an excellent spur for each principal.”-Frank A. Beach, Preparation and Presentation of the Operetta, 1930

Don’t let kids cast the show.

“To have a vocal class vote on these candidates is one way of asking for trouble. The judgment of the class is too apt to be prejudiced.”-William J. Watkins, Producing a School Operetta, 1937

Shockingly, I occasionally hear of schools that have students make the casting decisions today.

Don’t bow to parental pressure.

“A supervisor should be cautious in dealing with the ambitious ‘little star’ who in order to gain a footing, will sometimes bring unthought-of pressure, and even parents with interests somewhat their own ‘move in mysterious ways their wonders to perform.'”– Kenneth R. Umfleet, School Operettas and Their Production 1929

“Family connections, social prestige, or financial status have no bearing whatever on the qualifications of the actor. No boy should be chosen because he is the trustee’s son, and no girl is qualified merely because she is the banker’s daughter!”-Clifford A. Caton, How To Select and Produce Operettas, 1930

Make sure the singing parts are cast with actual singers.

“Singing by people absolutely devoid of prowess is torture to performer and audience alike.” – Charles T.H. Jones, Musico-Dramatic Producing, 1930

Learn the music first.

“If possible, let all learn all the music, solos and choruses (regard being paid to the range of the child’s voice) and let the spoken parts be read til all errors are eliminated. Nothing so irritates the young performers as to have to ‘stand about’ when all should be in action, while some soloist repeats and re-repeats his part.” -Joseph Despicht, The Practical Teacher, 1898.

Yes. Have the music rehearsals first.

Somebody actually needs to block the show.

“Although it is plainly evident to the audience that in the preparation of the operetta the music has been carefully directed, it is equally apparent to a critical observer that the action in the average operetta suffers from the lack of direction.” -Frank A. Beach, Preparation and Presentation of the Operetta, 1930

Biggest complaint I hear from kids about productions they’re in? They had to make up their own blocking.

Your costumes need not be as racy as they are on Broadway or the Vegas national tour.

“In connection with the dancing chorus it is well to supervise the type of costumes that will be worn. Girls particularly will want to wear the abbreviated costumes seen on the professional stage. These generally are unsuited to school productions, aside from the fact that they are seldom compatible with the text of the show. Perhaps the most serious effect of this type of costume is to provoke eyebrow raising and loss of sympathy for the production by the adults of the audience. They may ask, and rightly so, if that is the sort of things schools are teaching today.” -William J. Watkins, Producing a School Operetta, 1937

I’m with him. In some high school productions I’ve attended, I’ve spent most of the dance numbers studying carefully the ad for the car dealership on the back inside cover of the program. Oh, and you kids get off my lawn.

You also don’t need to blow your vocal cords out singing like the Original Cast Recording.

“The conductor will do well to keep in mind the fact that the average operetta will be given but once; the voices of the singers will be used for years to come. No vocal effect therefore will justify the misuse of the voices of the cast and chorus. Furthermore, the director in his choice of the operetta should remember that a work which has no moments that are really musical- from a vocal standpoint- is unworthy of the time of the conductor, the cast, or the chorus.” -Frank A. Beach, Preparation and Presentation of the Operetta, 1930

Get those scene changes moving fast.

“One or more of the early rehearsals should be devoted to stage setting alone; the director may use, as an incentive for acquiring rapid shifts, a definite time limit within which the used setting is to be removed and the next one set up. Dress rehearsals often drag late into the night simply because the stage manager has neglected to have separate rehearsals for scenery and lighting.”-Frank A. Beach, Preparation and Presentation of the Operetta, 1930

“Do not forget to hold one or more special rehearsals for the stage crew at which time nothing is done but the actual changing of scenery and properties. A half-hour wait between acts is intolerable and unnecessary.”-William J. Watkins, Producing a School Operetta, 1937

“Never, under any circumstances, let more than ten minutes elapse between acts. Five minutes are better.”– Gwynne Burrows, Light Opera Production For School and Community, 1929

Shout it from the rooftops, people.

Have an honest to goodness dress rehearsal and give the speech.

“See that they are equipped with everything necessary and require them to wear it at least for the first act if no change is necessary. This is important. You will then find that the flowing dresses of the girls catch on the scenery, that one boy trips himself on his cane, that swords are difficult to manage, that beards fall off and any number of things are apt to happen. Another trial for the director is the disposal of costumes after the dress rehearsal. Watch your hero throw is outfit in a corner and rush out. When he wants it again, he will not be able to find it. Then confusion results, and the curtain rises on a thoroughly demoralized hero. Get a suit box for each person. Impress your cast with the necessity for taking care of their costumes. Your home economics people should check them as soon after the dress rehearsal as possible. Hold your dress rehearsal at least two days before the performance.”-William J. Watkins, Producing a School Operetta, 1937

Makeup. Amirite?

“Watch the make-up problem. Amateur make-up artists are often bad. Professionals are sometimes worse. In a school auditorium where the lighting is inferior to the professional theater, your professional make-up man will plaster it on so think as to make your actors look ridiculous. Try out your make-up man as you do your electricians and scene shifters. It will pay dividends.” -William J. Watkins, Producing a School Operetta, 1937

There’s always that one kid…

“You cannot do anything with the fellow who arrives at the school just at curtain time. He is a species that produces gray hair on the director’s head. Sometimes you can predict who that person will be, but sometimes it is your most trusted principal actor… In any event, if you wish to live to a normal age, have your entire company on hand a half hour before curtain time- and keep them out of sight.” -William J. Watkins, Producing a School Operetta, 1937

Be inspirational. Energy, energy, energy!

“Just before the curtain is ready for the overture he should call all of his people on stage and have another one of his heart-to-heart talks. This talk should be entirely optimistic; he knows they are going to give him a wonderful performance; that every one must give him the best that is in him; that they must all watch for their entrances; speak loud enough and make the audience feel that this is the happiest and peppiest bunch of young people in the country.” – Gwynne Burrows, Light Opera Production For School and Community, 1929

But More Importantly: Why do it?

“Reasons might be easily added, such as the extraordinary amount of pleasure the young folks take in the musical portion of an operetta, the charm this always has for the parents and friends of the youthful singers, and so on…”-Joseph Despicht, The Practical Teacher, 1898.

 “Few programs seem to afford audiences as great pleasure as does the school operetta: it seems to be a lodestone which attracts many who are vitally interested in, as well as those who are remotely concerned with, what is going on in the school. The pleasure afforded to the school community; the gratification which results from seeing, even in a minor role or in a chorus part, one’s own child or a neighbor’s; and the varied appeals of the operetta itself,- all combine to make it a unique medium through which a school may appeal to its own particular and intimate audience.” -Frank A Beach, Preparation and Presentation of the Operetta, 1930

Kenneth Umfleet’s words are still profound and important, probably more true now than 80 years later.

“Most of our educational efforts have been considered sufficient if they have properly attended to the intellectual side of the pupil. The emotional elements, which in reality are far more important in determining character and action, have been left to shift for themselves, practically unguided. We have been centering our efforts on training the intellect rather than the emotions, yet the greater part of mankind lives, and is guided by emotion. It is said that practically all the actions of the present generation are traceable to an emotional source, and, in view of this supposition, the neglect of emotional training is a serious fault in our educational system. It is the opinion of many that dramatic activity will serve as an emotional outlet, an excellent safety valve for the young…

…Moreover, in our schools and in our life we fail to recognize adequately the educational power of joy – the joy of refined and edifying leisure activities. Our education seems to have run to brains, giving slight regard for the feelings. It has been slighting the heart, the imagination, the creative and dramatic nature of the child…”– Kenneth R. Umfleet, School Operettas and Their Production 1929

I’ll try and share more trips down memory lane as I come across them!

A Wonderful Noise: A Musical By Michael Hollinger and Vance Lehmkuhl

I had the privilege of Music Directing a delightful new musical by Michael Hollinger and Vance Lehmkuhl this past Spring at Villanova. Normally when I music direct a production, I do a long and exhaustive guide explaining the ins and outs of putting up the piece. Because this work is newer, and because I was heavily involved on the creative end of the production, I’m going to write this post a little differently. This lovely work deserves a wider audience and I’ll make a case for which kinds of companies could put it on. I also imagine some of you may be interested in the backstage process of putting on a new work like this, so I’m going to share what it was like to prepare to program the work, to rehearse it, and some of the process of orchestrating the music for the pit.

Michael Hollinger is a nationally known Philadelphia playwright with a reputation for writing very smart, carefully constructed plays full of humor and insight. He is a careful listener, an insightful teacher, and a witty and thoughtful conversationalist. His plays share these qualities. If you don’t know his work, you’re really missing out. I should also mention that he is a fine violist and a wonderful speaker about the process of writing a play.

Vance Lehmkuhl writes for the Philadelphia Daily News and is an expert on all things vegan. He is an exceptional and award winning cartoonist, sometime pop-band frontman, music enthusiast, and remarkable outside-the-box thinker. Kind, clever, and hilarious, Vance is the sort of fellow you want to be standing next to at a Vegan party.

These two really extraordinary men met and began collaborating at Oberlin College and have worked on a number of projects together. They wrote A Wonderful Noise as a collaborative effort. Michael wrote the book alone, but the story, score, and lyrics were a team project. The musical has won the Frederick Loewe award for Musical Theatre and the In The Spirit of America Award from the Barbara Barondess MacLean foundation, and it was produced very successfully at Creede Repertory Theatre in 2009.

I profile the authors here because the piece shares many of the qualities and interests of these two delightful and unusual men. A Wonderful Noise is a rarity for new musical theatre. The writers set out to write an un-ironic book show set in the 1940s, built around 9 young Americans “becoming the Greatest Generation”, as Hollinger put it once in a conversation with the cast. The musical is a love letter to classic musical theatre and barbershop harmony, but it also manages to tackle feminist issues, pacifism, and religious differences with warmth and humanity. The lyrics are fun, zany, and often very witty.

The plot revolves around two singing groups entering a barbershop competition in 1941: The Harmelodians, a traditional mens group, and Sweet Adeline, a girls harmony group trying to crash the competition dressed as men. The members of these two groups are locked in a musical and romantic rivalry which comes to a head at the competition itself. Meanwhile, the threat of war begins to cast a shadow that threatens them all.

The book scenes demonstrate Hollinger’s trademark deft storytelling touches, smart characterization, and perfectly seamless exposition, and the musical storytelling is ambitious and smart. It’s difficult to tell a story using period musical ideas without descending quickly into characterless pastiche, but Hollinger and Lehmkuhl find ways to be authentic to the tone of the period that are infused with a personal and zany voice that feels really original. I’d like to single out nine numbers for special mention:

All photos here are from the Villanova production directed by Harriet Power, and were taken by Paola Nogueras.

1. End of the Line

The opening number of the show takes place as both quartets arrive in Saint Louis. It’s a rousing kickoff that makes great use of the entire cast, both contrapuntally and as a full group. The accompaniment sets the mood of the period, the number quotes Chattanooga Choo Choo and briefly introduces a melody which will later be the major love theme of the show.

2. All for One

The men’s group is introduced in this lively march, which deftly quotes several classic songs to introduce the importance of Barbershop in the characters’ conception of comradeship, especially as it relates to World War I. This is also the first time we begin to hear snippets of real barbershop harmony, all of which is executed very authentically over the course of the piece.

3. Give A Girl A Chance

The ladies opening number is a rousing ensemble calling for greater opportunities for women. There are some deft Motown touches and comic moments that seemed very apt as we presented the musical during the Primary season in 2016. It’s a showstopper.

4. Turn The Clock/Corner of Your Heart

A Wonderful Noise does some really smart and special storytelling in this arena: In a flashback it is revealed that Chip and Mae had been dating some time earlier. Chip had written a poem, which Mae had set to music as a surprise. When their relationship failed, each of them took the song back to their groups and arranged it for quartet, unbeknownst to the other. The audience gets to hear the material as originally presented, and also in two totally different arrangements, each of which shrewdly reveals the characters differing outlooks. (both musically, and in terms of what happened in the relationship) This use of music to reveal character is the mark of a well-made show.

