Author: Terry Stibal
Date: 2004-05-05 16:15
I've been playing shows at both the pro and amateur levels (the music is the same, after all) for almost 35 years now, and I find it more enjoyable and rewarding (in the money sense) than any of the classical stuff that I've ever done.
One thing that helped me out early on was the fact that I was a bass clarinet doubler from the start, and also picked up sax and other horns over the years as I went along. This is essential if you want to do professional work, as they don't want to pay for two bodies when they can just pay for the (much less expensive) doubling spifs instead.
Many of the college and high school amateur productions that I've played have a pit full of clarinet player and flute players and sax players, and then one or two of us who combine it all. I use these opportunities to get them started down the right track.
I've always encouraged promising young folks who "only play (insert instrument here)" to start picking up the doubling skills right then and there. It's quite possible to go from flute player to flute/alto player in a month or so, and it gives them another set of goals to attain. You may not want them to play the dress rehearsals and show with their limited sax skills, but by the next show they've usually got what it takes to deliver a workmanlike Book 3 performance.
I'm currently playing a horrid old show (No, No Nannette!) for one of my trombone players, who is the entire music department at a large Lutheran high school. With limited numbers of students to fill the parts out, he leans on us (my lead alto, second trumpet and second trombone are also participating) to flesh things out to where it sounds "real", and we get a little money in the bargain for our troubles. Amateur though the cast may be (and this bunch is pretty bad), the music is still identical to what they play on the Great White Way.
Anyway, the book that I've got is scored for baritone sax (lots of 1920's quickstep music), bass clarinet (almost always a staple of the Broadway show) and bassoon. While I don't claim to be a Bradford Buckley, I'm able to hold my own on the bassoon with a little boning up on the fingerings. And, it's fun to get your "lip" back after a break of ten or fifteen years.
What I can't do is make the horn changes required in the part. There are places where the baritone to bassoon change only allows one or two bars of up-tempo cut time to make the switch. It generally takes a four bar pause to make anything else to baritone/vice versa switch, and messing with a bassoon reed, getting the bucket around the end of the boot joint and then playing in "musical fashion" compounds the problem.
I imagine that the Local 802 folks use a baritone stand on rollers, but I'm not about to have the bottom half of _my_ horn warped from one of those clamped on monstrosities. So, they lose a little of one side or the other of the music. Such is life in the fine arts.
My additional recommendations, based upon hundreds of performances of dozens of different productions of a page-long listing of various musicals (starting with Threepenny Opera (five productions to date) and currently involving Hello, Dolly! (four different productions to date) and the above mentioned No No Nanette!):
o A clever way to make some extra money while gaining experience is to get together a group of players who will work for schools not having an adequate music program but still wanting to field a musical. You get the fun and experience, plus a nice little sum; they get a "professional level" production rather than one with the choir teacher banging away at an out of tune piano.
In the 1960's in Saint Louis, I worked with a guy named Doug Major (He was a cutting edge kind of guy in that he had personalized checks (first that I had ever seen) with stock clip art of a staff and notes; the fact that it was in two sharps and he listed his name as D. Major was a nice little touch.)
Doug recruited me as one of his three "normal" reed men, and he made a tidy second income booking us for the pit orchestra at local Catholic high schools. We would work up the parts independently, do a tech and dress rehearsal, and then the performances. Two years of this and I had a lot of Broadway music under my belt along with about $100 a show (and that was when Ben Franklin could actually buy you something).
o I always make a ring binder copy of the book, reducing and copying the pages onto 8 1/2 x 11 heavy gauge paper (32 pound). Then I make my markings in the copy, turn in the clean original (except for my tiny little TS initials and the month and year, carefully written in the spine area of the last page), and go on from there.
o For the "inevitable horn change while turning page with weird cut because someone can't dance" situation, I do a fold out page (three or four pages across in my three ring binder). Much easier and cheaper than dropping a horn during a change.
o If you play the "odd" horns, you are far more employable than most. For example, the current touring production of The Producers appears to have a reed part (in one book) for Eb contra-alto (one of three shows that I know of that uses that monstrosity), baritone, bass clarinet and bassoon. There'll be no shortage of folks that can master clarinet, flute, alto/tenor/soprano, but few can cover "sewer pipe/bari/fag/the ultimate instrument" by themselves. Be one of those and the work will come.
o Don't just get a doubling stand (essential if you want to keep everything working); make one that is capable of keeping your horns upright when things are bumped in the tight confines of an orchestra setup. I've seen a Hamilton folding stand with a Mark VI tenor pitched over when a famous talent brushed by with her posse; her response was "Oh! Sorry...) as she continued to walk on by...the horn made an excellent wall hanging after that incident.
