Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical Follies (Applause Books) (34 page)

Michael Bennett went back to New York; he had decided to take a couple of days off and was scheduled to return on Saturday.

The first matinee went well: a house full of gray-haired matinee ladies enjoyed the show far more than many of us thought they would. A holdover of sheer post-opening energy got the company through without a hitch. By the evening performance, however, things were beginning to fall apart. Fifi’s entrance for “Ah, Paris!” had been changed a couple of days earlier, and she came charging on from the correct spot but suddenly forgot what she was doing. As the orchestra played on, she smiled and wandered around, saying to the audience, “I may be an old girl, but, ooh-la-la, I’m willing!” Hal Hastings coaxed her back into the second chorus of the song. Following the end of the Montage, as she came offstage, Fifi apologized to Ethel, who shot back, “Oh, Fifi, you always have some goddamn excuse.” Fifi said she was hurt and that Ethel shouldn’t say such mean things. But Fifi wasn’t the only one who lost her way; when Alexis got to the interlude release in “Uptown, Downtown,” she began the tongue-twisting lyrics and got completely lost. She just kept dancing away, threw her head back, and laughed until the second chorus, where she found her way back. You might even have thought she was singing the song as written. John McMartin went up completely on the lyrics to “Live, Laugh, Love.” This was truly bizarre, since that was the whole point of the song when performed correctly. But for the actor to lose his place was unnerving, most of all to John. After the performance, as he was making his way out the stage door, he muttered, “God, what a strange night. Sweet Jesus!”

I spent the evening performance in the orchestra pit. This was fascinating. First of all, the only feeling I got of being connected with the stage was the thumping overhead during energetic dance numbers. It felt as if a dance class was taking place on the floor above. Most of the time you could barely hear the actors or the audience. The pit is an area large enough to accommodate twenty-seven players with their instruments and music stands and a podium for the conductor. The floor is lower than the floor of the orchestra level of seats, which itself is lower than the level of the stage. The pit is partly covered, the back half tucked underneath the front portion of the stage. (Stage floors have been moved slowly in front of the proscenium arches over the years so the actors can be closer to the audience.) The musicians are fanned out, all facing the conductor, who is placed in the middle of the wall away from the stage. The players face the audience; Hal Hastings faces them and the stage. The podium gives the conductor a mid-level position, so that his head is visible both to the actors onstage and also to the musicians below. Strange though it may sound, there is no standard size and shape of an orchestra pit. The one at the Colonial Theatre is large enough to accommodate the
Follies
orchestra but would have trouble fitting in any more players. (Theatre owners are always trying to create a new row of high-priced seats at the front of the theater, thereby decreasing the size of the orchestra pit. They’ve become all too successful at doing that.) Each player needs an amount of space dictated by his instrument: the string instruments need room to bow, violins and violas at shoulder level, cellos and basses at knee level. The harp, with its tall lyre, needs to be at one of the far ends so it won’t obscure the view of the stage. Percussion tends to take up a significant amount of room, dictated chiefly by the instruments called for in the orchestration, plus a place for the player to stand amidst them all. For
Follies,
it was a trap set, xylophone, two timpani, and a couple of small triangles hanging from a music stand. One of the traditions of Broadway orchestras is for the woodwind players to play more than one instrument throughout the course of the evening. Called “doubling,” this procedure allows the orchestrator to use, for example, clarinets at one point in the evening and saxophones later on, provided there is enough time for the players to shift from one instrument to the other. The flutist almost always doubles on piccolo, used sparingly but necessary when the orchestration demands a high-pitched sound. Woodwind players tend to be surrounded by stands and poles on which to rest their instruments. The brass section has its own particular needs: trombones need space in front for the slides to move freely, the tuba takes up considerable room, and trumpets need to be placed where they blend in with the overall sound, but also where they won’t blast into the ear of a fellow orchestra member. Brass players also need places to put their mutes, which often have to be put in and taken out during the course of a song. Tradition dictates that the strings usually fan out to the left of the conductor and the woodwinds to the right. And if there is a keyboard, it usually stays close by the conductor as well. There was a piano in the
Follies
pit, and a celeste. There was also a piano as part of the onstage band.