We hear the men’s version of Turn The Clock in rehearsal, and it’s really fun to watch them fine tune their performance. It’s a straight up traditional barbershop ballad, with all the charm and detail we would hope for from the genre. The ladies version is a very subtle piece of writing for women, with some exquisite harmony and some word changes to show Mae’s thoughts on their breakup.

5. I Can Sing That

Agnes has a wonderful traditional showtune here, where she tells Pettigrew she can sing anything, and then does, including a Mongolian Yak Milking song. It brought down the house.

6. Act I Closer (Give and Take)

This sequence is really special. Snippets of barbershop are peppered through the final scene of the Act, which is a complicated game of one-upmanship. That scene rolls seamlessly into a really complex closing number, with touches of Music Man style speak-singing, fast close harmony, a catchy tune, scatting, a canon, and a wild 8 part counterpoint that barrels us to the act’s conclusion. It is quite difficult to learn; we needed to spend a lot of rehearsal time to get it into shape. But while the material is difficult, and there’s a lot going on, the storytelling is very strong and easy to follow, and it leaves us breathlessly right where we should be at an act break.

7. Ma Roney’s Daughter

This number is meant to be a little too off-color for the audience at the competition, but it’s very tame by today’s standards. (which is part of the joke) This is easily the funniest barbershop number I’ve ever heard. Barbershop groups should really be doing this outside the context of the show. I won’t spoil the jokes for you, except to say that the song is about the charms of dating and marrying a woman with a wooden leg. The barbershop writing is really exceptional, and it’s beautifully paced. Another show-stopper.

8. Chit Chat

A really fun number with wonderful wordplay and a great swing dance break for two guys.

9. Chin Up

This was a difficult number to learn, but it’s a wonderful toe-tapping audience pleaser with some hilarious lyrics, and a really fun all-sing for 6 characters. Picture a rousing Dixie style romp full of references to historical figures who failed and got back up again. (except some of them didn’t)

Those are just 9 of the numbers in this little jewel of a show. Many smaller companies often have difficulty tackling Golden Age musicals, with their large cast and orchestra sizes and budget breaking scenic needs. This musical taps into the same kind of nostalgia and good-clean fun you would expect from pre-1960s musicals, with a knowing nod to some relevant social issues and some modern touches. It also has the potential to resonate strongly with older audiences. But unlike shows like Oklahoma or Brigadoon, A Wonderful Noise would work best in a small house with a strong ensemble cast of good musicians (more on that later). If that describes your theatre, I would encourage you to look into this show. Audiences adore the barbershop quartet in The Music Man; this musical plays out the same joyous thrill over the course of an entire evening.

Behind the Scenes of the Villanova Production

Barbershop Workshop

In 2006, director Harriet Power headed a two week workshop at New Dramatists with the authors to develop and revise the piece, so in a sense, our production was a reunion of a creative team that had originally done a lot of the work of perfecting the show. I was the new kid on the block with this piece, but they brought me up to speed in a hurry.

We began talking about the production a year in advance. Because of the complicated a cappella writing throughout, we wanted to make sure we had the kind of singers to pull off the score well. We held a workshop on Barbershop/Sweet Adelines singing on campus to explore the interest and abilities of our student body. Michael, Vance, and Harriet joined me as I gave a brief talk about Barbershop Singing, its history and practice. Then we did a warmup and I quickly separated the singers into 4 parts based on range. Then I took the ladies, Michael, Vance, and Harriet took the men, and we quickly taught them a passage of traditional barbershop. If you’ve ever done any barbershop style singing, you know that the highest part and the bass part are not generally very difficult to hear, that the melody is in the second voice from the top, (called the lead) and that the second to lowest voice (or baritone) is often punishingly difficult, because it threads in and out over the melody note to fill in whatever note in the chord isn’t covered by the other three voices. It’s best to teach this kind of music a part at a time, combining voices in different pairings until everyone knows what’s happening relative to the other parts. If you’re paying close attention as you teach the parts, you can easily discover who has a good enough ear to carry the part, who has potential, and who really can’t do it. There are many fine singers who can’t negotiate these kinds of interior parts. When we had taught a passage, we split up into solo quartets and tried it without the piano to help. Then, at the end of an hour or so, we all came back together and sang our selections as a group to each other. Like most colleges these days, Villanova has a very strong a cappella scene, so many of these singers had experience with a cappella music, but not much familiarity with barbershop, and as with most people, they were surprised at how fun and challenging it was! The creative team decided it would indeed be possible to mount the show, but we’d need to spend a lot of time making sure we cast the right people, and we confirmed the suspicion that we’d plenty of rehearsal time to get a collegiate cast where they needed to be. Villanova acquitted itself well.

The semester before auditions, I designed and taught an undergraduate course about a cappella singing; how to arrange for vocal ensembles, basic vocal and rehearsal techniques, auditioning and organizational ideas, etc. It was built to support the student a cappella community at Villanova, which is very strong, but it also gave me a chance to get my own head around the issues involved. The class was such fun, we’re repeating it this coming year.

Preparations

The show had two public readings and a full production with piano before we got to it, but this was going to be the first time it would be performed with a pit orchestra. I was charged with the task of writing the orchestrations. The summer before the production, I met with Michael and Vance over vegan snacks and coffee, and we carefully went over how I was going to build the band parts. It was important to me that we have a small pit, in the same scale as the cast, firstly because Villanova’s performance space isn’t enormous, and secondly because I wanted future productions to be able to hire the entire instrumentation without having to cut anything for budgetary reasons. The show needed a swing feeling, so we opted for Piano, Bass, Drums, two reeds, (doubling between them flute, piccolo, clarinets, alto, tenor, and bari saxes) a trumpet and a trombone.

As I began orchestrating, I listened to a lot of Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, and of course Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson and Count Basie. I discovered the challenge was to recreate the sound of the swing era without a full compliment of reeds to play against a full compliment of brass. In a big band arrangement, the trumpets usually play together, the saxes play something else, and the trombones yet a third thing, mostly as sections, antiphonally. You can’t really do that with only one trumpet, one trombone, and 2 reeds. That instrumentation is better suited to a dixieland style. However, I found that you can get some of the same feel even with a reduced orchestra if you’re clever. When the alto sax is on top of a chord voicing and the tenor is on the bottom, with the trombone in the middle, you can get a decent sax section clone. (although it gives the trombone a workout) When the trumpet is on top, the trombone on the bottom, and the alto in the middle, you get a kind of brassy trumpety sort of sound, and when you put the tenor sax in unison with the trombone, you can fake that kind of trombone section all-play sound fairly well. There’s a charming duet in the second act between the Jewish member of the mens group where he attempts to court a girl in the other group who is pretending to be Jewish and failing. Writing the quirky klezmer clarinet was a lot of fun, and I found other places in the score to write Gene Krupa style toms, soulful bluesy sax, marching band piccolo obbligato, dixieland trombone, and motown bari sax. It was really a blast to put together the pit.

As I finished first drafts of each of the numbers, I’d send them to the authors, and they’d return notes to me that were really helpful, clarifying what they intended dramatically, and I worked to clarify my work to reflect their intentions. It was delightful to have such an inside look at how the authors wanted their material performed, and I felt much better prepared to start the production.

Auditions

Our audition process was very specialized and comprehensive. We heard the normal song selection of classic musical theatre and a monologue, and I did a range check. Then I did two ear-training exercises; the traditional one, where I played a three note chord and  asked the actor to sing the middle pitch of the three. Again, an inability to hear that pitch doesn’t make a person a bad singer, but for a show like this, you need really fine ears. If we got a good result there, I put the actors through a really unreasonable test: I played My Country Tis Of Thee with them, then asked them to sing it in the same key they just sang it in, while I accompanied them in another key entirely. By the time we got through that gauntlet, the audition committee and I had a fairly good idea  of who was going to be a possibility for the two quartets. Of that group, we separated the voice types, particularly looking for the highest and lowest parts. This style of singing requires a very strong, clear bass, and a light, floaty high tenor. The singers best at putting over a song should go to the Lead, and the best ear should go to the Baritone. (second from the bottom) This distribution is also true of the ladies group. Of course, the authors and directors also had strong ideas about who would suit the roles best, which figured into our callback plans as well.

For the callbacks, I had isolated brief sections of the more difficult moments in the solo and duet numbers to be sure our actors were capable of the harder non-group moments. We also taught 4-8 measures of the a cappella music for the men and another set for the women. The big moment in the evening was the counterpoint section of Give and Take. We taught the large group of actors the parts based on their ranges, then split them into groups of eight (4 men, 4 women) and heard them carry their parts on their own. After this process, we had a short list of who was able to do the heavy lifting in terms of the a cappella music. I relayed my thoughts to the rest of the team, they contributed their own observations, and we continued with scene work to get enough information to cast the show.

Rehearsals

Once we had decided on a cast, we scheduled a number of early rehearsals, where we began with the most difficult ensemble music. These rehearsals were spaced a week or two apart, so that there was time for people to leisurely run things on their own between our rehearsals.  We recorded MP3 files which we uploaded to a dropbox for the use of cast members. Our goal was to hit the ground running when our rehearsals began. I had a wonderful Assistant Music director in Lexi Schreiber, who was able to share some of the duties of rehearsing the two groups, take notes, and bring another set of great ears to the table. A true Barbershop group directs itself and feels its own pulse. Our goal was to get the groups to be able to rehearse on their own as soon as possible. I’m happy to say that by the end of the rehearsal period, we did get there, and the Music Directors were eventually not needed in the room for these groups to get fine work done on their own. In the show, the a cappella numbers are led by the groups themselves, not by the conductor.

The creative team met early to plan our rehearsals over a plate of vegan brownies. After we had plotted our rehearsal time, we went carefully through the script to find where the scene changes would go. We had a great time trying to locate the right mood for these scene changes, and deciding whether each scene change would button up the scene that had just ended or instead lead us into the next number. We then planned on a mood and chose which songs from the show would be quoted in each scene change. I would ultimately write these scene changes during rehearsal breaks. Since the orchestra needs to be generally subdued when singers are involved, and since the musical has numbers without orchestra at all, these scene changes proved a great place to let the band really shine. The creative team gave me free rein to do as I chose with the bows, so I elaborated a full big band style medley of the numbers we only hear for a few measures.

Our regular rehearsals began about 6 weeks ahead of our opening night and we started with a very strong push to learn all the music. We were fortunate to have the authors in the rehearsal room many times, and we clarified passages based on what we heard. The materials had been in various forms, from the original readings and from the earlier production, so we agreed on a standardized format, and I edited the parts to match one another and for clarity. We also expanded several of the dance breaks and rewrote some harmony passages for easier execution. I time stamped each revision on every page, so that we could easily see whether we were using the most up-to-date versions of the music. I found when I was in rehearsal, I was in a much better position to finish the orchestrations intelligently, knowing more where the difficulties in the score were, and what the cast would need to hear to do their best work. My AMD and I had a great time working subtle musical references into the orchestra. I was pretty far behind, but a snow day allowed me to catch up and finish that part of the work. The parts were extracted and sent as pdfs to the musicians, and I began to build a new piano vocal score that cued the orchestra in to use during performances.

Tech and Preshow

Our sitzprobe was the first time anyone had heard the orchestrations. For the most part, they went off without a hitch, although there were some revisions needed. Harriet Power is well known for really tight transitions, so we needed to trim a lot of the scene changes down to just a few measures, and one wound up needing to be rewritten completely the day before we opened. I found I really enjoyed knowing exactly how long each scene change needed to be! The scene changes as I wrote them are still in the score, so future productions can take the time they may need to transition without vamping endlessly. I tried to hire musicians I knew would play well at sight, but who would also share their honest opinions about the writing. Several of the players I hired are also professional composers and arrangers. Their feedback was extremely helpful. One of my players was using an Ipad, which worked well, except when revisions made it necessary to re-assemble a full PDF of the part, and I realized I need to find a way of doing that more efficiently than I had been.

Many shows have a ‘fight call’ for various physical actions on stage that may be dangerous. Lexi, my assistant MD and I developed a ‘musical fight call’ that we used before the show to keep the difficult parts running smoothly. There is a part right before the first act finale where two brief numbers need to begin without a pitch being played. they begin with one character singing, but we took to starting those numbers randomly out of the blue just to be sure we could do it. The complicated counterpoint passages also got special nightly attention. But we found once we had really internalized them, they became some of the easier moments in the show.