After having a bass clarinet get pitched forward one night (but intercepted, thank God), my late father and I came up with a doubling stand that is pretty much impervious to accident. It's built on a H-shaped framework of 2 x 4 morticed together (with two 8" stubs extending from the crossbar of the H), and over the crossbar intersections are mounted bolt up mounts for a strap iron baritone stand, bassoon stand or a commercially produced cast aluminum alto/tenor sax stand. The base occupies a rectangle of about 2' by 1 1/2', and it takes a thirty pound pull to overturn when loaded. (My father's initial calculations were based upon the force exerted by a certain S. St James...)
In the middle of the crossbar is a bolt mount for a bass clarinet stand that I found five of many years ago (it shares common parts with the alto/tenor stand), and on the stubs are sockets for pegs for the clarinet, flute and (God forbid) English horn and oboe. Add a screwed on accessories box on one unused leg end, and a cup holder for a beverage or bassoon reed pot on another, and you're cookin' with Crisco.
It's a bit heavier than anything you can buy, but it's not going anywhere and it will last forever. And, if you play bari or bass clarinet, you already have a cart to haul stuff anyway.
When you're in the same place (as you will be in a show), you can probably leave it there. (However, I once had one stolen from the Loretto-Hilton Theater of the Saint Louis Repertory Theater; fifteen years later, I found out that my wife's son-in-law's brother was the one who lifted it...Small World, Isn't It indeed.)
o If you're going to practice anything to make you more ready for the world of the theater orchestra, spend time working on scales and arpeggi for the extreme keys. Five sharps is the rule rather than the exception, since much of theater music starts out in a good key but then gets rewritten to suit the limitations of the talent that ends up singing it.
On clarinet, you'll be throwing a lot of broken arpeggi as part of standard vocal numbers, and most will be in bad keys. I'm to the point that I'm more flexible in A major than I am in C major, simply because of practicing until the "hard keys" are second nature. (That articulated G# key helps here as well, on sax, clarinet and bass clarinet.)
Everything's Coming Up Roses, from the above discussed Gypsy, is an excellent example of this. The Mer may have been a great performer, but that tune (set in seven flats for the Bb clarinet) is an ordeal if you're not up on your intervals....a whole page of sweeping eight note passages that is played all "on the keys" (rather than "on the holes"). So, you're paying the price of Merman's vocal range, and you have to make the latest Mer-substitute sound good in a bitch of a key as a result.
(By the way, while those who play the lead parts for Gypsy may like the show, I found it to be a bore the three times that I played it. Of course, none of the three productions had the full orchestration, and the nifty jazz bass clarinet work in Ya Gotta Hava Gimmick was replaced (for me) with a dull interior harmony clarinet part. Having to tote a bass sax around during one of the productions didn't help.)
o Maintain your musical friendships, for you never know when you'll need to borrow a bass saxophone (quite a few parts for those, including Funny Girl, The Music Man, Gypsy, and West Side Story), a contra clarinet (I've only had this problem once, with On The Twentieth Century, but I note that The Producers uses the horn as well), an Eb clarinet (two shows, Company and Camelot, called for this for color purposes only), bassoon, English horn or other oddity.
Just showing up with a bass sax gets you some "bulge" over the others with their puny little Traypac sax/flute/clarinet setups; actually playing it well sets the capstone. (Finding a place to set it down is a whole tale in itself.) Besides, you might be able to refer a friend, and friends tend to refer you back in the bargain.
o Show up on time, come prepared to play (bottled water is a help here these days; less need to take a water break that way), and bring something to keep you occupied during the down spells (particularly during the technical rehearsals with cast). Save your talk with others for the break, so that when things start to go south the director will not be yelling at _you_ to be quiet.
o Finally, have fun. Sure, there's a lot of boring fill music in shows, but there's also a lot of hot dance lines, florid clarinet work, and "working with the soloist" vocal accompaniment parts that make it all worthwhile.
And the stories that you will accumulate (like the poorly placed flute cut in half by the hydraulic orchestra pit elevator platform, or stepping in at the last minute to cover for a missing player on a part that you have to sight read, or getting engaged in dialog with Zero Mostel during a performance, in front of a full house and all of it ad lib) will last you a lifetime.
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The Clarinet BBoard
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