Diary of a Music Director: Jim Watson on Sweeney Todd
I envy the time professional theatre production staffs are able (expected, required) to devote to each project. Longer access to show materials and less (albeit not ‘no’) context-switching between other full-time jobs yield plenty of lead time for analyzing scores, building models, dramaturgy…ing, solidifying the vision for the piece and getting artistic buy-in from all the component directors, designers and choreographers. I’m sure the pros often find their schedules constrictive, but in community theatre those timeframes seem luxurious.
Even though the production staff for PTP’s Sweeney Todd began forming almost two years ago, I couldn’t seriously begin preparing to music direct the piece until a few weeks before auditions. Fortunately, the PTP Board agreed to contract an extra month of the entire score from MTI, a substantial cost for community theatre but from my perspective quite worth it. (Thanks, PTP Board!)
But before casting, before getting a chance to delve in to the score with purpose, there was a lot of prep work to do.
What are we going to play?
MTI licenses two sets of orchestra instrumentations: the standard eighteen piece (with two to four doublings on each of the five reed parts) and the alternate nine piece (no doublings). I had to decide which one we would use before we could place our contract. (The alternate instrumentation, by the way, has nothing to do with the 2005 John Doyle revival, where the actors played the instruments. That is yet another instrumentation (and orchestration, actually) which is, I believe, unavailable for traditional licensing.)
(For the obsessive reader: the commercially available vocal score references a twenty-seven piece orchestra.)
This is a big choice: it affects a lot, and the decision had to be made basically blind. Ideally, of course, we’d use the standard set. This would give a richer sound, deeper textures, and be closer to the original production. On the other hand, what if we couldn’t, e.g., find a reed player to double on clarinet, Eb clarinet, flute, and piccolo? And where do we fit eighteen players plus the conductor if we want to play outside the pit? And what about our budget? (For this production, our musicians will basically earn gas money, but … gas money for nine or eighteen?) Would the volume from eighteen musicians force the sound designer to mic all the actors?
I decided on the nine piece instrumentation: primarily because I was comfortable I’d find players to cover all the parts, scheduling would be less hectic, and our space would be better apportioned. Trusting that the arranger Did The Right Thing while cutting the size in half, we would still achieve much of Sondheim’s aural vision.
When are we going to play?
One frequent tack for organizing rehearsals is by a production’s French scene breakdown. Finding those breaks is usually rather straight forward… read through the libretto and cut a new scene each time the characters on stage change. For some reason, finding the FS breakdown for Sweeney Todd was challenging.
A few weeks before we received the official materials, I set out to build the French scene plot so I could then start to plan music rehearsals — once the show was cast, we’d be able to use the plot to know which actors to call when practicing each song and we could match it against the actors’ schedule conflicts to maximize productivity.
With no official materials, my best resource was the commercially available vocal score (absolutely worth its list price). The CAVC has the added benefit of declaring “This score has been prepared from the composer’s piano copy [...]. Insofar as discrepancies in the lyrics are concerned, this [...] is to be considered correct.”
So, given the numerous discrepancies (lyric and note) in the rented materials, I’ve used this as the Official Copy to answer all related disputes.
With fingers crossed in hopes that the CAVC would match the materials coming from MTI, I spent hours entering and validating a spreadsheet covering entrances and exits for all characters across almost 400 pages of music. For my purposes it mattered if someone was in a French scene but not singing — they wouldn’t be called for a musical rehearsal, so I took care to code singing and “present on stage” differently in the spreadsheet. In the end, we have a nicely colored plot with almost fifty French scenes. Now that we are deeper in to the rehearsal process, we use the breakdown less rigorously, but it was extraordinarily valuable for planning what to work on during casting callbacks and for scheduling the first five or so weeks of rehearsal.
How much are we going to play?
In the perfect musical theatre world, you play every note of every song. Doing less is like cutting dialogue (which, by contract, is verboten). In some productions, however, you find it necessary to drop a few things — sometimes because of a director’s artistic choice, or maybe for choreography considerations; sometimes you cut for length. (Song 11 Johanna, sung by Judge Turpin, was dropped in the original production because of time.)
In rarer times, though, you’re able to include more. Doing South Pacific? You can now include My Girl Back Home, which was cut from the original production. Camelot? Ditto Take Me To The Fair and Fie On Goodness. With Sweeney Todd we get the option of song 27A Searching Part II (Insert), originally added in the London production, which exposes more of the Beggar Woman’s character.
But beware! Sometimes it isn’t just Todd’s customers under the knife! The alternate instrumentations do not include song 10A The Contest Part II. Yes, the tooth pulling has been pulled from any one playing the nine-piece. I maintain it’s simply an oversight… perhaps there is a way around…
Furthermore, the alternate instrumentations have only the 1980 West End transposition of song 10 The Contestwith its introduction in Ab. This is a stretch for many community theatre actors as it puts Pirelli singing a full C5 instead of the F5 he’d have in the original key.
Next…
With preparation done, it’s time for auditions!
Until then, peace….
jdw
