Posted on June 24, 2010 at 3:28 pm
You’ve been hired to direct a show. You do all your homework, find a way to tell that story that’s unique to you but comprehensible to the audience, work with your designers to bring that vision to life, cast the actors who most closely resemble the image of those characters in your head, and then…
Dear Mr. Brown: I’m currently directing a production of The Last Five Years. It’s a very great process and I’m enjoying it tremendously. However, I have run into a pretty big issue. The pianist is a little iffy in some spots… and overall I’m not satisfied with the sound… I feel it could hurt the show. I think using an accompaniment instrumental CD would be my best bet… but I can’t find it anywhere. I know a Jason Robert Brown karaoke CD is sold, but that doesn’t have the full score. MTI doesn’t sell an accompaniment CD on their site. Is there any possible way to get my hands on a recorded instrumental score of The Last Five Years to use in my production? If so, where, and how much would it be? It would mean the world to me right now to get a helpful response. Thank you.
That sound you hear is JRB taking a deep breath. Here goes:
Thanks for your message, and thank you for bringing The Last Five Years to life.
I appreciate the difficulty you’re having in finding musicians who can accurately reproduce the written music; it’s a very hard score to play (and to sing, though that’s not the issue at hand). And I can see why you would want to try using a recorded version of the score in lieu of the live musicians you’ve already hired. But I think that’s a bad idea, and I’ll explain why, and it will help you not one iota.
I am unutterably opposed to using recorded accompaniment for The Last Five Years, or, in fact, for any of my shows. There is a communion between musicians and actors that is the only real part of musical theater that interests me. I’ve never cared about who can belt the highest or cry the hardest or leap the farthest or tap dance the fastest; the reason I write musicals is that when a character becomes sufficiently charged with emotion that they have to sing, they require musicians to support them – that support, that give and take between the dramatic and the musical, is what I love more than anything. However, it’s simply not possible with recorded music. By definition, the recording cannot respond, cannot support, cannot in any real sense accompany the singer – all it does is play along while the singer has to follow it slavishly, responding to the recording’s phrasing and tempo without being able to call on any of the gifts or instincts that make a musical theater actor great.
You say your pianist isn’t quite up to the task of playing the show, though, and so all of this glorious rhetoric about musical give-and-take is essentially moot – with an ill-equipped musician, what your production probably sounds like right now is Panic. The pianist panicking because the notes are going by and he’s missing them, the other musicians panicking because no one is leading them, and the actors panicking because they feel utterly at sea, doing their best to bring extremely difficult music to life without any solid ground under their feet and no air under their wings. The sound of Panic is horrible. It’s the worst sound in the world; it sounds like amateurs and fools.
Now, okay, can I be straight with you for a second? If your pianist can’t play the show, then he should be fired and replaced. (It could be a she, of course.) And then you should hire someone who’s up to the job. Of course, if you’re not paying very well, you may find it difficult to hire a pianist who can do it. But that’s what you should do. I’m glad you recognize that your pianist isn’t up to the gig – all too often, such incompetence passes unnoticed in the theater – but now that you’ve recognized it, it’s your job (and the job of your producer and your theater) to do everything in your power to respect the musical element of this show that you have chosen to stage and that you are charging people to attend. There is no excuse for asking an audience to sit through a bad performance.
You may, however, simply say “There’s no money for a better pianist.” Or there may be a political issue about firing the current piano player. At that stage, I have nothing left to offer. I understand that small theaters survive on tiny budgets and every penny is accounted for, and that a professional musician may be more than an amateur theater group can handle. But I didn’t write this music to be performed badly, and I don’t think you want it that way either – if you’re not prepared to create a professional product, then you have to be satisfied with whatever it is you’ve signed on to create. I can’t abet that lack of respect for the musical element of a show by sending out a recorded version of the score.
I wish you the best of luck on your production, and please let me know how it all plays out.
J.
And if you’ve gotten this far, let me mention that you can now follow my inane tweets on Twitter because I’m a sucker and I signed up for the damn thing and now I spend all my time thinking up dumb bullshit to put on it. http://twitter.com/MrJasonRBrown if you give a shit, and I swear I don’t take it personally if you don’t.
8 comments
I read this post during the day, and now- at 4am- am having trouble falling asleep thinking of a suffering director whose pianist for The Last Five Years is about to ruin his whole production, and the added pressure of the writer of the show saying “he didn’t write this music to be performed badly”.