Closing Thoughts

It was a true joy and a fine challenge to work with such gifted collaborators on new material, and I do hope that my readership will give some thought to including A Wonderful Noise in future seasons. Your audience will thank you. I also hope that smaller companies (even school companies) will consider the possibility of commissioning or putting on new work. The licensing fees one normally pays for a musical everyone has seen dozens of times could go a long way toward bringing something new and original into the world.

For More information about A Wonderful Noise please contact: michael.hollinger@villanova.edu

 

 

 

 

 

The Light in the Piazza: A Rough Guide for the M.D. Part 1: Landmarks of Guettel’s style

 

ADAM GUETTEL AND THE MUSIC OF THE LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA:

Adam Guettel is, for my money, the most compelling and fascinating musical theatre writer working today. I will not go into his incredible heritage and background, others have done so extensively elsewhere. I’ll focus here on what I’ve found in playing and studying his music. Guettel writes very very little. We get only a show or two out of him every decade, which makes the collapse of The Princess Bride a real blow to musical theatre, since Guettel’s output is so spare. From Floyd Collins through Myths and Hymns to The Light In The Piazza, (the three projects of his which are generally available at this writing) Guettel has developed a deeply personal musical language characterized by these 5 features, among others:

1) An idiosyncratic piano style that often relies on figures that cross from one hand into the other, with the left hand often leading a rhythmic figure that washes up into the right in a frenetic flurry of notes. This feature of his work has precedents in Sondheim (Another Hundred People, Every Day A Little Death), Schwartz (West End Avenue, Meadowlark), and even Bach. (Bb major prelude, WTC book I) Guettel seems less interested  in working out every successive permutation of a cell of pitches than Sondheim and less interested in overt pianistic display than Schwartz. In Guettel’s work, it’s almost as though the piano is being strummed rather eccentrically like a guitar.  With a few exceptions that I’ll point out later in the guide, playing these figures in Guettel’s music seems almost improvisatory, a rhythmic activation of a harmonic idea using both hands actively across the measure.

2) An obsession with moving interior chromatic lines. Guettel’s harmonies are tonal, but they often move in unexpected ways, led by the most subtle ear for harmony active in musicals today. A careful listen to nearly every Guettel song reveals a bassline or interior moving part of the harmony that leads the chords in unusual directions. The bassline is often leading the charge into exotic harmonic territory. In a must-hear interview on Tim Sutton‘s excellent podcast “The Voice of the Musical”, Guettel explains:

“I played upright bass for many years, played out in clubs, and did that sort of gig for a long time, on the upright bass, and it gave me a really good training into not just the kind of harmonic relationships that exist under a lot of songs that one might hear in a jazz club or even at a wedding, because I’ve played hundreds of weddings, but also how to make a melody out of a bassline, which I think is even more important, that the root of the chord is not always the way to go, that to create something that is a kind of subterranean melody, that is almost as strong, if you can as the melody itself is something that can help to propel a song forward.”

This harmonic subtlety gives Guettel’s music a quality of melancholy and a rich and exotic flavor of the unknown. Several of my friends dislike Guettel’s music. Among these friends are some of the best musicians I know, who say they can’t follow where Guettel is going harmonically. In the same interview I quoted from earlier, Guttel has mentioned that his late mother Mary Rodgers critiqued his early work:

“… a melody has to have some opposing energy and something unexpected about it, it has to lead the harmony, it has to be able to exist on its own, and it has to come home, and take us back to where we’ve come from. And some of these things I now observe more in the spirit of them, rather than the letter. I don’t always return to the same key, but I’ve held on to some of those basic precepts.”

Guettel is one of the few composers working in musical theatre who uses voice leading to take the music to unexpected directions, with strong direction but very subtle inflection. I find this harmonic ambiguity refreshing, and I actually hear the influence of his Grandfather, Richard Rodgers. I imagine Rodgers would have been completely confused by the harmonic progressions of Dividing Day or Let’s Walk, but in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s best work, there is often an interior line moving stepwise and driving the harmony in some aching and unexpectedly beautiful direction. Think for example of the chromatically descending bassline, harmonized in 10ths in This Nearly Was Mine, under the lyric “One love to be living for”, or the end of You’ll Never Walk Alone, “walk on/walk on/ with hope in your heart/ and you’ll never walk alone…”, driven to the climax by an interior line that begins on a G, the fifth of the first inversion tonic chord, then rises a half step at a time to A, then dropping back down to G to climb by half steps back up to C. I don’t think Rodgers was working that out intellectually, but intuitively; whenever middle-period Rodgers is looking for that big emotional payoff, he finds an interior chromatic line, in a kind of distillation of his fanciful chromatic excursions with Hart. Guettel is taking that aching ambiguity a further step, to the point where the key destination becomes unclear. I think this is the key ingredient of that exquisite, painful ache of his music, and where Guettel leaves behind those with more conservative harmonic palates.

3) A Sondheimian and certainly Stravinskian use of collections of pitches in varied phrase lengths for rhythmic interest. His debt to Sondheim is well established, and he has expressed his admiration for Stravinsky in interviews. From the same interview I quoted earlier, he says:

“The way in which I’ve really been influenced by [Stravinsky] is phrasing. He invented… a kind of phrasing which has a circularity to it where he’ll lay out, I guess what we would call a cell, or a motive, or something, and start to break it into its component parts, in terms of its clauses, it’s musical clauses, and mix them and match them, and repeat little parts, and then go the whole way through, and then turn them upside down. He took melody and he created sort of like a living room out of one melody, where you knew all the furniture, and it just kept getting rearranged, and that fascinated me, and I think it’s applied sometimes in my music.”

We find this way of constructing music all over Floyd Collins. I can’t resist drawing a line between Stravinsky, Sondheim, and Guettel, because it makes my meaning clear, (and is just really fun)

Here is a passage from Stravinsky’s L’Histoire Du Soldat (1918). It was hard to find an easy-to-understand example of Stravinsky’s rhythmic game-play, but you can find it in virtually any of his scores, especially in The Rite of Spring or any pieces he wrote in the period immediately following.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I hope you can follow this passage enough to understand what’s going on. I want to call your attention to the Double Bass (here marked Contrabasso and C.B). It’s laying down a little two note pattern, and that’s a very steady groove indeed; it keeps going even through multiple time signature changes. It’s essentially in 2/4, despite all that’s going on. Look at that Violin right above it. The violin has a vocabulary of a few little cells of notes: 1) a group of two thirds descending to a single note. 2) A shuffling little sixteenth note passage alternating thirds and single notes on the bottom. And then 3) a figure that opens from a third into a 7th, then another set of falling thirds, this one starting on D and F, leading the first time to another instance of the first cell of notes again. Notice how sometimes the first group happens on the G in the bass. Sometimes it happens on the A. Sometimes there are two little 16th note chunka-chunka things following the first idea, and sometimes only one. A new idea shows up in the middle system that is followed by the first cell of notes transposed up a whole step. At the bottom of this excerpt, there’s a long third, which unexpectedly turns into the third cell in another rhythm, but maybe you didn’t notice, because by that time the bassoon has popped himself in and has started his own game with little cells of notes. In your music textbook, you may read that Stravinsky ‘liberated’ rhythm from the tyranny of the barline, whatever that means. I don’t know if he liberated rhythm as much as he found a new way to use it through re-arranging bits of it. What he’s really doing is using groups of notes in a sort of collage fashion, or like a fun-house mirror. He gives you enough regularity to think you may know what is supposed to come next, only to give you something you may recognize, but exactly in the way you would never have expected. For the game to work, you have to recognize the pieces, expect them to fit one way, and then be delighted (or infuriated) when the pieces turn out to fit some other way.

Now compare a familiar passage from Into The Woods, in which Sondheim uses a rising cell of notes cell of notes, C,D, and F, with a culminating high note on G:

 

 

 

We’re in 3/4 time here; the first cell begins on 1, the second cell begins on the & of 2, and then the release of the G falls on 1 of the next measure. The 3 against 2 pattern is felt as a little hemiola, and the repeated Ds in the next measure feel like 3/4 time again. The third measure of this phrase starts the same way, and then gets stuck bouncing back and forth between the top two pitches of the cell before releasing to the G. This establishment of a musical motif, and then the subsequent fracturing and reassembling in different parts of the barline is a legacy not only of the musical modernism of Stravinsky, but also the similar games played by Gershwin and others. Think of Fascinatin’ Rhythm, Anything Goes, Puttin’ on the Ritz, or The Wrong Note Rag, to name only a few examples of repeated patterns working against the grain of the meter to accent and syncopate the melody. It’s impossible to separate what comes from Jazz, what comes from the Modernism of Art Music, what is the legacy of popular song, and what might even be found as a part of the Ragtime aesthetic, but Stravinsky looms large in the background, especially when the composer seems to be truncating or extending the phrase length to keep the listener off-balance.

It’s fun to look at this bit of Floyd Collins in light of the Sondheim I’ve just discussed, because you could nearly sing the Sondheim lyric to it:

 

 

 

 

 

It’s a half step higher, of course, but here Guettel takes that C,D, F pattern, culminating in a G, and plays the game in 4/4. The repeated notes are here at the beginning, and the 3 note cell is at the end of the measure, beginning on the strong beat, 3. The next time the cell happens, it’s on the weak beat 2. Are we in 4? I wonder if we don’t hear it as a bar of 2, a bar of 3, another bar of 3, and another bar of 2. Without any accompaniment to anchor it, we’re left with a very strong pulse, a clear sense of the collection of notes in play, and a very weak sense of how many beats are in each bar. That’s both Sondheim and Stravinsky.

The Stravinsky element is also here in Piazza.  I’ll indicate those moments as I go.  Let’s get back to Guettel’s stylistic markers. Directly related to that use of phrase length is:

4) The extension (lengthening) of passages the second or third time through for emphasis, development, or to add excitement. We find this in Saturn Returns and Floyd Collins, but in The Light in the Piazza, the device is used in every number, excepting the scene changes. This device is incredibly effective and simple in construction, but often very very difficult to learn and memorize, because for many moments there are two variants that need to be performed correctly and in the right order, or you will wind up ‘taking an offramp’ to a road that doesn’t exist. I’ll clarify that later. Another composer might modulate into a higher key to add punch; some composers lately seem to modulate every 4-8 measures. Guettel rarely modulates passages up at the end of a song, instead he draws out some passage by adding new music and heightening the tension that was already there the first time through.

5) Extended use of Vocalise– (passages using Ah or Ooh or other vowels, melody without lyric) When one hears Guettel himself perform his material, one senses that these extended wordless passages are a central part of the composer’s personal style of expression; in his voice, they sound completely effortless. When these passages are notated, they often look like a thorny bramble bush of notes. I don’t know about Guettel’s process other than that he writes all the music first; only applying words at the end. He evidently had nearly an entire score of music for The Princess Bride before the project was scuttled, but he had not begun to write the words. I can’t imagine working like that, but that process certainly accounts for the originality of his musical expression; writing words alone, one easily drops into a rhythmic syntax that results in square phrasing musically. Music without words is free to find its own expression without any regard to the limits of obvious sentence structure and poetic meter. I wonder whether Guettel’s wordless passages occur at points where he is unable to craft words that match the emotional state of the characters. Normally in a musical, there are two levels: 1) dialogue, and then 2) song when dialogue is not enough to express the idea. In Guettel, there is yet a third level, where the song reaches a point at which the words themselves need to be jettisoned to make the point; words are no longer expressive enough. In The Light In The Piazza, this device of Guettels is put to a further use, because when our couple leave words behind, they are finding the point of connection beyond common language, which they don’t share. This point is made explicit in Say It Somehow, which is an entire scene and duet about that concept.

