Shameless Self-Promotion.

I now have two Twitter feeds:

@donmckennan - all of my usual nonsense, only in smaller doses;
@RightwingIrony - speaks for itself, literally.

Please follow, and enjoy. I thank you.

Live music on Broadway?

When I was the FOH mixer on Les Misérables at the Imperial Theater, over twenty years ago, on more than one occasion an irate customer came up to me during intermission & said something like 'You people have a lot of nerve. I didn't pay $60 to listen to recorded music on Broadway.' (Yeah, Broadway tickets were sixty bucks then. Imagine that.) My response always was, 'No. You didn't. This is all live music. Take a walk down to the front row & look into the orchestra pit. There are twenty-five musicians down there & they'd love to say hello to you.' The customer then said something like 'Oh, thank goodness, there is still live music on Broadway after all. Thank you thank you,' & walked away, relieved & happy.

So. Not quite ten years later, when I was mixing Saturday Night Fever at the Minskoff Theater (tickets were around $100 by that time), a customer came up to me during intermission & started raving about how good the show was, what a good time her whole family was having, & the show sounded wonderful; how long did it take to get it recorded so well? I said, 'No ma'am, it's not recorded, it's live music, why don't you go down front & have the musicians introduce themselves to you, they'd like nothing better,' and she shrugged & said, 'Hm. Whatever,' & walked back to her seat. This also happened more than once.

Sure, this is anecdotal. But this suggests to me that in less than ten years Broadway audiences went from demanding live music as part of a live theatrical experience, to thinking the music was recorded & not caring when told it was live, at roughly twice the ticket price. Tickets are half again as expensive today, and that's not counting premium pricing, 'airline' pricing, scalpers...

I tell Broadway musicians whenever I have the chance that this is what is gonna kill things for them, not synthesizers replacing violins. Some day, some producer is going to have the balls to actually try canned music on Broadway & if by some miracle the show is any good, it will sell out anyway, because the audiences think it's canned now, and they're ok with it, if they think about it at all.

It's already happening on the road. I found myself thinking about all of this after reading a story on the AFM website written by Mark Mulé, a musician who went out with a non-union tour of The Wizard of Oz:

But perhaps the greatest evil and the most egregious crime perpetrated against the actors, musicians, and most importantly, the audience, was the use of the virtual orchestra machine.

Non-union producers of musical theatre are absolutely in love with this mechanical monstrosity.

...

As some of you may know, the virtual orchestra machine is operated by tapping a single key on a miniature keyboard which triggers a computer simulated “orchestra.”

Thus the title of “tapper” is given to the operator of this crime against humanity masquerading as “musical accompaniment” for a so-called “Broadway tour.”

The thing sounded like crap, broke down several times per week (even nightly for a while), and sounded like crap (yes, I realize I wrote that twice).

Non-union tours are almost without exception a fraud perpetrated upon an unsuspecting & gullible public. But, despite generally bad reviews, this specific tour has been out at least since 2009, selling tickets & making money. Until that stops, this is only gonna get worse. It's a matter of time before this 'virtual orchestra' stops sounding like crap & doesn't break down repeatedly. Those are probably the only reasons we haven't seen it in New York, yet.

But there's more. Broadway shows have grown progressively louder over the years, so that now, almost nothing acoustic emanates from the stage or the pit anymore. It's all in the sound system. The actor's voice is no longer his; it belongs to a black box, fifty feet away, & the orchestra is no different.

I have been told that loud shows make it easier for the audience to understand what is going on & draws them in. I disagree; I think the opposite happens. I've watched audience members stare at the speakers instead of the stage, during book scenes & musical scenes alike. If the actor's voice is removed from his mouth, a wall goes up that inhibits his ability to tell the story; the audience is pushed away, not drawn in.

That's my story & I'm sticking to it.

If it is unforgivable that audiences don't demand live music for the money they're paying, or that they don't insist that live theater be performed by live human beings, top to bottom, at least it's easy to understand why they can't tell the difference.

If I were of a suspicious nature, I would think that this steady increase in volume is no accident. If nobody can tell whether a live orchestra is playing, then nobody will miss them when they're gone.

All of this is taking place in a culture where everything is spoonfed to us, usually through earbuds. Sitting in a theater, elbows on knees, & concentrating, really listening, rarely happens anymore.

Ironically, all of this significantly increases the job security of people like me. They're gonna need sound people more than ever.

Stan Musial at the Polo Grounds.