Although I agree with Mr. Jason Robert Brown about the actors singing to a recorded accompanying background not being a satisfying solution to the problem, I do think there ARE other options to make the show work without asking the audience to sit through a bad – Panic sounding – performance.
The first thing that came to my mind was simplifying the piano part: I know the arrangements for the L5Y are pretty damn good the way they are written and the best way to go would be hiring musicians who are able to play all the notes in the parts. But I think there are always ways of playing something simpler that may not be as musically interesting or challenging as the written arrangement, but will “do the job” in the sense of keeping time/harmonic structure for the singers to have a solid ground on which to lay their melodies. If I were in the pianist’s place I would take some time to analyze the music I was having trouble with to try and find easier arrangements that would still “work” to get through the show. Even while I am a HUGE fan of the incredible arrangments on L5Y, I think it’s better to leave out some notes and get through the show, than to hear a stumbling pianist hardly keeping time trying to play the complex parts and suffering singers striving to find a solid ground to lay their voices.
In this case, as Director of the show, I would ask the Music Director (who I guess for this show is the same pianist) to make a harmonic analysis and write chord symbols for the difficult parts and play easier arrangments.
Another option– and this just came to my mind in an insomniac/totally-out-of-the-box state of consciousness– would be to hire a 2nd pianist so they can play the piano part with 4 hands. This might sound like a crazy idea but again, I think the main goal is to make the music happen somehow. It is much easier to read one staff than two. This would probably take a lot of practice time by the two pianists to play in sync, but it would probably even be an interesting way of aproaching the music.
I’m not sure that JRB would like either of my suggestions because it sounds like he is very proud of his songs with the piano parts the way they are written (as he totally should be!), but I’m trying to put myself in the position of the director whose long hard work is being held back by a technical music issue.
I live in Caracas (Venezuela!) and have worked as Music Director/Conductor for several full productions of Broadway musicals here. This is a place where there is almost no musical theater industry– this meaning that there is not a lot of infrastructure/platform/musical theater actors/musical theater musicians, etc, etc, etc. We are always faced with problems that we need to solve to get the show going. And I tell you: there is ALWAYS a way to work out a show so that the audience will still enjoy a nice performance. Fortunately we have good musicians here, but I have been through similar experiences with pianists: when we did The Producers, I hired a wonderful jazz pianist to play with the orchestra since it’s all big band and swing… But when the parts arrived (a couple of days before orchestral rehearsals) I realized that the piano music was all written out- without ANY chord symbols! I had to re-cast the pianist and hired a classical guy who does not know anything about jazz but was able to sight-read the whole thing. And the interesting point is that the classical pianist cost a lot less than what the wonderful jazz guy was asking for!
This option is probably not applicable for The Last Five Years because you need a pianist who will read complex arrangements AND also keep great time and groove (since there is no drums or percussion).
So I would suggest trying to either play simpler piano arrangements, or try to play the thing as written but with two pianists (they can play 4-hands and/or play different songs each to split their work-load).
I think it’s great to try and do a show as the authors intended it to be done when they wrote it. But I also think Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock don’t mind Fiddler on the Roof being staged by amateurs at a jewish school somewhere in the world.
Best of luck!
Salomon Lerner
[FROM JRB: Salomon’s intentions are good, so I won’t bother rebutting his points in any detail; suffice to say that a qualified musical director will have taken all those options into consideration and not left the actors and the production hanging – if the MD can’t get the job done without the director feeling like the show’s falling apart, the MD should get replaced.]
Jason,
Thank you so much for that honest, hard hitting and heartfelt post. As a singer/actor I have performed in as many venues as exist. Unfortunately I have had to endure the straitjacketed agony of touring with a CD recording of a musical. Every once in a while we would hit a theatre where they had a “must use a live musician” rule and the level of performance would rise enormously. The show we were meant to sing and act would be realized. New moments would be discovered. We could breathe. We could relate to each other and our accompanist and our audience’s reaction to what was happening on stage. We were in live theatre heaven. Then . . . back to purgatory. I stand up with you for the live musician. And, please, musicians, learn to play JRB’s music and all of the new music that is being written. Let’s face it, the world of music theatre has grown in sophistication of technical demands (despite the rock dominated Tonys of this year) and it is up to all of us to keep up.
If you don’t have the horses, don’t go to the track.
It’s just that simple.
If you really respect the composer and his music, you won’t put yourself in a position to butcher it.
