Full orchestras make a theater comeback after years of budgetary slashes - Washington Post article

Full orchestras make a theater comeback after years of budgetary slashes

(Washington Post article)

By Peter Marks

Tuesday, December 14, 2010; 1:46 AM

The look on Florence Lacey's face said it all. Singing for the first time with the 20-piece orchestra for "Sunset Boulevard" - the largest band Signature Theatre has ever assembled for a musical - the actress lingered onstage and beamed.

"That's incredible," Lacey exclaimed, moments after finishing the rehearsal of "With One Look," the first-act anthem for her character, the reclusive film star Norma Desmond, in the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. "I'm having fun."
Her giddiness was perfectly understandable. Accomplished singers love the lift that a lush, full accompaniment provides - and in the musical theater these days, that's an extreme rarity. Standard practice on Broadway and in theater towns such as Washington is to pare the orchestra down to as few instruments as possible, in the service, mostly, of saving money, and at the expense of the robust sound that was once typical of a big musical.
But in selected instances, a counter-trend is developing, one that is allowing audiences to hear shows - particularly revivals of older musicals - in much the way their composers and orchestrators intended. In these cases, artistic administrators are making room in their budgets for full complements of strings, brass and woodwinds in their pits. While star-studded Broadway remountings of works such as "A Little Night Music" and "La Cage aux Folles" get by nowadays with anemic ensembles of eight or nine musicians, these other upstart productions are hiring as many as 30 players.
The statement they are making is profound. It is that the live notes from a harp or oboe or second cello are as essential to the support of a musical as that dazzling lighting effect or that cadre of sleek dancers.
"To me, cutting back an orchestra is the same as saying we're doing different material," said Michael M. Kaiser, president of the Kennedy Center and a longtime advocate of full orchestral sound. "It adds up to a cheapened experience. And when we cheapen the experience, we can't be surprised when people stay away from the theater."
It just so happens that Washingtonians can get an earful at the moment of what Kaiser is so passionate about, of the sensuous auditory experience of a fully occupied pit. The Tony-winning revival of "South Pacific," now on a national tour, begins performances Tuesday night in the Kennedy Center Opera House with a total of 26 musicians playing the original Rodgers and Hammerstein orchestrations. And right across the river, on Signature's main stage in Shirlington, 20 instrumentalists are crammed two abreast onto a narrow balcony behind the "Sunset Boulevard" set, applying complex colors to a Lloyd Webber score.

The aural ambition of director Eric Schaeffer's revival of "Sunset," which began preview performances last Tuesday and has its official opening on Saturday , seems all the bolder considering Signature's physical limitations. The auditorium accommodates only 276 seats - a ratio of one musician for every 14 paying customers. Consider, too, the price tag. According to Maggie Boland, Signature's managing director, the company will pay about $265,000 for its orchestra - roughly a quarter of the show's entire budget, and more than twice the expense of the 10-piece band for its recent hit revival of "Chess."

Schaeffer believes that the outsize acoustical impact in that intimate space will make the extra expenditure worthwhile. "I guarantee that you'll remember the show the way you hear it here," he declared.

Routine reductions

Technology has given producers and regional theaters around the country an expanding bag of tricks for trimming the band: The credits for Broadway's "La Cage," for instance, include an acknowledgment of the orchestra's "Synthesizer Programmer." The era of manufactured electronic sound, and the proliferation of rock musicals, have conspired to train audiences to absorb show music as pumped-up in volume but not perhaps as variegated tone. Kaiser says that when he was at the helm of a ballet company some years ago, a board member proposed that since musicians are often invisible to the audience, couldn't there just be a recording of the score and someone hired to stand in the pit and wave a baton?
The practice of reducing the size of the band has become so routine, in fact, that popular expectations for what a show should sound like have changed. Today, some new Broadway musicals, such as "The Addams Family" and "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown," can have as many as 18 musicians. But that's still a smaller orchestra than what Signature has assembled for "Sunset." Ted Chapin, president of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization, the group that controls the rights to the work of the songwriting team, as well as of composers such as Irving Berlin, says until the recent revival of "South Pacific," he'd never heard a Rodgers and Hammerstein score on Broadway with its complete original contingent of instruments.
The choice of employing a full orchestra for an older musical can turn a revival into an event. That's what happened at Lincoln Center Theater in 2008 with director Bartlett Sher's "South Pacific." When, during the overture, the roof of the Vivian Beaumont Theater's orchestra pit retracted for a few minutes to reveal 30 musicians, the audience broke into astonished applause. "I'm a fan of seeing music being made," said Ted Sperling, the revival's music director. "It just sounds better when you see it."

Nothing like the real thing

It is surely possible to sit through a satisfying evening with Rodgers and Hammerstein's World War II tale of romance and prejudice without 30 people in the pit. (On the road, that number has been reduced by four.) But as Sperling notes, the range of emotions the show is meant to evoke was carefully plotted out in the musical arrangements as well as the dialogue, under the supervision of its original director.
"Josh Logan thought the music would tell you so much about the inner life of the characters," Sperling said. "That's why there's so much underscoring in 'South Pacific.' "
Kaiser committed the Kennedy Center at the outset of his tenure to filling the pit. So the musicals the center revives boast orchestras that very closely mirror the numbers in the original incarnations: 23 players for "Mame"; 24 for "Carnival"; 28 for the recent "Ragtime" that moved to Broadway. Next spring's "Follies" with Bernadette Peters, Jan Maxwell, Linda Lavin and Elaine Paige will also feature 28 musicians.
The visceral pleasure of being in the room with all the sounds of a show can come down to the resonance of one familiar instrument - the plunking of the banjo, for example, in "Mame." That drew cheers, Kaiser recalled: "It's a physical sensation. You feel the overtones of the music when you're in the presence of it," he said. "And you lose that when you cut it back."
At Signature - where the attempts to scale down large musicals such as "Les Miserables" and "My Fair Lady" have been a hallmark - the accent on this occasion is on the breadth of the auditory experience. To win Lloyd Webber's consent to stage "Sunset," Schaeffer says he had to agree to use the orchestrations for the original production, which ran on Broadway from 1994 to 1997.
A direct result is a balcony so crowded with musicians it looks like the Red Line at rush hour; a percussionist sits around a corner from his colleagues and watches the conductor, Jon Kalbfleisch, on a monitor. Distributed across the long back wall of the stage, the musicans face a thorny logistical problem: Those at one end can't hear those at the other. One of Kalbfleisch's jobs is to ensure that the far-flung sections are in balance.
For example, after one duet, Kalbfleisch wanted to know from Schaeffer, who was sitting out front, whether the volume of his large ensemble was overpowering the actors. "If it's too loud there, we can adjust up here," the conductor said. Soon, he was issuing orchestral instructions. "We need more cello and bass, because the tune is in the lower instruments," he told the musicians.
Schaeffer seems to subscribe to Sperling's view that the orchestra is an experience for the eye as well: At appointed times, doors in the back of the set pull apart to reveal a substantial number of the musicians. It makes good sense, too, allowing an audience to see what it's paying for (in this case, upward of $84).
And in an age of digital miracles, reminding theatergoers in every way possible that melodies can be trilled and blared and plucked and strummed more vivaciously by flesh and blood beings may make it easier for theaters to choose them over sophisticated software.
"As good as it gets technically, it still doesn't sound as nice as having the real thing," said Craig Jensen, head audio engineer in the Kennedy Center Opera House. "It's humans performing for humans."