These characteristic qualities of Guettel’s music make for a very heady theatrical experience, and many listeners can’t come along for the ride. After one talk back, a gentleman came up and asked me why modern composers had abandoned melody. I told him I found the show full of melody, but that melody was clearly a matter of personal taste. He was ready to argue the point; he had heard no melody the entire show. Other patrons mocked the Ahs, saying “Oh, there they go, ahhing again.” One set of patrons openly speculated that the music had been written by students. If you program this very difficult show, be aware that the part of your audience that isn’t completely swooning might very well be totally baffled by this music. These are intelligent and cultured people, mind you. They just don’t find his musical argument compelling. But Guettel’s voice, surely one of the most original and compelling in the theatre today, must be programmed regularly, so our audiences can begin to address the work on its own terms.

In my next post, I’ll go into greater detail about this specific show, and I think I may have found a few things that may even surprise people who know this show extremely well. Stay tuned!

 

 

Ripped From The Headlines: Lessons you can learn from school shows in the news

I noticed a trend on my facebook feed from actors, and a little further googling revealed these 10 interesting news stories:

Surely there are lessons to be learned from these unfortunate situations:

March 1994, Middle School Production of Peter Pan Canceled citing its insensitivity to Native Americans

May 2005, Samuel French Shuts down an all-girl production of Grease

February 2008, 3 High School Productions of Rent canceled amid content concerns

July 2008, Wilmette Park production of Ragtime shut down over language and content concerns.

March 2011 High School Production of Tommy canceled because production couldn’t get it together on schedule

September 2011 PA High School production of Kismet canceled over middle eastern themes and muslim characters

October 2012 Students lobby against school’s choice to Nix the musical Rent

December 2012, High School Drama instructor in Ohio forced to resign following controversy over canceled production of Legally Blonde

January 2013, Utah High School Cancels Production of All Shook Up because Elvis’s lyrics are too racy

February 2013, Black students protest a school production of the Wiz which has no African American Leads

March 2013, Protests in Connecticut over High School Sweeney Todd Production in aftermath of shootings

March 2013, Community Group discusses appropriateness of same production of Sweeney Todd in aftermath of shootings

March 2013, Student expelled from school after fight with director during production of Annie

March 2013, School production of Spring Awakening actually plans forums to discuss topics related to their production

Musicals are a strange cultural phenomenon. They are generally written for a savvy East Coast audience of jaded New Yorkers and out-of-town tourists, but after they close in New York, they take on another life out in the rest of the world, where they often meet a different set of performers and a very different audience. New Yorkers are not easily offended, but they are very easily bored. The rest of the country is often fairly easily offended and doesn’t particularly want to see their children acting out scenarios calculated to titillate an audience of bored Manhattan hipsters and New Jersey housewives.

The school musical is actually quite an old phenomenon, but when it began, it was quite different than it is today. If I’m not mistaken, the school musical was originally an operetta, sometimes G&S, but just as often some minor English or translated European operetta, in the old style, or something written specifically for educational performance. As such, these forerunners to the school musical of today were heavy on the music and light on the drama, and run by somebody in the music end of things. Today your school director is likely to come at it from the drama angle, is often an English or Social Studies teacher very familiar with cutting edge cultural ideas, who also feels the need to stay current by  programming shows which appeal to kids or have some kind of cultural currency; something which wasn’t on the radar of school directors a hundred years ago.

Shoe-horning these new, edgy shows into schools that lie on the fault lines of cultural clashes is a recipe for controversy and argument. For the directors and the students, defending the new shows is a matter of freedom of expression. Often the ideas in the show represent points of view and ways of looking at the world they care very deeply about. For more conservative parents, the rejection of these shows is an attempt to protect strongly held cultural values, to preserve as long as possible the innocence of their children, and in some cases to push back against what they see as a bulwark of immorality in the culture. The administration is caught in-between, having to answer to parents, teachers, students, and their superiors, and wanting to avoid being the subject of an unflattering news item.

For a nuanced perspective on the issue, I urge you to read this interesting exploration of some of the facets of this phenomenon from schooltheatre.org, an excellent resource for anyone who cares about educational theatre.

What’s clear in most of these cases is that communication, collaboration, support and trust have broken down or don’t exist between the administrators of these schools and the teachers who are running the productions and choosing the shows. I know of local school districts where the Musical gets the full support of the administration, who are aware that the creative staff plans to do challenging and potentially controversial material. The creative staff can count on that support. I also know of local districts where the superintendent and sometimes the principals do not even attend the school musicals of their award winning district. I also know of districts where the entire creative staff of the musical is composed of outside contractors who have no other contact with the school and are paid from a student activities budget. These people not only don’t have the true support of administrators, they haven’t even met any.

For Administrators there are lessons here:

1) Unless you implicitly trust your staff (and are willing to go to bat for their choices), better to be a part of the process in the beginning than to come in late in the game and play catch-up. If your staff asks you what you think about their choice of a show, do your homework, read the script and listen to the soundtrack. You owe that to them, to the students, and to the parents.

2) If you’re hiring outsiders who don’t normally work in your school, you must properly vet them. You don’t want shouters and screamers directing shows, and you ultimately want people involved who are invested in the lives of the kids and the life of the school. This is not just a matter of your basic criminal background check. It’s a matter of checking references and asking questions.

3) Your teachers know when you’ve got their backs and when you’re throwing them under the bus. This may seem to you like a very small part of the life of your school, or even a headache in your already overcrowded schedule, but for the people involved in the production it represents a colossal amount of work, and when an administrator is quick to take sides against them, it feels like a terrible betrayal.

4) For Pete’s sake take a night to go and see the production. Better yet, offer to say a few words of appreciation before or after the show. These are small things that make a huge difference and will help your credibility if you have to deliver hard news or have a difficult conversation.

For Directors and other people involved in school productions:

1) Know the culture of your community and your school and take that into account as you choose a show. Some places can handle difficult material unflinchingly. Others will look askance at even mainstream shows. Walk in with your eyes open, and be sensitive to the fact that not everyone shares your outlook.

2) Run show decisions across the desk of your administrators and keep track of the interactions. If anything happens, it’s nice to be able to tell your administrator that you brought these issues up with them and that they gave you the go-ahead.

3) If you’re doing a particularly thorny piece , take a lesson from some of the schools mentioned in these stories, and plan sessions to discuss the ideas with parents, students, and community members in an honest and open manner.

4) Ask yourself why you’re anxious to program this show. Is it about the kids or about your ego?

5) Don’t program shows that you have to alter drastically to fit your school.

6) Plan the rehearsal schedules of ambitious shows rigorously. That story about Tommy up above here is a shame.

7) If there are racial issues involved in casting, try to be aware of them in advance, and where appropriate, announce your intention in the audition materials to cast with or without regard to the race or ethnicity of the characters, whichever the case may be.

8) Keep your rehearsals positive. Your school director may have been a screamer, and you may think you have to yell and carry on to get the kids to do what you want, but in reality, when it gets to that point, you’ve generally made a wrong turn somewhere. In that story where that kid pushed his director and got expelled, I guarantee there was plenty of blame to go around.

I think it’s worth mentioning that when a production gets canceled, it’s the students that lose.

Let’s work hard to present quality work with our students that both challenges and honors the students and communities we love.

The Drowsy Chaperone: A Rough Guide For The M.D.

A LITTLE BACKGROUND:
I’m assembling this rough guide having just finished a terrific run of this show at Villanova University, which was directed by Father Peter Donohue, PhD OSA, choreographed by Kevin Dietzler, with important assistance and insight by Dr. Valerie Joyce. If there are good ideas in this essay, they are most assuredly the result of collaborating with these incredible people. If there are lousy ideas, I claim them as my own. We were very fortunate to have Bob Martin and Lisa Lambert join us for a talkback, which was really informative. They were incredibly nice people; I’m really looking forward to their further projects.
BEFORE YOU START:
1) Listen to the Original Broadway Cast Recording
2) Read the script. It’s short and funny. You’ll like it. You’ll want to play Man in Chair.
3) Our Dramaturg, Ashley Leamon put together some incredible notes for the cast, which I am including for you to use. Thank You, Ashley! Drowsy Chaperone Actor Packet
4) Watch some Marx Brothers comedies (always good to have an excuse to do that) and/or listen to some of Tommy Krasker’s restorations of some actual Broadway comedies from the 20s and 30s.

ABOUT THE SHOW
In many ways, this is a perfect show for young performers. With the exception of Tottendale, who is supposed to be old, and perhaps Drowsy and Man In Chair, everyone else makes sense with younger performers. The show is basically light, fairly clean with only a small number of potentially offensive moments (some of which could be ‘tweaked’ in a very conservative venue), and audiences love it. It’s also pleasantly short. It does have an Into The Woods style casting problem, in that it’s a show with a large ensemble cast and virtually no chorus. So if you did it at a High School, you’d have to beef up that chorus of servants and be very creative about where you put those extra actors.

AS YOU’RE CASTING:
General Notes:
The characters in the show-within-the-show should ideally be able to act presentationally, as in the period. This can actually be a tough thing for a trained actor. Normally you’re looking for the sort of honesty between characters that projects to an audience, but doesn’t particularly acknowledge them. This kind of acting is the sort of arch performance style that plays the scene, but is really focused at selling the characterization to the audience. These characters are big, comedic, and play for laughs. Stock Gestures, which are normally to be frowned upon in modern Theatre, are actually just right here, because they make the stereotypes very specific. There is a kind of honesty in this very ‘fake’ acting, but it takes a while to find it. The actors are also playing actors playing characters, so there is a layering of delivery that’s fun, but challenging.
Man in Chair:
This is a tour-de-force role for a comic actor. He has to be able to sing, but only enough to just carry a tune at the end. The important thing is that he can command the stage for the whole show; he makes or breaks the evening. There is a tricky monologue at the end that pivots from tragicomedy to tragedy to comedy on a dime, and not everyone can pull it off. When he came and spoke to our Villanova audience Bob Martin said that he considered the show a tragic monologue interspersed with some funny numbers. An amusing remark, to be sure, but it really is a story about the Man In The Chair and his relationship with a record. That record has replaced any kind of functional relationship in reality. It’s hard to play that well, and if you have somebody just playing it for laughs, the show has very little meaning.
Tottendale:
The joke is that she’s old and has no memory. In lieu of an actual old person, you can either make someone up to be old, or just play her as zany and forgetful. You do need someone who can dance a little and who has excellent comic timing. It also helps to have someone who can spit in a mist, not a stream, but I’m not sure you can ask for that at an audition. It’s also helpful to have someone who can play the ukulele. If she doesn’t play, almost anyone can learn the uke in a hurry.
Underling:
Your typical stuffy butler/maitre d type, with a high baritone voice. It doesn’t have to be a terrific voice, but he does basically open the show-within-the-show, so it would be unfortunate if he couldn’t sing at all. Underling does tap very briefly in Cold Feets, but it’s not complicated. Mainly you need someone who can play haughty and put-upon well, and someone who doesn’t mind being spit upon repeatedly night after night.
Robert:   
This is potentially a very difficult role to cast. It doesn’t require great comic timing, although that’s nice. It does require a strong tenor with at least an F chested/mixed. (If Robert doesn’t have the F, George has to.) Robert also should be a strong dancer, who can tap and skate blindfolded. Villanova’s production had a great Robert, who was sidelined with kidney stones for a performance. Our choreographer slipped into the part, but we had to eliminate the skating, because it was too involved and risky to learn in a short amount of time. (Bob Martin, the original Man In Chair told us he was also struck with kidney stones before both the New York and West End runs. Maybe there’s a curse)
George:
George was originally a high tenor, but I’ll show you a way around the very highest notes. He needs to be able to tap. A small part which was played by our choreographer in our production. This proved very convenient many times.
Feldzieg:
There are a number of ways to go with this role, because the stereotype of the producer isn’t as specific as it used to be. Sometimes the producer is played as a thin middle-european type. Sometimes he’s a more substantial businessman type. Feldzieg (switch the syllables to get the joke…) dances a little, sings a little, but mostly acts as straight man to a lot of goofy types.
Gangsters:
These guys are called dancers in the show, but they’re more of a comedy team that dances a little. They have to be able to carry a tune, but they needn’t be fantastic singers either. It’s that pun filled dialogue they have to be adept at.
Aldolpho:
Aldolpho needs to be a strong comic actor with a flair for over-the-top accents, moderate dancing ability, and a sustained G above the staff.
The Drowsy Chaperone:
Of all the characters, Drowsy needs to be the most archly aware of her audience and the most presentational in her performance. She needs to have a very strong stage presence and a very assertive singing style. In order to be playful with the material, she needs to know it cold. This is not a role for a weak performer; she winds up being the lynchpin of the show. Young people might want to look at Tallulah Bankhead for inspiration.
Trix:
This role is tiny and fun. Originally the role was played by an African American, and there’s a line about that which needs to be rewritten or cut if you cast it any other way.
Janet:
This role will always bear the stamp of Sutton Foster; adorable presence, dancing, and most of all a belted treble C that goes on for days are the mark of her roles. Janet is all about glamour. She needs to be able to present herself as glamourous, she knows she’s always being watched, and is always trying to be seen at the best angle. You should ask your Janets if they have any special skills. There are a lot of ways to go with Show Off depending on what your Janet is able to do.
Servants/Chorus/Bit Parts:
Originally these were only 4 people. You could have 8 or 12, but try to keep the parts balanced, and don’t do more than 12, or the scenes they’re in will be bloated.
A few things to note about the Music Director’s Materials:
The Piano/Conductor score is pretty well put together, although there are a few mistakes and numerous discrepancies between the score and the script. Rather than listing the errors here, I’ll list them in the Trouble Spots section. One of the great benefits of working in a quality graduate theatre program is that I could turn to my very capable Stage Manager and ask him for a list of the discrepancies, and he in turn could turn to one of his Assistants, who compiled for me a pretty exhaustive list, which I will pass on to you one at a time as I write about each number. There are also very few cue lines indicated in the score. I’ll include the ones I used in our production.

