The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
MAKING MUSIC ON THE RUN
Conductor and musical director for Playhouse Square-bound ‘Anastasia’ tour says prepping a new orchestra in each city is as stressful as it sounds
“It’s live theater. Things do happen.” ¶ Lawrence Goldberg, the music director and conductor for the tour of musical-theater work “Anastasia” that’s about to start a three-week run at Playhouse Square’s Connor Palace, has just been asked if he has any memorable stories from his many hours in orchestra pits. ¶ While he mentions a recent moment from the “Anastasia” tour when a lighting miscue left his musicians — like the cast members singing on stage — to perform the final moments of the show in the dark, his more dramatic tale took place years ago during a production of “Les Miserables.” It was the first night together for the show’s orchestra for that tour stop, and there were sparks. ¶ Literally, there were sparks.
“Those stand lights that light up (the musicians’) music started flickering in the middle of the first act, and then suddenly they went out completely, and there were sort of sparks flying,” Goldberg recalls during a recent phone interview. “There must have been a short in the light circuit. There were sparks shooting out from one of the plugs underneath my podium, which I couldn’t see.”
The players could see them, and they soon got the conductor’s attention, who laughs about the pit being, more or less, on fire.
“I had to stop and evacuate the pit, and I got on the phone to the stage manager and shouted into the phone, ‘The pit’s on fire! We’re stopping and evacuating!”
After about a 30- or 40-minute delay, he says, the show did go on — despite a melted plug in the pit.
Goldberg says his job regularly involves putting out fires, they of the metaphorical variety. More on that in a bit.
Between the time he was hired and the “Anastasia” tour operation beginning, he was tasked with substitution duties in the Broadway show.
“They needed a little extra help on Broadway, both with keyboard players and conductors,” said Goldberg, who conducted once a week and played rehearsals and in the pit as needed. “It was a great introduction to the show, because by the time we started rehearsing the tour cast, I knew the show from the inside.”
While he was responsible for teaching the music of “Anastasia” to the cast and then, on the road, making sure the performers are correctly executing the work of composer Stephen Flaherty and lyricist Lynn Ahrens, the real challenge comes in relation to the orchestra.
That’s because there isn’t one — at least not one that’s remotely permanent.
As with the aforementioned tour of “Les Mis” and many other shows with which Goldberg has been involved, there isn’t much in the way of a traveling group of musicians. For “Anastasia,” he travels with two keyboard players, while the rest of the players are freelancers hired for each tour stop. Musicians picked up in each city are sent their sheet music about a month in advance, he says, and a video of him conducting the show online further serves to prep them.
“But they don’t actually play together until Tuesday morning — and we’re doing our opening show that night,” he says. “It’s a very quick and stress-laden process where I show up at 9 a.m. and we … take five hours to plow through the whole show.
“I tell them every little detail I feel I need to tell them, and sometimes we have time to play things more than once, but usually not,” Goldberg continues. “We play once, and I maybe give them some notes and adjustments, and hopefully they remember it for that evening.”
The show will be in Cleveland for three weeks, but that’s unusual. Often the show is in one spot for a week, sometimes less, so the process repeats quickly.
“It’s a very challenging task that I have to try to pull off,” he says.
By the end of even one week, Goldberg says, the makeshift orchestra knows the show pretty well, but it can be a bit of a bumpy ride to that destination. The audience members may hear what he calls the occasional “bloops and bleeps,” but, for the most part, they’re focused on what’s happening on stage and don’t notice.
“It’s always stressful for me, because I obviously want us to be at our best, but there is a learning curve — and I just have to keep that in mind.”
Goldberg says a contractor typically used regularly by each host theater is charged with hiring the musicians — this is a person who lives in the market and knows the talent pool — and some contractors are more willing to accept his input than others, he says.
“I’ve been through most of these places before and worked with a lot of the players who tend to play these shows,” he says. “Ideally, I would want the best possible players.
“The flipside of that, though, is I know from a practical standpoint, many of these players have made a large portion of their careers playing shows and, from their perspective, they don’t want the rug pulled out from under them — it’s something they’ve been relying on for years. There’s no job security if someone like me is going to come along and deny them the work.”
Goldberg has been to Cleveland with multiple shows — he likes to visit the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and spend time with a few friends who live in Northeast Ohio when he’s here — and says an uncle very important to him lived here in the 1970s.
“He was very instrumental in getting me involved in music, teaching me piano and music theory,” he says.
“I must have obviously shown an aptitude for it.” Born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Long Island, Goldberg excelled in musical pursuits in high school and went on to study classical piano and composition at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
There have been various pursuits since, including a couple of rock bands, but he seems content to be most firmly planted in the theater world.
“One of the things I love about theater is that it does encompass a wide variety of styles,” he says. “You do need at least a foundation in classical music and be able to read music well, but you also have … to have an ear for lots of different styles because every show has a different style and period of music they’re sort of channeling.”
Although many of today’s popular shows have a rock and/or contemporary vibe, “Anastasia” — adapted from the 1997 animated film of the same name — has a classical base.
“I think this is one of the most beautiful scores from the theater in the last 10 or 20 years,” Goldberg says. “This show has a sweeping lushness that’s just gorgeous.
“The show’s also visually stunning,” he continues. “Between that and the music, it’s just a really beautiful experience.”
“Anastasia,” in telling us the tale of a young woman who doesn’t remember her past and sets out to discover its mysteries, takes audiences from the end of the Russian Empire to 1920s Paris.
The stage version of “Anastasia” is more grounded in reality than was the movie, he says. Gone is the dark magic-wielding version of Rasputin and his talking albino bat sidekick and in their place is a Soviet officer determined to silence our heroine. “We’ve made it much more a story that could happen in real life.”
There are also people who grew up with the movie and are now excited to show it to their children, Goldberg says. And while plenty of young girls come dressed as princesses, he sees the show as offering something a bit deeper.
“At heart, it’s your typical princess story, but it does sort of put a modern twist on it. It’s more the story of the empowerment of a young woman and her taking control of her life, which is sort of the antithesis of a princess story.”