I don't remember the New York Giants or the Brooklyn Dodgers. I was three when they left for California. When my dad was growing up, New York had three ballclubs, and you were allowed to like only one; you had to hate the other two. Those were the rules. My dad’s team was the Giants. When they were gone, his heart was broken. He blamed everything on Mean Old Walter O'Malley. It wasn't bad enough that Mean Old Walter O'Malley had convinced Poor Old Horace Stoneham to go west with him; Mean Old Walter O'Malley had talked Poor Old Horace Stoneham into moving my dad's beloved Giants to cold, rainy San Francisco, while Mean Old Walter O'Malley took the hated Dodgers to sunny Los Angeles. It was too much to bear.

My dad was, and is, a National League fan. He may have hated the Dodgers, but at least they were a National League team. So, with the Dodgers and Giants (sorry, Dad, the Giants and the Dodgers) gone, as far as my dad was concerned, there was no Major League Baseball in New York. He refused to take us to see the minor league team in the Bronx. My brother and I knew all about Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris and Bobby Richardson and Tommy Tresh and Tony Kubek and Clete Boyer and Moose Skowron and Yogi Berra and Elston Howard and Whitey Ford from our friends. We had trouble understanding how the team in the Bronx, who beat the holy crap out of everybody year after year, could be the minor league team, but that's just how it was. My dad said we would understand when we were older.

It wasn't until the Mets started playing in 1962, and there was National League baseball in New York once more, that my dad took us to a ballgame. We went up to the Polo Grounds on Sunday, 8 July 1962, to see the Mets play the St Louis Cardinals, who, nearing the end of a long dry spell, were about to start beating the holy crap out of everybody, too.

The Polo Grounds was huge. (For years, my brother and I thought that every ballpark was huge. It wasn't until we went to Shibe Park in Philadelphia in 1968, by that time gloriously renamed Connie Mack Stadium, that we learned that most ballparks were not huge, and looked nothing like the Polo Grounds.) The foul lines were short, but the centerfield wall was 483 feet from home plate. The team clubhouses were beyond centerfield, up a flight of stairs that were on the field. The resulting niche pushed the dead centerfield wall back to 505 feet. Vic Wertz' shot in the 1954 World Series that Willie Mays caught over his shoulder would have been a home run anywhere else, by 50 feet. There were vertical iron girders throughout the stadium that managed to block the view of anything important, without fail.

The Mets lost, 15-1. I was only eight, and even I could tell they weren't very good. The Mets committed four errors; Frank Thomas, their best hitter but something of a defensive liability, had two of them. They only managed three hits. I really didn't understand how this could be the major league team in New York.

But my dad was in heaven. He was finally sitting in a National League ballpark with his sons, the same ballpark he had sat in with his father (more often his grandfather, actually; my grandfather didn't care too much for baseball), watching guys he remembered from what were already being called the Old New York Giants; the Old Brooklyn Dodgers, too.

The Mets scored their one run in the bottom of the ninth, on Felix Mantilla’s triple and a groundout. Even the Cardinals' pitcher, Bob Gibson, hit a home run. But the Cardinals' left-fielder, Stan Musial, forty-one years old, hit three mammoth home runs and was removed in the eighth inning. My dad said he must be tired. When Stan Musial left the game, he had to walk across the outfield to get to the clubhouse and the crowd cheered, so he walked a little slower.

My brother and I had finally seen our first baseball game. Now that we had seen a National League game, my dad relented and took us to see the minor league team in the Bronx, so we got to see all the guys that our friends had been telling us about. They even beat the Red Sox that day, in the bottom of the ninth.

The Mets moved to Shea Stadium in 1964, practically walking distance from our house in Corona. We got to see a lot of games in the next few years (particularly when the Mets played the San Francisco Giants), but I wasn't present at a game that the Mets won until 1967.

The Polo Grounds was torn down in April 1964, right around Opening Day. We moved to Jersey in 1968.

The night before our first game, Stan Musial hit a home run in his last at-bat. Combined with the three he hit at our first game, he hit four home runs in four consecutive at-bats, which tied a major league record. Monday's Times dedicated half a page to the game, and Musial's feat. Thanks to Stan Musial, I was able, years later, to find out the exact date of my first baseball game, complete with a big spread in the Times.

Stan Musial died yesterday, at the age of 92. Thanks, Stan.

(...& special thanks to William Austin Campbell, Sr., whose photograph of Stan Musial I cribbed.)