TROUBLE SPOTS AND ADVICE:

A Couple of General Notes:
I didn’t notice this until I brought the orchestra in, but there are MANY places in the show where the singer begins a phrase in the clear with no orchestra on a musical pickup phrase, and the orchestra comes in on the next measure. Actors have a tendency to sell these entrances with an allargando, which is fine, but it makes it hard for you to align the entry, especially if you’re conducting from the piano, because you can’t predict when they’re going to hit the downbeat. To solve this problem, you have to either drill these entrances to make them consistent, or work from the very beginning to get the actors watching you for the downbeat. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself muffing the orchestra entrances. I’ll list some of these as we go.

As in Thoroughly Modern Millie, the men’s parts are generally divided into 3 parts, where the women are only divided into 2. In this case, that’s because the cast is predominantly male, and there were good high voices in the original cast. If you have augmented your chorus with extra people, you may be able to tweak some of these harmonies, moving the high tenor part into a 3rd women’s part range.

2 Arcane but important details:

1) A tiny bit of this music is music in the show. Most of the music is coming from the record player. This music is diegetic, meaning it comes from the world of the show, not from the character’s expression. When a record plays or a radio is on in a movie or a play, or even when someone sings as part of their daily life, when they actually would sing, we call that music diegetic. When a character sings in a play or a movie and we are meant to see that as an expression of his or her emotion or state of mind, (not reality) that’s not diegetic, that’s mimetic. Be clear which music is on the record and time your entrances to the needle drop. In our production, I had a video feed that only looked at the record player, so I could get those cues. If the record weren’t playing, there would be no music for most of the show. Remember that as you go.

2) A conceptual point that doesn’t affect your music direction, but will very much affect the production is this: Are we seeing the actual production from 1928 acted out in front of us, or is the visual part of the production only in Man in Chair’s mind? If it’s the latter, (a much more interesting route) how does his imagination change the reality of what we’re seeing? For example, Man in Chair has a drink in the middle of Bride’s Lament, and then things go haywire. Is that the original production we’re seeing there, or his alcoholic version? I think a good production is going to have to answer that question at some point.

1. Overture
As you work out this number, you will need to be involved with the blocking and timing from the very beginning. There are a number of complicating factors: Firstly, the original Broadway cast  recording does not reflect what’s in the script. At measure 42, the tune is much further extended on the CD. There’s also more at 54. If you were looking to reinstate these measures, I think the first chunk doesn’t appear anywhere in the score, but the section around measure 54 is in the Exit Music.

The more important discrepancies are in the script. The script does not match the score, you can’t just have the actor read the script and play along with him out of the score. This is the list of discrepancies in this number the Stage Management team at Villanova cooked up for me (the formatting in WordPress isn’t doing what I wanted it to, but you get the idea) :
Sheet Music                                                              Script

You hear the static?  I love that sound.  To me, it’s the sound of a time machine starting up.  Now, let’s visualize.	You hear the static?  I love that sound.  To me, it’s the sound of a time machine starting up.  Alright now, let’s visualize.
Imagine if you will, it’s November 1928.	Imagine if you will, it’s November 1928.
You’ve just arrived at the doors of the Morosco Theatre in New York.  It doesn’t exist anymore.  It was torn down in 1982, and replaced with an enormous hotel.  Unforgivable. You came by horse, I suppose.  I mean, a horse drawn carriage..  You weren’t actually riding the horse. Anyway, it’s very cold and… A heavy grey sleet is falling from the sky but you don’t care… because you’re going to see a Broadway show!  Listen!	You’ve just arrived at the doors of the Morosco Theatre in New York.  It’s very cold – remember when it used to be cold in November?  Not anymore.  November’s the new August now.  It’s global warming – we’re all doomed – anyway…  It’s very cold and a heavy grey sleet is falling from the sky but you don’t care because you’re going to see a Broadway show!  Listen!
Isn’t this wonderful?	Isn’t this wonderful?
It helps if you close your eyes	It helps if you close your eyes A kettle on the stove begins to whistle.  MAN runs over to the stove and dances while he makes himself a cup of tea.
Don’t you love overtures?  Overtures are out of style now.  I miss them.  It’s a polite way of beginning the evening.  It’s the show’s way of welcoming you.  Hello, welcome.  The meal will be served shortly, but in the mean time, would you like an appetizer?  A pu-pu platter of tunes, it you will.	Overtures?  Overtures are out of style now.  I miss them. It’s the show’s way of welcoming you.  Hello, welcome.  The meal will be served shortly, but in the mean time, would you like an appetizer? That’s what an overture is, a musical appetizer. A pu-pu platter of tunes, it you will.
Oh!  Something new!  What could it be?  Sounds like a dance number.  Kind of rollicking.  Maybe involving pirates!  Don’t worry.  There are no pirates.	Oh!  Something new!  What could it be?  Sounds like a dance tune.  Kind of rollicking.  Maybe involving pirates!  Don’t worry.  There are no pirates. He runs back to his chair as the music segues from a mono recording to a live orchestra.
Now.  This is it.  This is that special moment when the music starts to build… and you know you’re only seconds away from being transported. And the overture builds and builds to it’s climax…	Now.  Here it comes.  The moment when the music starts to build and you know you’re only seconds away from being transported. The overture builds to it’s conclusion.
and the lights dim and you settle back in your seat…	The curtain is going up.  I can’t wait!
and as you’re sitting there in the dark you think to yourself
A new Gable and Stein musical. Aren’t you excited?

I suppose since both sets of words are in the materials you are sent from MTI, you can pick and choose what you like to say. You do, however, have to align the following things:

a) I believe the music starts after “…time machine starting up”
b) I think “You’re going to see a Broadway show” ought to go around measures 14-16
c) I think the part of the monologue about Overtures needs to come around 39. There isn’t really enough time, but…
d) The “Oh! Something new!” portion of the monologue needs to come around 45. You’ll find it’s hard to get through the lines that come before in time.
e) The real Orchestra begins playing at around 63. You can take all the bass out of the cast recording and put some crackle on it, (and then you get some more time before 45) or you can record the pit like I did. Be careful, though. You’ll probably wind up recording it at the Sitzprobe, and then for the run of the show, you’ll have to listen to it every night, the way you were playing it before you knew it very well.
f) At 75, the band is just getting ripping, and they have to play under the monologue. It’s kind of a drag.

1A. Opening Scene
The cue to go on to 2. is when Underling says: “It’s a miracle, Madame” (go on)

2. Fancy Dress
This number does just what it’s supposed to do, but I can’t help thinking that it isn’t really a ‘20s number in terms of what it does theatrically. I can think of lots of examples of shows before the 60s that begin with a chorus singing “We Are” and numbers in which characters say “I Am”, but this number, in which everyone comes out and says “I am”  or “he, she is…” one after another feels like a post-Hal Prince thing to me (Fiddler, Cabaret, Into The Woods, Ragtime,). Lisa Lambert and Bob Martin came and spoke to us at Villanova, and Ms. Lambert mentioned something in passing about the number being related to a Marx Brothers opening number, but I can’t remember which movie she mentioned. Whether it’s anachronistic or not, it does the job far better than a more typical ‘30s chorus opening would do, (like Bon Voyage at the beginning of Anything Goes for example) and if it has that zany Marx Brothers madness going on, it’s the perfect opener. There are a few errors and omissions in the score: Underling is supposed to say “Ah!” in measure 27. There is a mistake in Reed 1 in measure 58. The top note, which is clearly a concert D, is marked concert Db in the part. 69-72 is a repeat, not a vamp. At measure 84, Feldzieg sings “I gotta stop this wedding or I might get shot” in the score, and “I gotta stop this wedding or I’m not worth squat” in the script. Even though the script version doesn’t sound very ‘20s, you must use that version. Kitty’s next line ends with ‘shot’ also and you can’t have an identity. If you find yourself arguing with me, I’ll just say, trust me. There can be no identities in musical theatre that is pretending to be from the ‘20s. (identity rhyming is a disease of the modern musical theatre which had not begun to spread in the ‘20s)  At Measure 128, the script has everyone singing this part. The score says ‘staff’. I guess that means it’s up to your discretion. At 144, resist the temptation to slow down. In measure 177, the cue in the score says “Champagne makes me deliciously drowsy.” Take the deliciously out. There isn’t enough time. At 189 there is an elaborate figure in cue notes that isn’t in the parts at all. Don’t play any of it in rehearsal, it’ll drown out Trix and confuse everyone when the band shows up and doesn’t play it. The figure at measure 208 for Feldzieg and the Baritones could be up the octave. (and probably should be) Same at 216. At 206, be sure your Man In Chair knows to turn the record down, and drill your chorus to drop the volume way down there. An important detail here is that the record has been turned down, but their performance has not gotten less energetic. The choreography and the energy ought to be as big as ever, because they are still performing ‘full-out’ on the record! (meta enough for you?)The script has this moment in a different place. Decide for sure where that happens with your director. At 209, Man in chair says the characters have been introduced. The script says all the guests have arrived. You’ll have to decide which you prefer. Note that 219 is a different figure than it was at 179. Make that difference explicit early in the rehearsal process. At 221, the Double Bass book has a rhythmic error. Check against the score. I did 225 twice, and used the NEXT measure as a vamp. Reed 1 has an error in measure 227; I think that first note is marked as a concert G natural, not a concert G flat, as correctly indicated in the score. Budget a lot of time for 229; for some reason it’s very counterintuitive for the principals (particularly Trix and the Gangsters). It can also be a little counterintuitive for your drummer, because the swing eighths go away without warning. Make a big deal out of a clean cutoff at 251, and if possible, have your choreographer put some movement at that moment so that they can lock in on that beat.
2B. Macaroons
The cue is marked as “…macaroons”, which must have been the cue line at one point. Now the line in question ends with macaroon (singular), and it must have been a completely different line to have been plural. Maybe at some point Feldzieg said it about the gangsters? It’s just a drum punctuation to a joke.
3. Robert’s Entrance
I did this number twice, adding the reeds the second time only to keep it from sounding like a repeat. We used the line “I always thought that number was overplayed” as the cue, but you could also use “Let’s go to the groom’s room”.
4. Cold Feets
This number has a lot of ideas from minstrelsy, Lisa Lambert mentioned the Gershwin’s Slap That Bass as a cousin of this piece, I hear a number of other classic rhythm numbers in there too. The first section of the song actually presents some challenges. You have to play a little of that trumpet line in during rehearsals, because it fills in spaces and does a kind of call-and-response with the singer. There is a stinger right at the top of the number in the brass that isn’t in the score. Make sure you give a good cue for that. It’s marked colla voce, but I think after measure A, you ought to be in a slow, but steady tempo. The phrases are actually in 6/4 when you think about it. Whatever you wind up doing, Measure 6 ought to be in tempo, because the trumpet answer phrase lines up with the bassline, and you need to be in tempo to do that. I took a slight ritard at measure 7. There is a line in measures 9 and 10 that isn’t in the score. Robert says: “You know what you got?” Measure 19 is rhythmically different from what happens before, make a note of it. In the script, George says “You don’t say?” before he says the rest of the line as written in measure 63. There is a cut around measure 73 in the Original Broadway Cast Recording. Cueing out of 85 can be tricky. By the time you’ve run it a million times, it should wind up being the same amount of times through, more of a safety than anything. Make sure your drummer doesn’t drown out the lines being spoken in 85, or you won’t know you’ve missed your cue until it’s too late. Measure 88 should read What do I want? Not what do I got? At 94, I think the tempo should slack a bit. This is one of those tap moments where the dancer sets the tempo for what follows. Make it clear to the dancer that they’re stuck with whatever tempo they establish there. At 104, the tempo picks up a bit. At some point in there, the script has them saying:

Robert: “George! Look at you! You’re dancing!”

