Author: Ralph Katz
Date: 2003-04-08 12:09
In a production of HMS Pinnafore, there were 8 planned encores of the "Bell Trio", each one more actively choreographed than the last. The one line, "and the men who sail the water," kept getting more strained and out-of-breath, until the baritone could only say "water". On the last encore, the horn player behind me stood up holding a tray, with a towel on his arm, said "Water" at the proper moment, and the baritone came over for a drink.
In La Belle Helene, someone is disguised as a shephard. "But where are your sheep?" the young lady he is wooing asks. During the last Saturday night performance, at this point, one of the stagehands introduced a live sheep on stage. The sheep really didn't want to go out, and there was a stagehand's Levi-clad leg, with cowboy boot, visible from the house prodding the sheep out. It took the cast and audience about 10 minutes to recover from this little number. One of the tenors had a farm and borrowed the animal from a friend. They brought it in during the early afternoon, and husbanded it away in an unused closet filled with straw, near the lady's chorus dressing room. Apparently the sheep had, every so often, let out a single "baa". One of the ladies remarked afterward, "I thought it was Ron warming up."
In G&S Patience, there is a brief clarinet cadenza, which leads Patience into a song. The soprano picks a point in the middle of the cadenza to take her preparatory breath, and the clarinet's dominant note at the end of the cadenza immediately begins her next song. One night, with the conductor's approval, I extended the end of this cadenza substantially, with some material taken from cadenzas from several concerti. The singer took her breath, but I kept going on, with no end in sight. People tell me that her expression, as she tried to start to sing but stopped, several times, was priceless. Good thing for me she had a sense of humor.
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The Clarinet BBoard
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