This weekend I am helping a friend’s show.  He is doing a dual piano version of Sound of Music local gig and needed a second pianist.  It’s essentially a church production, but the cast is having fun, and it’s nice sometimes to do a low-pressure gig.

The Lyric had to postpone the production of Light in the Piazza, which I had been working on (very difficult score) for a few weeks……so they’re putting up Grease now, and I will be joining the pit orchestra as keyboardist in a couple of weeks.

More details soon.

Fun show, great cast, and really great music — gonna be a hot one! Definitely get your tix early for this one!

www.atlantalyric theatre.com

A local high school is doing it — I played their Hairspray last summer for fun and would do this one again but the schedule doesn’t fit with my new work schedule. I’m trying to find someone who can come in and play keys for them; they need a pro with some skillz. Doesn’t seem like money is much of an object, so if interested or know anyone who might be, please let me know ASAP.

Schedule is below, and they’re very flexible and understanding:

January 19th – 3:30-6:30 JCHS room #291

January 26 & 27 – 4-7pm both days in the auditorium

January 29th – Dress R from 2-6pm (call at 1:30)

January 30-February 1 – Dress Rhsl from 5pm to ~9pm

February 2 – 3 Performance : AIDA call at 6:15 / Show at 7-10pm

February 4th Performance : AIDA Matinee at 2pm / Show at 8pm.

Yeah, the two don’t play nice together. My page looks really weird in IE but it’s all there; the layout is completely hosed yet everything functions.

For now I’m not worrying too much about it — apparently this is an issue that everyone is having.

My page will remain in HTML5 because there is some audio and video embedding I want to use in lieu of Flash. It is best viewed in Firefox or pretty much any browser not called IE.

The first attempt is up — still getting the details into the various pages but there is basic info, contact form, and links to other places. Photos, videos, bio, resume, and of course STUFF TO LISTEN TO are all still in progress. It’s very basic and not terribly cool at the moment, but it’s clean and functional. Also, it is apparently a great tradition among keyboardists to have crappy websites anyway…..

www.bj-brown.com

Eventually I’ll split out the index file so users can choose Flash or HTML; for now it’s just the basic version.

We found the arrangement and I sightread it for her there. Now I’ve gotten back to my workshop and recorded it.

I LOVE this tune! Don’t really care much for the album version because I’m ancient, but I think this little arrangement is going into my repertoire book.

Feel free to download and keep. Here it is; hope you enjoy!

http://www.bj-brown.com/Coldplay Paradise.html

Part of the new year is a promise to myself to focus more on my own music.  I love playing and helping out with the Lyric shows and other groups/friends, but this year I am dedicating myself to putting my own stuff forward first.  There WILL be more frequent updates in terms of info as well as new music

Thanks for continuing to be a part of my musical wanderings; there will be some payoff soon, I promise.

I had never conducted a show before; the closest was running the band in 1940′s Radio Hour, but that was mostly just starting songs.   [EDIT:  After writing this post I realized I had forgotten about The It Girl.  That was a full conductor/player combo on my part.  Again, it was mostly starting songs and adjusting a few tempos for dance breaks, nothing like 42nd Street in terms of sheer stick necessity.]   This was a LOT of rubato and having to react with actions and words on stage — challenging enough with a stick, but doubly so with index fingers and bouncing from playing to conducting and back. Conducting is an art and has its own skillset; just being a musician doesn’t translate into leading other musicians. You have to have a deadly accurate clock ticking in your head and have the strength of personality to bring others around to your path through the music. As a natural accompanist, I usually listen to others more than myself and go with them, so this was a major adjustment for me in terms of how I work as a musician and play with others. Add in having to actually play (lots of decision trees), and the Danger Quotient is now moving up….so there was a bit of a learning curve, on Union musician time and in rented rehearsal space (tick tock indeed). Brandt was very patient and gave me a crash course in conducting, and our orchestra manager/drummer Jeff fixed my tempos when necessary and gave me helpful feedback on communication and conducting from a practical musician point of view.  The members of the orchestra were all incredibly supportive and really used their musicianship to complete my flailducting.

Tempos must be consistent, volumes and entrances must be managed, occasional “fixes” are necessary (i.e., extending scene change music on a moment’s notice), and attention must be paid at all times to just about everything. I had to consider costume changes, potential entrance issues, scene change flexibility, and listen for specific lines at certain points in order to break out of vamps, etc. There are a lot of balls to juggle. Then you have to make sure that your own playing is topnotch, with everything else to concentrate on. It’s a multitasker’s dream.

There were some issues of budget and Union concern that delayed the decision of whether to use tracks or live musicians until fairly late in the process. The Christmas miracle in all this was that we got such fantastic musicians. The availability of good musicians in December, especially on short notice, is virtually nil. However, we lucked out and got great pit players who were adept at figuring out my flailings and were able to fill in the blanks. If I had subpar musicians that required babysitting, it would have been very distracting. In the beginning they literally had to read my mind, so I dubbed them the Atlanta Lyric Psychic Orchestra.