George: “I am? I am!”

The score doesn’t have those lines or indicate where they go. Some of the trombone work at 112-127 is a little awkward. If you’re compiling a list of things to pay particular attention to for that player, that’s the most exposed Trombone work in the show. 133 on is a much faster tempo. Make sure you and your choreographer are in agreement about the tempo here. It’s easy to run away with this section. Underling has a very funny moment in the fermata at 158. Again, after that the dancers establish the tempo at 159. Make it clear to them how important it is that they establish it correctly, or conduct their 5…6…7…8… yourself. Obviously the higher voiced singer of the 2 can sing the A flats in the passage at 161. I think 183 must be a misprint. It should be an octave higher or spoken. And line up that button at the end on beat 3.
5. Wedding Bells No. 1
The Cue for this number is: “And no more tap-dancing!” The phone message has an extra bit in the score that’s kind of funny. (or at least I thought it was funny, but it didn’t really get a laugh) Call your director’s attention to it, and see if you want it back in. Measure 8 says ‘slow 4’, but that feels really wrong. For me anyhow, the section feels like it’s mis-notated, that every note value should be doubled, that every bar should really be broken into 2 measures, and that the piece should be conducted in a fast 2. It has the same vibe as 3. Robert’s Entrance and 6D Janet’s Bridal Suite, both of which are in 2. I’m not suggesting you rewrite it, I’m only saying if you don’t mention that it’s weird to the band, you’ll do it a couple of times before you get it right. If you have a George who can’t really sell that high B flat, (um, who does?) change the notes in measure 8 to D flat, D flat, D natural, D natural, E flat for the long note. And finally, be diligent about where the button goes. If you are successful in feeling the beat correctly, you’ll get it in the right spot. But it won’t feel like a 4. Play through it, you’ll see what I mean.
5A. Janet By The Pool
Fairly straightforward scene change. I repeated the first 8 measures 3 times to buy us more time. The last 4 measures work pretty well with a poco a poco rit.
6. Show Off
This is one of the major show-pieces of the musical, and you might want to watch a you-tube video of it, to see all the stunts they managed to put in for the first production. Musically, it’s your classic Sutton Foster number, climaxing on her signature belted C. There is a lot of ground to cover in this number, so you’ll have to bear with me as I lay out all the issues.

Right off the bat, there’s an issue of whole-steps versus half steps. The figure in measure 1-4 and measures 9-12 has a half-step motion; the figure in 5-8 and 13-16 is a whole-step motion. It’s very easy to do both of them as half steps. This distinction continues throughout the number. Watch the cutoffs for the chorus in measures 36, 38, and 40. Don’t speed up at 42. The marking Faster (wild charleston) is not in all the pit books at measure 48. Make a note of it. If you don’t do the snake-charming bit at mesure 74, you’ll have to cut that section or it doesn’t make any sense. Again, see a youtube video to see what the music initially went with. Some of the dance sequence is very specific. There is a huge copy-paste error in both the vocal books and score. The second vocal entry “don’t wanna show off no more” that starts at 99 is wrong, and should be deleted. It isn’t in the cast recording and doesn’t match the harmony the band is playing. If you look at the vocal book, you’ll also see some other funniness there that proves it’s in error. There was initially some business in the drum fill at 105. If your production has nothing in particular going on there, cut the measure and go straight from 104 to 106. The section beginning at 106 is a place where you’ll wish your Janet wouldn’t listen to the CD. The Original Broadway Cast Recording has this section in another key. This is another open spot where the singer could establish a tempo you don’t like. (See my earlier notes) Make sure you get the tempo you want there. Again, the chorus parts are wrong at 113-116. There’s nothing for the chorus there at all. At 123, the fermata on that chord will feel odd. Play with it until it makes sense to you. I suspect it’s a seam from an earlier cut. At 124, the Original Broadway Recording is in the correct key again, but it may still be odd for your Janet, who may hear the key relationship from the cast recording. And once again, 124 is another place the singer has potentially too much control over the tempo. 125 is clearly in your traditional ‘stripper-tempo’, a tempo which doesn’t work if too slow or too fast. It should be slow enough to dig in on the stride left hand without being so slow that it lacks any energy. I took a little accelerando at 131. It’s unclear from the score what’s happening at 142. You’ll need to carefully tape the actress singing that phrase and play it back during the show at that spot while she drinks a glass of water. I can’t remember why at this point, but I gave the low men a B natural at the downbeat of 144 and changed the low girls to a G. Take 145 through the end as fast as you comfortably can. The end of the number is an applause segue into the playoff.
6A. Show Off Playoff
Very straightforward playoff. If you want it shorter, start at 7.
6B. Show Off Encore
The cue for this number is “I’m surprised she didn’t do an encore”
There is an alternate lyric in the script, that I suspect may have something to do with whether you have a trap-door or not:

Script: “Make the audience roar no more. I don’t wanna show off.”

Score: “Disappear through the floor no more. I don’t wanna show off.”

Again, this number has 2 places where Janet could speed you up or slow you down with her pick-ups. If your Janet has a high C, that works as a last note. But whatever happens there, I would advocate for a head-voice position on the C in measure 10, so we don’t hear a huge crack on the way up to measure 12.
6C. Spit Take
The cue line for the second half of this should read “Make myself a Gimlet”, as it reads in the script. They both have Vodka in them, but Gimlet sounds funnier than Bloody Mary.
6D. Janet’s Bridal Suite
I repeated the first four bars to extend this scene change.
7. As We Stumble Along
This is a Kate Smith style rousing anthem. You need to build the performance carefully to a fever pitch; work to pace your actress properly, so it isn’t just a hot mess. The Chaperone character is capable of many levels; be over the top, but a specific over the top, not a sloppy, indistinct one.
The cue lines vary from script to score:

Script: “Really, you’re not the least bit helpful. Couldn’t you at least allay my fears with a few choice words of inspiration.”

Score: “Well, perhaps you could allay my fears with a few choice words of inspiration.”

Be sure the word changes are clear to the performer early in the process. The first time it’s “…and the best that we can do is hope a bluebird will sing his song…” The second time it’s “…but as long as we can hear that little bluebird, there’ll be a song…”
There is a slight discrepancy between script and score at measure 33 too, and a missing line.

Script: “That was quite nice, Chaperone, but I don’t see how it pertains to my situation.”

Score: “That was very nice, Chaperone, but I don’t see how it applies to my situation.”

Followed in the script by:

Script: “ Oh, really, that’s not necessary. I suppose I’m just looking for a sympathetic—“ (This happens around measure 35 but the score does not list anydialogue)

At 35 I had a lot of fun accompanying the singer. I think it got lounge-ier every night. Measure 38 is miscued in the piano score. The clarinet in the reed 2 book has that figure. I got a funny look from my trumpet every time I cued it until I started remembering. At 43 there is a line for Man in Chair, who echoes Drowsy “Antarctica, Oh, Please.” He should say it EXACTLY as she says it. After all, this is his favorite record; her delivery is important to him. Our two actors had a great time changing it up every night, she’d pitch him something different every night and he’d say it just the same way she did. Measure 47 should be straight eighths. At the Bolero in 50, I found the articulations counter-intuitive. Make it a game with yourself to play the accents without making them staccato, and play the staccatos without making them accents. Once the band shows up, if you’re a good enough pianist, you can add a lot of Liberace style piano flourishes all over the section starting at 66. Change the choral parts to a half note at 73, a quarter at 77, and cut a quarter note out of 81, in each case to leave clear space for Drowsy to be heard. You’ll notice that the accompaniment really comes down at 78, then builds back up. It isn’t in the parts, but if you build that piano in and make it a strong crescendo, it adds one final level to the number. When you get to 82, do those hits colla voce with the singer, as written, but to land the joke, you’ll need extra space before ‘plumble’, and then hit those next 2 chords in tempo. It isn’t written that way in the parts, so tell the band too. We put a big fermata at the end of 84, and a portamento down to 85, and as a joke, our Drowsy took a big breath before “-long!”. I cut the E flat out of the ladies part in measure 86, and moved the cutoff for that chord to the downbeat of 87.

7A. Stumble Playoff
Start this playoff as she’s bowing. There is a discrepancy between the script and score in Man’s dialogue:

Script: “Basically, she sings a rousing anthem about alcoholism.”

Score: “She shoe-horned this song into the show. I mean basically she sings a rousing anthem about alcoholism.”

Janet’s entrance is on measure 15. Make sure that happens.
8. Aldolpho
I think this is one of the numbers that has been with the show since the very beginning. It works very well, and always gets a terrific response from the audience. One thing to shoot for in Aldolpho’s character is that it’s kind of unclear what ethnicity it is, vaguely hispanic, but also gypsy and Eastern European. There are a couple of places to throw the audience off the trail of that ethnicity, and it’s fun to find them.

I removed measure 2 entirely. I think it originally took place during some stage business we didn’t do. I also took out the fermata in 6. The passage from 10-12 is also underlining some stage business. (probably Aldolpho falling down) Be present and alert when that’s being staged. The upbeat to measure 13 should either be cued by the MD or in tempo; you want that entrance to 13 to be together.  The rhythm in the brass is notated incorrectly in the piano vocal score at 24 and 26 It ought to read Quarter rest, eighth rest, eighth note, eighth rest, eighth note quarter note. The piano part should be changed to match it. 31-35 isn’t that tricky to get through, provided your players are paying close attention. At measure 35, there’s a marking in the reeds that doesn’t work. It’s marked fp crescendo, which would drown out the lines. I told them to mark it piano. The clarinets trade off the trill there, so provided you have more than one, it could last as long as you like. At 40, I told my first trumpet to play that figure with a fat, unfocused, mariachi tone. It was funny. Measure 45 is the one spot in the show where I missed the second keyboard. That trill just isn’t the same without a guitar patch. Our percussionist added it into the mallet part. There are a lot of dynamic details to observe. Begin playing them in rehearsal and make sure your band sees them too. The fermata in 55 should be really hammed up. On an unrelated note, am I the only one who has trouble giving a downbeat with my head while music directing from the piano after I’ve just played a big ascending glissando on the previous upbeat? Try it. Your right hand sweeps across up the piano while your head goes up and then you play the downbeat chord while your head goes down, all in one fluid and easy-to-read movement. I muffed it until I just told the band to come in on the downbeat and I wouldn’t cue them. There is a direct segue to the next number.
8A. Aldolpho Playoff
The first part of the playoff is pretty straightforward.
8B. Accident Prereprise
I played measures 1-4 3 times to accommodate a scene change. Robert will be making his entrance at the pickup to 9, and he’ll need to learn to hear that ascending triplet figure in 8 as his cue. He’s entering blindfolded, by the way. On roller skates. Now the blindfold can be seen through, naturally, but you can see how you’d want to know the tune pretty well. 🙂
9. Accident Waiting To Happen
This number is your typical 20s-30s mid-tempo ballad, like How Long Has This Been Going on? or Embraceable You. Performance practice for these songs requires a flexible tempo for the verse, the lyrics of which provide the context for the chorus. The chorus is generally performed in strict tempo. So the section of the number that begins in measure 2 should be a flexible tempo, coming to a pause at the end of each line. In the intro, be sure to play a little of that flute line in measure 1, to help the singers know what they’ll hear when the band is there.
The chorus of this song is very cleverly and idiomatically scored, and is a joy to play, particularly with the winds and percussion playing along with that jaunty accompaniment figure. Again, colla voce at 28A. (by the way, colla voce doesn’t mean slow, it means flexible. There’s a difference. You classical people, it’s more like recitative) There’s a section in the Original Broadway Cast recording that’s been cut; hence the awkward transition at 71. In that fermata is a bit of dialogue that doesn’t appear in the score:

Janet: “And then what happened?”

