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.)

A 9-11 T-Shirt.

I was buying a bagel on the way to work this morning & there was a woman on line wearing a brand-new ‘9-11 Memorial’ t-shirt (with an ad for Tishman Construction prominently displayed on the sleeve). Not a ‘Never Forget’ t-shirt or an ‘In Loving Memory’ t-shirt. That mighta been OK.

No. It was a tourist trap souvenir t-shirt. How exactly is that different from an Auschwitz t-shirt or a Srebrenica t-shirt or a Darfur t-shirt or a Columbine t-shirt?

At least it was black, but I think that was more Manhattan cool than anything else.

There is a serious disconnect these days between the sacrifices, the hardships, the tragedies, the insanity that makes up the lives & deaths around us, & the willingness or even the ability of the rest of us to see it. We have no shared American experience anymore. No shared grief or anger or despair or joy. Or love. We have become a nation of people who hate our neighbors, both next door & around the world, because we think they have something that should be ours & why should we share, anyway?

I had hoped that Ground Zero would remain...I dunno, hallowed ground. Sacred. That's strange coming from me, I guess. Maybe 'sacred' is the wrong word, because, in a sense, it is a monument, to how quickly people will kill (& avenge those killings) in God's name. An invisible monument, to be sure, but still there. To most people, it has become one more background for one more vacation picture of the kids. Something to do before the Broadway show or the Yankees game. A reminder to nobody. An homage lost & forgotten. An inconvenience.

9-11 no longer has any meaning. After just 10 short years, it is just an excuse to deny each other's patriotism. Or sell t-shirts.

Update, 20 May 2014: The 9/11 Museum is open. It has a gift shop.

Way to go, counselor.

Lemme see if I understand this. The Solicitor General of the United States, with months, maybe years to prepare, stood before the Supreme Court today and could not answer the one question that anybody who has been paying attention knew was coming.

At least Carlos Beltran got froze by a curveball, didn't he?

Un-f*cking-believeable.

The Photograph I Didn't Take.

 It was the last day of our vacation. We had just finished a week of camping our way around Lake Ontario & had spent most of September 10^th driving back to our house in Sullivan County under a cold front. If we had left 90 minutes earlier or later, we could have made the entire trip in sunshine. That storm also pushed another storm traveling up the coast out to sea, leaving behind the beautiful weather that we all remember so well.

Our backyard had three ancient willow trees that always shed branches when it rained, so that’s where I was, cleaning up, when my brother called the next morning.

Jane answered & Dave said, Are you watching television?

No.

Turn it on. Now.

What channel?

It doesn’t matter.

I was on the phone with him when the North Tower fell.

On September 12^th, back in the city, Dave & I rode our bicycles downtown to see what we could see. On my way to meet him, I saw a car parked on West 77^th Street, covered in dust.

The cops had all traffic blocked at Houston Street, but from years of running along the East River, I knew the little downtown streets pretty well. Getting inside was easy.

Dave wanted to go back to his old apartment in the West Village. Walking out of his front door every day, the first thing he would see would be the towers. At Christopher & Washington, he got off his bicycle in the middle of the intersection & let it drop. He stood in the middle of the street, arms at his sides, staring up at the empty sky.

I took so many pictures that day, but I didn’t take that one. I don’t know why.

We got within two or three blocks of The Pile. Everything was covered in dust, sometimes ankledeep. Papers & shoes. Demolished cars & trucks, towed just far enough away.

At some point I realized that we were serving no useful purpose & had no acceptable reason for being there, taking pictures of rescue workers with nobody to rescue. I thought about what was in the dust I was walking on & I felt like a creep.

The fires burned for weeks. You could smell them from 30 miles away, or more.

In 2002, I worked the first Tribeca Film Festival. Every time we stepped outside, day or night, we would see truckloads of debris being loaded onto barges for transport to labs, hoping to find something, for somebody.

Jane & I sold our house upstate a couple years later. Dave died a few months after that. The 9/11 photograph I didn't take is the one that's stuck in my head.

All those people.

Welcome Back.

OK, that was a lot of fun. We all had a good laugh or two at the expense of fools, & that’s the best kind of laugh. ‘If you can’t think of a good Rapture joke, it’s not the end of the world.’ That was my favorite.

Y’know, I can’t help but think that the people who were that sure they were going, at the end of the day, weren’t going anywhere. If the Rapture had happened for real, we would all have been very surprised at who stayed & who left.

But we’re all still here & what sucked about life on Earth last week still sucks. Legitimate problems that gave this joker in Oakland just a little more ammunition to convince people that the world deserves to end, they’re still around. Some of the other stuff, like homophobia & good old-fashioned Christian intolerance, isn’t what I’m talking about. Those are problems, to be sure, just not in the way most apocalyptic Christians imagine.

So how about we dispense with the myths & fantasies & fairytales. Let’s stop waiting for dreams to come true. We could actually try to fix the world that we live in, here & now.

I know. Fat chance.

But we do get to play this End of Days game all over next year, when the Mayan calendar runs out.

Children of the Rapture.

So, should the Rapture NOT come Saturday, what happens to the children?

We’re all giggling up our sleeves at these poor delusionals that have exhausted their life savings to warn the heathen scum among us that it’s not too late to repent & be saved.

(Let’s just think about that for a second & then quickly move on: the End of Days is upon us & people are spending everything they have on advertising. Madison Avenue has won. Maybe it really is over, after all.)

When the End doesn’t come, they’re gonna be broke, because of this snakeoil salesman in California. (Don’t misunderstand me. I have no sympathy for them. None.) Is he gonna reimburse them? Not bloody likely. He’ll just pick another day, like the last time. Maybe he really believes this stuff. More’s the pity.

I could go on at length about how here we are, an allegedly modern society, & this nonsense still has astonishing traction. But, like I said before, what I really want to know is, what about the children? This wasn’t their idea. I doubt that they were seriously consulted. What did they do to deserve whatever comes Sunday, after their parents throw it all away on Saturday? Why are the sins (yeah, I said sins) of the father always visited upon the son? Are the infidels, atheists & other sundry unbelievers who these pious souls were willing to pray for, but happy to leave behind, supposed to step up? On Friday, we weren’t good enough. Will God provide? He’s lied to them already, at least once.

All I’m saying is, if you gotta roll the dice, then roll ‘em, but don’t bet your kids. There’s no such thing as a sure thing.

What about the children?