Hal Hastings’s baton of choice was a Scripto mechanical pencil, chosen because it was short, about six inches long, and had a metal tip on the end that caught the light. His stool sat on a mechanized podium that was raised slightly off the floor. He could sit or lean on the stool when he wasn’t conducting. In front of him was a music stand, lit from the sides and large enough to hold a stack of bound copies of the full orchestral score for each individual song. By now he hardly ever referred to the full scores, since this was the sixth performance and he knew the orchestrations pretty well. He never referred specifically to a score when the orchestra was playing; occasionally, while a scene was taking place, he might check on something, make a note, or shift to the next score. He had a script nearby in case he needed to refresh his memory about how much time he had until the next song. He could speak to the orchestra quietly, and even though his rising up from his stool signaled that a number was coming, he would sometimes have to remind one of the players to get his or her instrument poised. He could also give notes during the course of a performance when the orchestra wasn’t playing, but most often his comments were simple and direct, like the one he made to a bass player who almost botched an entrance:
“Watch
me.” One of the extraordinary things about Broadway orchestras, and about the specific orchestra for this particular Thursday-night performance, is that the players assigned to and hired for the orchestra have the right to send in substitute players. There are rules under which a “sub” can be used, and it isn’t uncommon, as was the case this evening, for there to be eight substitute players out of twenty-eight. Since the part for each specific instrument is always on the music stand, it is the responsibility of the man or woman assigned to the original orchestra—they’re called the ones “with the chair”—to make certain the books of music are up-to-date and accurate. The conductor has no say over when a sub can be in the pit, and often he isn’t even informed. He steps into the pit, looks over the orchestra, and sometimes sees a sea of strange faces. It’s his responsibility to guide them through the performance as proper members of an ensemble. After the one performance the conductor can decree that a sub isn’t good enough, but if he doesn’t speak up then, he is stuck with that player as a sub for as long as the show runs. It doesn’t take long for a conductor to sense which substitutes need specific attention and which are able to hold their own with everyone else. Surprising though this system sounds, it does allow for first-rate freelance players to work in the pit of a musical while maintaining other jobs.

Once the performance began, Hal’s concentration was focused on the stage. Much to my surprise, he conducted every song differently. Different actors needed different things from their conductor. When Fifi was singing, both his arms were pointed right at the stage so he could follow her precisely and throw her whatever lyric she might miss. When she messed up, he pointed right at her and said, fairly loudly, “No, wait,” and put his finger up until he knew the orchestra had caught up to the verse. He understood that when the chips were down, it was the actors who needed his guidance more than the orchestra, that they usually looked at his downbeat and then played their part instinctively. Most of the time he would mouth the words carefully, especially for those in the company who were still somewhat on edge, like Marcie Stringer. On occasion he would cue an actor with his left hand, but for the most part he let his right hand gently beat the rhythm. For “Losing My Mind,” he simply looked at Dorothy and made the smallest casual movements with his Scripto pencil for the orchestra to follow. At times he didn’t do anything; he was clearly following her, and the orchestra just played along. Dorothy’s career had been almost entirely singing with an orchestra, and she knew how to take the stage and “lead” the conductor. Most of the time he cocked his head slightly to one side, smiled, and waved his arms in a way that looked fairly nonchalant.

Orchestrations are deceptive. They’re meant to sound complete and whole, yet it’s surprising to listen to the individual pieces that make up a whole. For example, during “Waiting for the Girls Upstairs” I heard things in the flutes and piccolos that reminded me
of Bye Bye Birdie.
They came during the women’s chorus, adding a playful punctuation to the ends of four of their descriptive lines. I hadn’t noticed them before, and they reminded me of the flute passages in “Put on a Happy Face.” I asked Jonathan Tunick about them, and he said, “Ah, yes, the Ginzler flutes.” Robert Ginzler was the orchestrator of
Bye Bye Bizdie
and had been one of Tunick’s mentors. Obviously, the homage wasn’t meant to call attention to itself, and Tunick would not have done it had he not thought it right for the song. But since the whole of an orchestration is made up of hundreds of details, in the hands of a good orchestrator there’s room for appropriate musical quotes or references. Little ornamentations or even jokes can be added that really are invisible except to anyone fairly knowledgeable about musical-theater orchestrations. In the documentary film of the
Company
cast recording session there is a moment during “Another Hundred People” where the camera is focused on the trumpets, which are echoing the “Bobby baby” theme—something that I never heard in the theater or on the recording until it was pointed out visually. Fascinating though the quotes and references are, the most important job for theater orchestration is to support the singers and serve the work.