Robert: “Well, then…we kissed.”
Robert’s part at 74 lies in a potentially tricky place for a tenor. Head voice, or a light mix is the way to go here. This number is much better with the skates and the blindfold. It’s a daunting task, but one well worth the hours and hours of rehearsal time.
9A. I Sure Did!
I have no idea why it’s titled this way; it must have been an earlier draft of the cue line. The real cue now is, “Oh, no! What have I done?” Then it’s kind of a keystone cops vibe until around 12.
9B. Kitty, The Incomprehensible
This underscore is easy, but the score hasn’t been edited since the whole scene was rewritten. The cue line is all wrong now. The script has it right:
Kitty: “…and don’t forget to shave your legs”
In the parts, the winds share the figure in the piano right hand. First it’s flute, then clarinet. If you didn’t hire all the books, just tell the players you do have to repeat that figure.
10. Toledo Surprise
I’ll be honest and say that this is the number that kept me up nights. There’s one part which runs like clockwork after you teach it well, but it’s not easy to teach or play. You’ll know it when you see it. This is one of the numbers where you miss reed 4 if you didn’t hire it. The Bari sax part is priceless. The cue to this number is the SECOND time Feldzieg says “One more time!” We tried it cold, but I wound up giving Feldzieg a bell tone D flat to start, because the Dadadadadada needs to be in the right key. If he cues the MD to give the bell-tone, it’s funny. This is yet another case where the actor is potentially giving the tempo for the next section in the clear before the orchestra comes in. Be aware of that upbeat phrase being too slow or too fast. I’ll point out that the rhythm for the melody in the cast recording is not what’s notated in the score. Most of the time it winds up being Quarter, eighth eighth, instead of Eighth Quarter Eighth for the figure that begins in measure 3. I gave in; the way it’s written winds up sounding fussy. I moved the G flat in measure 18 down an octave. Can your gangsters hear harmony? Have fun with 21. If not, don’t be a hero. Have them both sing the bottom line. Again, at 35, you can drop that G flat down the octave if it’s just too high. At 36, my drummer and I checked in with each other to establish the tempo for the next section. If things had dragged at all, we fixed it there. In 36, the dialogue is:

Feldzieg: “You boys are naturals.”

Gangster # 2: “Honest?”

Feldzieg: “Keep it up, I’ll go work on the contracts.”

Gangsters 1 & 2: “Hey!”

Feldzieg: “A-5-6-7-8.”

That 5-6-7-8 is your cue out of 58. Observe the subito piano in 61, so that you don’t cover up Kitty’s line:

Kitty: “Mr. Feldzieg. Oh, what’s going on here?”

Feldzieg: “Kitty, I’m developing a new act.”

Gangsters: “TOLEDO SURPRISE”

Then around 91:

Kitty: “You mean you’re putting gangsters in the show and you won’t put me in? They’re not even in the union.”

Feldzieg: “Shh. You got it all wrong. The new act—it’s for you, Kitty. And these boys are your back up dancers.”

That’s your cue to get out of 98.

Kitty: “Back up dancers? Holy cats!”

That’s your cue to get out of 98A. Ideally, Holy is on a downbeat, cats is on a downbeat, and you’re right out into 100. By the way, at 100, the new Half note is the old quarter. It isn’t marked. Tell your band the PRISE of SurPRISE is on the downbeat of 108 and we’re off in tempo. The original cast album has more music after 116. Don’t let them rehearse to it; it’s not in the score. In measure 126, go on after “What a wonderful, wonderful tragedy!” If 145 and 150 are low or inaudible for your Feldzieg, you can put 145 up and leave 146 down, or put them both up the octave. The section between 147 and 162 had a tendency to rush when we did it. Don’t let the train slow down at 187-188 either; Strictly in tempo. Watch some youtube versions to see what to do in that moment. It’s an opportunity for a good laugh! Which brings me to 218, the crazymaking record skip section. Let’s hope I can make this clear to you; it’s potentially very confusing. I found 218 much easier to think about from the pianist/singer perspective as a bar of traditionally subdivided 9/8. In other words, THEN you GOT a TO-le, with three strong beats. I rehearsed it that way, only playing the top notes of the right hand and the left hand. Then after the 7th time through, (and you need to drill it into their heads that it’s 7 times and out) I really whacked that full chord on the downbeat of 222, which I thought of in conjunction with 223 as one long bar of 7/4. You mustn’t slow down at all in 223. Then 224 is in cut time, really. After some confusion, this made sense to everyone. It did not make sense to all my pit members, particularly the drummer and the percussionist, who preferred to think of it as it actually is, namely 2+2+2+3 eighths. The drum book certainly is that way, basically a bar of 4 with an extra eighth. I still feel the subtlety of that beat distinction will be lost on most casts, who will almost certainly not be paying any attention to your beat pattern at that point anyway. In practice, I wound up just giving a strong head nod on the downbeat of 218 each time, I carefully counted to 7 times through, and gave my drummer instructions to really whack the snare on the downbeat of 222. Hey, as long as it consistently works, any solution to that measure is legitimate. My hat is off to you! It’s an applause segue into the next number, BTW.
10A. Act One Finale
Okay, here’s another place where the original cast recording will lead you astray. On the recording, 10-13 are double-timed. It took us a while to figure out what was going wrong there. Also, it isn’t clear in the script or the score, but context clues tell us that the dancing should continue briefly from measures 1-6. (otherwise the lines don’t make sense) By the way, the script has an “Oh, Robert” before Janet’s cue line.

Should you add an intermission? No! The monologue isn’t as funny with an intermission, the show is only an hour and 45 minutes long, the second act isn’t long enough to justify an intermission, and your need to sell candy isn’t great enough to mess up the flow and the proportions of the show. Okay, I’m off my soap-box.

11. Message From A Nightingale
So the whole point of this number is that it’s horribly racist. So there’s no point in backpedalling on it. Gotta go whole-hog, with the ‘Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting’ style parallel 5ths and the gong and the horrible pronunciation and all. Make sure Man in Chair gets all the way out of the room before you start playing or it doesn’t make sense that he doesn’t come back on to stop it. There was evidently some business at 17, but we just had an entrance, so I made no tempo changes and played straight through in tempo from 16-18. There are a number of ways you could sing the section starting at 10, but a Julie Andrews delivery is quite funny, if slightly anachronistic. When Man In Chair runs in from offstage, he interrupts measure 37, preferably with a record-scratch sound cue. In rehearsal, I always had to play that F+7 chord much too long, and sometimes wound up playing a Bb chord just to keep it from sounding wrong. But when the band showed up, we put that TamTam at 36, and the ringing went on so long, the F+7 chord seemed just right.

12. Bride’s Lament
This was another number that struck me as out of place in a 1928 musical, (mad scenes aren’t really the thing until Rose’s Turn from Gypsy or maybe Lady In The Dark at the very earliest) but when you realize things start going off the rails when Man In Chair starts drinking, everything starts to make sense. Once again, the number begins with a colla voce verse. It shouldn’t be too self indulgent, but it should have room to breathe when the audience laughs. (and they will if they have a pulse and speak English) The opening instrumental should be slow. There’s a lot of dialogue to get through, not all of which is in the score, by the way. The underscore at 30, though, should be faster, piu mosso as marked. At 45, you also need to be moving ahead. At 84, the left hand of the piano is initially hard to play, but 15 minutes with the metronome will put you on the right track. Drill 90-94 until it’s solid as stone with your Janet. You need to say “ding” or something for the triangle note at 105, or Janet will blow through it in rehearsal. I also recall that it wasn’t in the drum book? Triangle parts are in both books, so you never know where to cue them. The section beginning at 109 is so fun, but it helps to know a few things ahead of time. Look at that harmony part at 114, it’s strange at first. There is a monologue at 110 that isn’t in the score. That means your chorus will have to be at a lower volume than you will probably like. I was all ready to have them going full bore until I found out about the monologue. This is what Janet says:

“Oh Robert! What a fool I’ve been. A hapless fool! I know now that I love you, but I’ve thrown it all away! I love you monkey… but is love enough Is love ever enough?”

Clearly you want people to hear that. There is also some business with cymbals there. The score indicates measure 123, but we put a few more in. The sooner you can get them in rehearsal, the sooner you can be aware not only of how to get them to play together, but how LOUD they’ll be. If you have any say in the matter, recommend cheap, small cymbals. The reed 3 book has a concert D flat in the and of 4 of measure 117. Should be a concert D natural. The last measure should clearly be a half note fermata in the vocal parts. They ought to cut off at the button.

13. Vaudeville Entrance
I had this number starting at the moment Man In Chair yanks the phone cord out of the wall.

14. Love is Always Lovely
The cue to start this number is “That’s just the nature of love” During measure 8, this exchange happens:

Underling: But Romeo and Juliet was a tragedy, madam.

Tottendale:Oh, I never read reviews.

At measure 17, this exchange happens (also not in score):

Underling: Might I remind you, madam, that Anne Boleyn lost her head.

Tottendale: Yes! She was in love!

That’s your cue to go on. I found that one difficult to time. The score says “Love was good for Eve and Adam”, but I’m pretty sure it should read “good to Eve…” Underling is supposed to say “Here we go again” after “…Adam” and before “..and Samson and Delilah too.” Before he says “May I pose a question Madam?” he says “good grief!” on beats 2 and 3 of measure 22.
At 27 there are some funny sound effects in the percussion book you should make the choreographer aware of, or they’ll be quite a surprise! At 45, I had Tottendale on the top line, and Underling on the bottom. I suppose it works either way. In the vamp at 46, this line happens in the repeat before she sings “Love sneaks up behind you”:

Underling: “Oh. I found that quite taxing. Excuse me, madam, while I pour myself a glass of ice water”

At measure 60, I had Underling on the top line, and Tottendale on the bottom. The original Broadway cast recording has a different ending here. If you need a scene change, you can go back to 58 for it.
14A. Incidental
In our production, we decided this underscore wasn’t on the record. Our cue line was “for the benefit of the young people.” It’s all about the trombone gliss in, people.
15. Accident Underscore
Much of the scene this underscores was apparently cut. Now the dialogue ends earlier. I cut it when Feldzieg enters with Kitty.
16. Kitty, The Incredible
The cue here was when Feldzieg says “MY mind” the second time. I had the band cut to Measure 5 on Kitty’s cue. (wherever they happened to be in the measure)
17. Wedding Bells #2
The first chunk of this number really only exists to cover the costume change for the girls to get into their wedding gowns. (I have that on the authority of the writers) Since we didn’t have 4 dressers backstage, I wound up writing and scoring another 45 seconds of music for George to tap to. No, I won’t send it to you. The cue in is “Hip Hip Hooray!”  Also, it should be played in cut time, even though it’s written in common time. The score at measure 4 says “That’s George” instead of “He’s George” again, which I like better. As I recall, the Original Cast Recording has much more harmony. If you want to transcribe that and teach it, you’re welcome to, but I don’t think it adds all that much. At 24G, I cut out the middle note of the ladies part, and the high a out of the second half note in the men’s part. At 24H, George says:

“Minister you may begin…Oh no, I forgot the Minister!”