Having recently had to watch an otherwise fabulous production of Parade where the orchestra played catch-up with the cast for the entire first weekend, this brought joy (or at least a sense of vindication in my opening-night ravings) to my heart. Thank you.
As a producer and performer for a small music theatre company who premiered the first amateur production of L5Y in South Australia, I can empathise with the writer of the email to JRB. Producing a work such as this is an enormous challenge and finding the musicians and performers to do it justice is challenging at best. It is a difficult position to be in when you realise that a member of your cast or orchestra is not up to scratch and I feel for the position the writer is in.
I do, however, have to agree with JRB’s position.
We were blessed with an astoundingly talented pianist and MD (big shout out to Matthew Carey) and the musicians he sourced were equally talented bringing the score to life every night with all the magic the JRB wrote into it. That said, before we signed on the dotted line to produce the show we did our homework. As producers we desperately wanted to mount this show for a multitude of reasons but we agreed early on that if we couldn’t find the musicians to pull it off we wouldn’t do it – consequently we embarked on a 2 month exploration of who we had available to do the show and we had, in principle, cast the musicians and performers before we locked the show in.
This may seem a little counterintuitive, especially in the amateur theatre world where the show is usually chosen and locked in before anything else, but when choosing to mount a complex and difficult show such as this, it is an essential step to have the right players in your corner first.
Almost all shows have recordings and perusal scores available and there should be no difficulty in determining ahead of time whether it is within the scope of a particular company to do a piece justice. If not there are plenty of fun interesting and rewarding shows available that are not as complex to perform and it is the responsibility of the production team to select the right one. All too often, MDs and directors blue pencil works, change keys, re- score and otherwise alter works to suit their purposes – usually to the detriment of the work and often in direct conflict with the composers intent.
Having spent a lot of time researching The Last Five Years (and other JRB shows), it seems to me that just about every note and word in the score is there for a reason. Removing or changing them means you aren’t performing the piece as the composer intended. Think of the first time you listened to that recording of the show and, if you were like me, sat there dumfounded by the emotional rollercoaster of that 70 odd minutes. Yes it was due to the astounding talent of Norbert Leo Butz and Sheree Renee Scott, but it was also due to the fact that JRB wrote and arranged the score the way he did.
With respect the to the writer of the email, I would implore you to follow JRB’s advice and find someone who CAN play the score and use live musicians. To play to a recording would kill the performers and kill the piece – all of the beauty and magic that are woven between live performers will be lost. Having sung the role of Jamie (I will leave it to others to say whether I did it justice or not), I cannot imagine what it would have been like to have been tied to a recording.
Sure if you did it you would probably get away with it and, depending on how talented your singers are, you would probably get a good audience response.
But really, is this a piece you want to ‘get away with’ ?
The fact that they’re looking for an accompaniment CD makes me think that they don’t have the budget.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had demanding producers at the low-budget level ask me why I can’t make the pit sound better. If you’re not paying musicians what they’re worth, you’re not going to get reliable, quality musicians, unless you’re really lucky. And you can’t go through your business life planning on being really lucky.
The political comment about firing the MD is true and can be a tough choice to make but at the end of the day any music that has been scored (and scored in such great detail showing time, effort and passion) should be played with the utmost accuracy.
I was lucky enough to MD this phenomenal piece last year and in the end I lost count of the amount of hours I spent practicing to perform it to the best of my ability.
This score is neither for the ‘classical’ or ‘pop’ pianist – it (in my opinion) takes those hours to make sure the tougher areas for either type have been practiced and nailed! Take the triplets at the end of ‘Moving Too Fast’ – the bane of my existence for about a week but getting them right in the performances was worth the time spent.
As for backing CD’s – they would be near impossible to use due to the vamp/safety bars etc throughout the score.
Jack
Unfortunately, it seems to me that too often the music is the last thing considered when mounting a musical. The score to L5Y is not only difficult, it’s intricately woven to tell the story in ways that the lyrics and the actors don’t. (I don’t mean to say that the lyrics and actors don’t serve the story, but that they do in different ways from the music.) This give and take between musical elements and dramatic elements to the end of telling a story is what makes L5Y so compelling.
Frankly, while I sympathize with this director, I have to wonder how it got to this point with this pianist. I completely understand being a director and being compelled toward a certain piece, but when that piece is a musical, the first thing you do is make sure you have the assets you need to serve the music best. If you don’t have those resources, unfortunately, you don’t put on the show until you do.
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