Pic above is our first orchestra rehearsal.  Of course I’m out of frame on the right (sigh….). Some players had a few conflicts to sub out, and they brought their subs in, so not only were we a step ahead there, but it also sounded H-U-G-E in that echoey room and all those horns.  Actual pit orchestration for us is Piano, Drums (doubling percussion on Mallet Kat), Bass, 2 Trumpets, 1 Trombone, 1 Horn (covered by 2nd keyboard), and 3 reeds doubling all the saxes, clarinets, and flute/piccolo.

Keep in mind the orchestra gets one 3-hour rehearsal by itself on Sunday night, then goes away for a night (presumably to brush up on what they were weak on at read-down), and comes back Tuesday.  In that rehearsal we are in tech week and it is a stumble-through with first shot at costumes and wigs on the real stage and set (LOTS of stops for tech/spacing/bad conducting…).  Get as far as we can, then come back Wednesday night to finish the show (now with mics and lights and all that attendant tech stoppage), adjust, then start a run again and get as far as possible.  Repeat on Thursday night with everything tech put together, then open on Friday.  Not much time to get it smokin’!

The cast was fantastic and worked/tapped their butts off — it’s a huge show, with big number after big number, and everything must be bigger than the last. They really deserve all the kudos we could ever give. We had a fair number of nonsinging dancers, so my principals were drafted willingly into offstage vocal duty, and we were able to deliver a very strong vocal/dance balance.

Okay, now for some fun…..one of the highlights of the show is the fantastic music, and when you have a hot band playing those great old songs, the energy goes through the roof.  We had such a tight band with quality musicianship across the board that the Exit music ended up being The Show After The Show.  Every performance ended with large crowds hanging out just to listen to us play a last medley of the big numbers, and we got lots of reports of singing/dancing up the aisles on the way out.  I had several people ask if we were a touring Broadway company, and they were surprised to learn that it’s all Atlanta talent (well, except for a couple of ringers).  And a 15-year season ticket holder told me that “this is the show where it has all come together.”  All in all, it’s been amazing and terrifying, and I’m proud and excited for the work we did and the show we created.

Our soundboard operator had her husband stand on a chair in the back with the iPhone and record the Bows and Exit music from our last performance.  It was a sold-out house, and every big number was met with loooooong applause and ovations.  Here are the last sounds of the Atlanta Lyric Theatre’s production of 42nd Street:

And finally (for now) some video shot by my brother the night before close.  This is the end of the Exit music from the side of the pit so you can see kind of how we’re arranged.  I have some other video to test but might be posting shortly, so keep an eye (and ear) out!  Enjoy……

I got to be the full Music Director for this one, which I really appreciate — having played in the pit at the Fox with the touring show, it has become one of my favorites.  Musically it’s amazing, just a lot of great music and great songs, no clunkers, and so many different styles.

We worked incredibly hard from the start, and EVERYONE, including principals, had to learn chorus parts.  We can’t afford as many personnel as the touring and Broadway shows (and wouldn’t have space to put them if we could), so our principals had to pull double duty and pitch in with backing vocals at all possible times — about half of the ensemble was cast primarily for dancing and so there were varying levels of comfort and skill in singing, which my principals graciously made up for.  But I have to brag about my cast, because they all worked their butts off, and even my nonsinging dancers were hanging right along with the singers by the time we got to opening.

The show has been incredibly successful, with several sold-out or near-sold-out performances, and it is definitely the talk of the Atlanta theatre community this summer.  Here’s a promo clip using footage from an early performance:

I’ll tell more about the show in a post next week.  In the meantime, enjoy the clip and share with anyone who might like to catch a glimpse of Hairspray!

“Cabaret” closed out the Lyric’s season in June.  I played in the pit of “Pippin” over at StageDoor Players in Dunwoody with my dear friend Linda Uzulac and had a fun time.

Now the Lyric’s new season has started; we opened with “Will Rogers Follies”, which is probably the hardest show I’ve ever worked on.  It ended up being an amazing show — best the Lyric has done yet!

We’re now preparing for Rodgers/Hammerstein’s “Cinderella”.  For financial reasons we have elected to go with tracks instead of a live orchestra.  We’re doing the Enchanted version, so there are no commercial tracks available — I’m creating them myself.  While waiting on the orchestra parts, I played the piano score into Reason as a skeleton.  The parts, of course, were about 2 1/2 weeks late getting to us, so I’m really behind on that portion.  However, the samples I’m using are high-quality and the recording process is proceeding nicely.  We start rehearsals this coming weekend, and the original plan was to have the tracks done and ready to rehearse with from day One.  Yeah, that won’t be happening, but I hope to have all the recording done this week so that I can concentrate on putting the musical touches on the track (dynamics, tempo changes, musical bits) via MIDI control.

The nice thing about this approach is that I’m not locked in to anything — if a section of a particular song needs to be faster, I don’t have to re-record everything; I just go into the tempo control and set it as needed; the MIDI notes will follow the tempo track, and I simply export a new .wav file.  As I get this thing closer to production I’ll post some samples.