That’s your cue to go on. I don’t know how your production will solve the problem of the plane coming on stage. But the tempo of 25 is determined by how long that transition takes. At measure 50, write Tempo Di I Do I Do in your part. You’re establishing the tempo of the next number there. Make sure your dynamic drops under that dialogue. 54 is the only place in the score you may miss the 3rd trumpet.
18. I Do, I Do In The Sky
The cue to start the number is “Wait! I Got it! Trix!”  Be careful when you teach the section from 21 to 28. That melody line is tricky, and you don’t want to learn it wrong. Trix is missing an “I” on the last beat of measure 48. Write in courtesy natural signs in the men’s part at 59. That passage that begins there is fun to play, but don’t go on autopilot; it changes slightly at 62 and 64. Don’t be intimidated by the power failure at 90. It’s actually really easy. A small, but important point: The singers aren’t wind up toys, so they shouldn’t flop over on the ground when the power goes out. They just drop in pitch and stop. Then when the Super says: “Here we go!” and the lights come back up, they start scooping up and you cue them for “SKY!”

19. Finale Ultimo
The cue for this number is: “…a little something for when you’re feeling blue. You know?”  In an ideal world, Man In Chair remembers that pitch and just starts singing. (You can’t really get it from the previous number, which is in A flat, not C, and which in any case has a monologue between) I turned down the volume on my synth, struck the G and turned it up just loud enough to be heard. The uke chords at measure 8 are Dm7, G7, Dm7, G7, Em7, A7, Am7, D7. In standard gcea  tuning, those chords are (sorry for my lousy cutting and pasting):
If Robert can’t sing the low notes in 16, you can either throw the whole phrase up the octave, (not the best option) or sing these notes in measure 16: G, F, E, D, C, D, E, F. Your cast will likely want to breathe between the first and second beats of 45. Take an 8th rest before “will” and let them do it. At 50, I moved the 1st tenor part up into the alto, cut the Bb out of the first chord for the guys, cut the Ab out of the chord on beat 3, and cut the Bb out of all 4 men’s chords in 51. The script has the second word of 51 as tumble, but I think crumble, as written is funnier. At 52 you may want to explain to the band that the chorus comes in on 2. Otherwise they’re likely to misread your chorus cue as a cue to them. On the last note, I played the chord and told the singers, “Pick a note that feels right and comfortable and loud”. After all, every note in the D flat major chord is there, and there’s bound to be a Soprano and a tenor pulling that high A flat.
After the number, Man in Chair says, “Goodbye Everybody!”, which is your cue to play the:
20. Bows
You’ve played this before, but the section at 15 is in a different key than before, so don’t let your fingers go on autopilot. If you need a repeat, you can repeat 25-32. It took me awhile to trust the slower tempo of 51, but if everyone is digging in and the trumpet is really playing out broadly, it does work well.
21. Exit Music
I’m pretty sure this got faster every night. It’s a good chunk of the overture, really. Don’t wait until opening night to look at 28-30. It’s not quite the same as the overture, and the differences can throw the band off when it re-enters.

Instruments You Should Get For Your Pit
This is a dance show. You need a pianist, a drummer, and a bass player.
The reeds do a lot of work. Reeds 1 and 2 are most important, 3 is good, but less important. You only miss Reed 4 during some of the Bari sax work and a few Bass Clarinet place.
Trumpet 1 and Trombone are very helpful.
Trumpet 2 helps round out the sound, but has very few exposed parts.
We did not hire a trumpet 3, and I only noticed 2 places where an exposed 3rd trumpet part was missed. I didn’t even bother re-assigning them, I just played them on the piano.
I didn’t hire keyboard 2, and didn’t miss it.
The percussion book adds a LOT of color and silliness, but it’s very very hard, like all the mallet books orchestrated by Larry Blank. My percussionist Mark Cristofaro programmed the changes into his Malletkat, and it really made a lot of the show pop, but again, the mallet work is very hard, and if you have a player who isn’t great, or isn’t committed, don’t bother using the book.

3 person pit:
Piano, Bass, Drums

6 person pit:
Piano, Bass, Drums, Reed 1, Reed 2, Trumpet
9 person pit:
Piano, Bass, Drums, Reed 1, Reed 2, Reed 3, Trumpet 1, Trumpet 2, Trombone

Then add, in this order:

Percussion
Reed 4
Keyboard 2
Trumpet 3

Hail To The Chief: Top 22 Presidents in Musicals

UPDATE: I’ve added the Hamilton Presidents in, finally! And now there are 22.

In honor of this crazy election season, here are 22 presidents appearing in musicals. Herbert Hoover, although mentioned in Annie, Assassins, and Follies, does not appear, so he doesn’t make the cut. It turns out presidents are popular fodder for musicals. Many major writers in the 20th century found presidents interesting enough to write them into their shows.

22) Stephen Decatur Henderson.                                

What’s that you say? Not a real president? Well, he’s the star of Mr. President, Irving Berlin‘s very last musical, about a president who loses his re-election bid. One of his songs is entitled It Gets Lonely In The White House. But as a musical president, he actually has plenty of company, as we shall see.

21) Dwight D. Eisenhower

Ike is the only president to appear in Michael John Lachiusa‘s seminal First Lady Suite. He’s also mentioned in the musicals Jamaica, Merrily We Roll Along, and Finnian’s Rainbow.

20) William Howard Taft

This 300 pound president, who once needed to be greased with butter to get him out of a White House bathtub, only appears in one musical as far as I can tell; the underrated Teddy and Alice, which we’ll run into a few times in this list. (three presidents appear) The music in the show is adapted from John Philip Sousa. Taft is also mentioned in Parade.

19) James Monroe

James Monroe appears in Leonard Bernstein‘s 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with a number of other presidents. Actually it might be more accurate to say he appears as a number of other presidents, since the same actor plays all of them. He sings a song called The Little White Lie, about America’s trouble dealing with the institution of slavery. In that song, with lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, Eliza Monroe sings:

You knew when you were Washington

How wrong it was to do it.

You knew when you were Adams.

You knew it. You knew it.

As Jefferson you knew it!

As Madison you knew it!

And now that you’re Monroe,

You surely ought to know!

Does anybody else hear the music from You Did It from My Fair Lady in your head while reading that? Don’t worry, Bernstein’s music makes the sing-songy lyric something special.

18) Harry Truman gets props for actually appearing in a musical, making a cameo appearance in a performance of Irving Berlin‘s Mr. President in Kansas City in 1964. Unfortunately, he had to be rushed out of the performance via ambulance when he had an attack of appendicitis. A Truman lookalike appeared breifly at the end of Irving Berlin’s Call Me Madam, in which Ethel Merman played an ambassador.  Truman is also a character in a musical that rehearsed for a Broadway opening, but never actually opened, called Senator Joe. A musical about Senator McCarthy, it was improbably written by Tom O’Horgan, who had directed Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar. It seems to have been something of a rock musical. If that sounds intriguing to you, head on over to you tube and type in Senator Joe First Act Finale. There you’ll hear a bootleg of part of first orchestra reading. Makes you want to hear what Truman sounded like…

17) Ulysses S. Grant appeared in a 1945 flop, Mr. Strauss Goes to Boston. He was played by Norman Roland, who would later get a bit part in the original production of Candide. Grant is also mentioned in Redhead, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and What Makes Sammy Run?

16) Rutherford B. Hayes appears in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, where he takes the oath of office accompanied by an obbligato of the departing and future first ladies.

15) Calvin Coolidge appears in the 1968 musical How To Steal An Election, where he sings a song entitled Charisma. The soundtrack can only be heard on vinyl,  but for presidential music buffs, it’s worth trying to find it, because it combines new songs with real historical campaign songs. 

14) James Madison appears in act 2 of Hamilton. He’s consistently in ‘the room where it happens’, but you kinda miss Hercules Mulligan.

13) John Quincy Adams appears in the 1919 musical Happy Days, but I get the impression it was a brief appearance, since the cast also included Napoleon, Henry the 8th, Madame Butterfly, Little Red Riding Hood and Sappho. He gets better play 9 decades later in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. (Martin Van Buren appears too)

12) You’d think Ronald Reagan would appear frequently in musicals, being such an iconic figure. As far as I can tell, he appears only as a voice in Doonesbury, and in the aforementioned Senator Joe. He’s also mentioned in Assassins and Falsettoland. But Reagan appeared in the 1943 film This Is The Army, which had an Irving Berlin score, and that has to count for something, even though he doesn’t sing.

11) Richard Nixon appears with the others in Senator Joe, and Vintage 60, which ran 8 performances. He is mentioned in Merrily We Roll Along. He’s also a major character in the John Adams opera Nixon in China, but that’s off topic.

10) Gerald Ford appears as a character in Assassins. I figured it was only right to put him after Nixon on this list.

9) William McKinley appears as a character in Earl Carroll’s Sketch book of 1935, where he was played by Arthur Griffin, who originated the Doctor in the first production of The Skin Of Our Teeth in 1942. McKinley is also referred to in Assassins and Ragtime, in both cases referring to his assassination.

8) Thomas Jefferson appears as a character in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and in 1776. In 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, he sings an ingenious March, The President Jefferson Sunday Luncheon Party March. I can’t get enough of this quirky tune.

In 1776 he sings quite a bit: Here are some clips from a very good production:

Of course, Jefferson is also portrayed spectacularly by Daveed Diggs in the original cast of Hamilton

7) John Adams also appears as a character in 1776 and is mentioned in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, although Abigail Adams gets the big song of the evening “Take Care Of This House” He’s also referenced in Hamilton. Here is a cut number from the show, which will remain on this page until the link goes dead:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUI8b17YGx8

6) Andrew Jackson is the president most recently incarnated in the musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. Not your grandma’s musical president, to be sure:

He’s also mentioned in the musical  Jamaica.

5) John P. Wintergreen is the hero of the Gerswhin musicals Of Thee I Sing and Let ‘Em Eat Cake. This makes him one of the only characters in a musical to appear in a sequel, but that’s not the only great thing about John P. Wintergreen. The original Wintergreen and his Vice President Throttlebottom (yes, you read that right) were played by the legendary William Gaxton and Victor Moore before they appeared in the original Anything Goes.

Wintergreen has the best campaign theme song ever:

“He’s the man the people choose

Loves the Irish and the Jews”

4) Teddy Roosevelt is the title character of Teddy and Alice, where he was played by Len Cariou. You old timers don’t need me to remind you he was in Sweeney Todd,   A Little Night Music, and Applause. For you kiddies, he’s on TV in Blue Bloods, as the old dude. Teddy also appears in Bless You All, where he was played by Robert Chisolm, who played Macheath in the original 1933 Broadway production of The Threepenny Opera. In 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, he sings To Make Us Proud, at the very end of the show. Oh, yeah. He was also in Earl Carroll’s Sketch Book of 1935, and the Gershwins mentioned him in Let ‘Em Eat Cake, the sequel to Of Thee I Sing.

3) Abraham Lincoln appears in Bless You All, as a voice in Frank Wildhorn’s The Civil War, Earl Carroll’s Sketchbook of 1935, and Happy Days from 1919. He is also mentioned in The Producers, Jamaica, and Assassins, naturally.

2) George Washington appears as a character in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, where he helps select the location of the country’s capital. I don’t think this is how it went down, but it makes for a good scene. I’m sad that this show flopped so badly.

Washington is an unforgettable character in Hamilton, where he acts as a mentor to Alexander Hamilton and ‘teaches ’em how to say goodbye’

He also appears in Bless You All, Rodgers and Hart‘s Dearest Enemy, Morton Gould‘s Arms and the Girl, Dance Me A Song, and Earl Carroll’s Sketch book from 1935. He is mentioned in Damn Yankees, How Now Dow Jones, Jamaica, and probably innumerable other lyrics.

1) Franklin Delano Roosevelt is the commander in chief of musical presidents. He appears as an important character in Annie and its sequel Annie Warbucks. If that weren’t enough, he is the subject of Rodgers and Hart‘s musical I’d Rather Be Right, which ran when FDR was in office, and starred the legendary George M. Cohan, who wasn’t actually an FDR fan, really.

He’s also a character in Teddy and Alice, Art Carney played his voice in Flora The Red Menace, and he appears as a puppet in Flahooley. He is referred to in Assassins.

Did I miss anybody? Are my facts off? I’m sure you’ll all let me know. And get out there and vote!

Broadway G4

 

I put this video together to show the increasing importance and changing production of the G4.But obviously, it’s also fun to guess the singers! You can join the rabble in making your guesses on Youtube, or you can post them in the comments here. I also welcome comments about how the G4 has changed over the years.