Posts Tagged ‘Broadway’

Musical Theatre

Sunday, April 19th, 2009

I used to pick on musical theatre a lot in college, and not undeservedly.  There is a great deal of musical cheese out there, some of it wildly successful and making piles and piles of cash for its authors and producers.

Honestly, though, in the end, I have to come down on the side of any medium that emphasizes live performance, gets young people and community members involved in the arts across the country and does so much to blend artistic and popular streams of composition.  As much as I wish that opera were more relevant to society, there’s a lot to be said in favor of musical theatre.

I got to experience a good shot of that this week with OPSU’s production of Urinetown: The Musical, which closed on Saturday after three fantastic performances.  The show’s music is extremely pithy, with a huge debt to Kurt Weill, and not a little bit to Leonard Bernstein (the jump number “Snuff that Girl” is placed in just about the same point in the story as “Cool” is in West Side Story (an aside–my former Cincinnati classmate Karen Olivo is currently playing Anita in the Broadway revival of Lenny’s incredible show, and had a write-up in The New Yorker a couple of weeks ago.  Again, I brush up against fame)).  The book to Urinetown is fantastic, with great use of a very post-modern narrator and exactly the kind of snide, knowing, sophisticated comedy.  Congrats to director Tito Aznar and a great cast for pulling this off.

It was an absolute joy to play in the pit of this show and listen to my students and colleagues expand their horizons as both performers and as human beings.  This is the point of both theatre and college, in my opinion.  Sometimes this can be done in the classroom, or through the experience of real life, but sometimes we have to put on a show and band together with others to do so.

Part of what I loved most about Urinetown was its social conscience–a wonderful ability to look at a problem that involves all of us, and to look at it from multiple angles, and to affirm, at the end, that the answer that seems morally right might actually be morally reprehensible.  The road to Perdition is indeed paved with good intentions.  We need theatre like this in all our lives.  If we all lived in New York City, we could experience the Broadway and off-Broadway shows like this that don’t get long runs or touring companies or movie adaptations (although Urinetown has gotten a fair amount of play, and did have a touring company earlier this decade… the movie version could be absolutely fantastic if they made one; I would actually vote for a cartoon by Seth McFarland).

So my plea to community and school theatre directors–choose shows with substance, that make your students make important statements and evaluate them.  The world does not need another revival of Grease, or Bye-Bye Birdie, or The Girlfriend, or even Once Upon a Mattress (which is one of my all-time favorite shows).  Even though I think it’s a snore, and extremely self-righteous, South Pacific at least confronts racism and imperialism.  The Music Man has a lot to say about prejudice and gossip.  Find edgy, exciting music–Kurt Weill or Jean-Michel Schonberg or Sondheim–and wry, dry, meaningful dialog (and for Pete’s sake, if you do put on Grease, don’t let the actors play it straight).  Shows from the last twenty years or so have nice, tidy little pits based on jazz and rock combos, and let the music have a bite and a relevance that just isn’t achieved when a pianist plays the orchestra reduction (or fills in most of the string parts).

I’ve been asked to conduct Sweeney Todd in the fall here in Guymon, and I’m really looking forward to digging into a difficult score and bringing it to life with a great director (Michael Ask, who played Bobby Strong in Urinetown at OPSU).  Will it be a reach for our community theatre?  Yes, but I have confidence that it will come to life.  Was I a little sickened by the movie version last Christmas?  Yes, but, with the chance to dig into Sondheim’s score and reflect on what’s really in the show, I’m hoping that I’ll be able to find the point to the show that justifies all that.

So… this is the time of year that many high schools are putting on their annual shows.  Get out and see one and support a hugely meaningful educational experience and a very important American art form.

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Playing and Listening–More to Bob

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008

This is a partial response to Bob Specter’s response to my response… well… anyway.  It’s been a mildly busy week (that’s my story) and this is the first chance I’ve had to sit and think about something that stuck in my brain about Bob’s last posting.  Don’t go looking for it–I’ll just quote it:

“2) Having grown up playing an instrument in an orchestra and brass ensembles, I feel that by immersing my entire focus into my past [sic; “part” (?)] and how it facilitates the “piece”, that takes all the energy I have. It is interesting to talk to people about the Canadian Brass performance of the Barber Adagio, and not have them have a clue how hard breath control can be. Now I see that as technique, not as the musical plumbing (open sevenths, etc.), and I wonder if someone who focuses on the musical plumbing loses the ability to appreciate the variances in the performance (and performers).”

Over the last year, my opportunities to perform have dwindled significantly, while the amount of time I spend thinking about the theory of music has grown to encompass most of my working time.  On top of that, the playing I’ve done has largely been in popular styles where the “text” of the music (i.e., the written score) isn’t taken as seriously as in, say, a Mahler symphony. 

The results have been interesting.  I am “hearing” like never before, either from lack of preparation time (come in on Sunday morning, read the charts in rehearsal, go to Sunday school, go back and play the service, hoping I remember the key change after the third verse) or from being immersed in styles where “note” is less important than “feeling.”  I am literally living and breathing music theory most of the time, and it is showing in my performance–what is improvisation other than simply living and breathing music theory?

So the “plumbing” isn’t a way to deal with music that circumvents or minimizes some aspect of the musical experience.  On the contrary–once one “groks” the plumbing, it ceases to be something that one thinks about and the effect is the same, except that it now becomes possible to label and explain the plumbing to others in a more efficient way.  We could do without it–simply talk about “that moment that happens at 2:43 on track 17 in the recording by George Solti,” and this works for people who are very involved with a few pieces or for a group of people who are discussing a single, communally-understood work.  But for full-time musicians, who must often absorb a great deal of music in ridiculously short periods of time, there must be some way to generalize, to categorize, to compare and contrast the great moments in Mahler with the great moments in Messiaen, and compare them both to the somewhat cruddy moments in certain Broadway-style musicals.  The difference is similar to the way a person like myself deals with a computer  and the way a professional computer person deals with it–I can’t talk to an IT professional about computers for very long because I don’t even know the jargon; the IT guy, on the other hand, lives and breathes the stuff.

In my freshman theory classes, someone always brings up the complaint that analyzing a piece of music takes all of the “magic” (by which I think they mean “emotional impact”) out of the piece.  It is true, that I now find that I must on occasion force myself to step back and notice the beauty as well as the plumbing (of course, sometimes the beauty is in the plumbing, as with Webern or Babbitt).  For this reason, after we finish an analysis in theory class, I try to take another minute and have the class listen again to what we’ve been studying.  I imagine that visual artists and natural historians must do the same thing from time to time–after studying the way Seurat uses points of color to make other colors in Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte, it is imperative that we step back and let the beauty of the scene again wash over us.

On Sunday, we have a fantastic group of musicians coming to OPSU: the Harrington String Quartet.  Since I organized the concert, I know the program in advance, and I have already been listening to the music they will be playing.  I’ve thought about the music, and I’ve written the program note.  I’ve been looking forward to this concert all summer, and it’s going to be fantastic.  I’ve been pushing it on the students, of course, but it won’t matter if I’m the only one there on Sunday–I will enjoy it.  And I think, based on what Bob has written, that I am going to make this one of those “step back” moments and just soak up the music.

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