Summarised, it is clearly a joy and a privilege for any musician to conduct a band (read: orchestra) that is even approaching the full-size scoring of West Side Story (even West End MDs find themselves doing it with the synth-string reduction). Yet on the flipside there are the challenges of budget, recruitment, balance — together with the realisation that your musical vision and lofty musical standards are not shared. The ironic reality is, as many before me have discovered, that music is the most marginalised aspect of musicals.

Audience expectation

First and foremost, a show like West Side Story is a musical spectacle as much as it is a stage one. Not all audience members will care, but a good proportion will be aware of the musical highlights and challenges and be looking forward to witnessing all the things that go with any live music performance.

If your ticket price is anything upwards of £10, your audience deserve live music (not prerecorded), well performed (not busked through by rank amateurs) and present/visible (not tucked away in a separate room and milked through the PA).

There’s a reason for mentioning this…

Fair pay

Every am-dram society has a budget issue. That’s a given. What’s not a given is an understanding from the decision-makers about what is a reasonable budget for a show. In my case, partly because the band was large, and partly just because of the society’s financial situation, the pay was particularly low, nearly 50% of what would be a going rate for amateur production pit players. This caused some issues with recruitment (described below).

I’ve done my research, and here’s MU standard(ish) rates.

• Non-pro musicians should expect £40-50 per call
• Pro musicians (West End) – £80

I won’t embarrass my players by publishing what BAOS paid them, but it wasn’t even close to the lower rate.

And the rates described above weren’t for shows as musically demanding as West Side Story.

Placement/space

There were a number of mitigating reasons for this, but in short, the society were blissfully unaware of the space issue created by having a larger band than previous years (19 players) and found out too late to do anything logical about it (such as strip out a row or two of seating to create space). This resulted in a number of unsavoury options being mooted including: putting the band in a separate room, placing them in unusual areas of the auditorium (including in multiple places – imagine trying to hold that together!), and reducing the size of the band (at short notice). I stuck to my guns here that doing the score with 19 players is already a compromise on the 30 it is scored for. Although you can reduce it further — by unappealing measures such as playing the string parts on a synth – you’re still only going to get it down to 15-16 players, still leaving you with a space issue.

In the end we took a gamble and just hoped that the band would fit in the pit. They did (save for percussion which was housed separately from the pit). We almost certainly had below-regulation space, but we did fit.

Whilst we’re talking about the pit, an important factor is to have ‘rat-stands’ (lamp-fitted music stands) or else a suitable replacement. We had skimped on this, only providing battery-powered LED clip-on lights which turned out to be nowhere near up to the job. Fortunately we managed to get some improvements at short notice, but we nearly had players playing blind!

Abilities

At low rates of pay, whilst you may get some outstanding players doing it for the love, or for a favour, you can’t guarantee getting a band of top-flight players, capable of meeting with the demands of the score. Not everyone will be equally strong, and you need to plan for this — especially in terms of being prepared to focus on weak players/sections but not victimising them.

You also need to prepare for and accommodate the tension this range of abilities creates within the band. (well, I wish I had!)

Rehearsal time

Here’s what we did (it just about worked):

• One band call (4 hours) with singers present
• Dress rehearsal, with only a sound-check (no further band-only rehearsal)
• Ad-hoc pre-show sectional rehearsals
• Notes provided, every day, pre-show for players to mark into their parts

And here’s what I’d do next time and what I highly recommend:

• One band call (two if you can afford it) – with only the band and no singers
• One ‘sitzprobe’ – this is a band call plus singers
• Dress rehearsal, including some time for band rehearsal
• A 7pm call, pre-arranged — you might not need it, but at least if you do, it doesn’t seem like an ‘additional’
• Notes – give people notice that they will receive these each day by email and have printout in place each evening. My unplanned approach just made it seem a bit like a reprimand.

Hope that helps!

Be prepared for this too: you just won’t care.

Well, you sort of will. It’s not pleasant knowing that you’re alienating all of the few friends you’ve stayed in touch with, or that you’re slipping behind on all those other projects, or that you’ve put on half a stone in 3 weeks, simply because the only time you get to eat is after rehearsals at 10pm when all that’s left open is KFC.

But what you’re involved with, and what you’re absorbed with and how it repays you, manages to forgive all of these drawbacks.

The sustained motivation and occasional euphoria is not dissimilar those experienced during ‘Flow‘, but on a macro scale, spanning several weeks or months.

In the case of West Side Story, you don’t fatigue of the music. It just gets better and better the more time you spend with it. You become more astounded at the genius of Bernstein, and you keep seeing your actors, dancers and singers grow more accomplished at bringing to life the great vision of its creators.

Just make sure you don’t piss everyone off too much; the show will end eventually!

Having gone back and forth over that decision for five months, and having ended up doing both, I can now see that — assuming you have reasonable keyboard skills – it’s the only way.

Basically, we didn’t have budget to pay anyone, and this is firmly the most preposterous thing about our production. Of all the shows, of all the scores, West Side Story is the one where you most need a rehearsal pianist.

But we didn’t have one, so we got by with me hamfistedly accompanying all the songs.

Without much time to practice anything, I don’t quite know what I thought we’d do when it got to having to run all the dances etc without the CD. And as you approach the show, it just doesn’t wash doing all the dances with recorded playing. You need live accompaniment as much as possible.

Around the same time I started to learn it, we had the good fortune to secure a first rate player (who was even prepared to do it for free). But this was sort of my problem, and it was one of pride.

Sure, it was great when we was there, but he couldn’t be at every rehearsal. Yet the expectation that we would rehearse any and all numbers, with live accompaniment, then became an added pressure on me, not to mention an embarrassment on some occasions. I ended up rather wishing that I’d invested the time upfront.

But then there are the advantages. Apart from the fact that everyone will think you’re super talented if you can play the reduction, as far as getting to know the score goes — no better way than with familiarity of the reduction.

Cues are now leaping out at me when I conduct from the full score. I’m feeling the timing and rhythm and general spirit of the Prologue and Dance at the Gym and the Rumble much more than I was before I could play them.

But if there’s one lesson I’ve learnt it’s that you shouldn’t allow the weight of expectation, or lack of funds, to force you into something that isn’t in your job description; a talented conductor is not necessarily a gifted pianist or accompanist, nor should s/he be expected to be.

Stand your ground, and insist there is budget for this. And then learn it anyway, because it’s cool.

If you come to music theatre from a classical training — and let’s face it, if you’re up to MDing West Side Story then you must do — the approach of theatre singers can be quite a departure from what you might consider the norm.

For a start it’s very easy to get frustrated at the lack of formal music training that most of them have had; harder still when a few have had training, and you have to tailor your directions to not baffle one camp and not patronise the other.

Many do not read music, and although they may follow it in their scores, this is primarily for the words and the notated music is hieroglyphics to a lot of them.

This results in much of the music being learnt by ear. This is fine, and a great way to learn (it explains why they can commit so much to memory — one skill they certainly have the edge on compared with classical musos — and pick up new music so quickly) but the challenge for the MD is that they are not learning it from you (you probably only have a few contact hours with them a week) but from their recording. Worse still, they are learning it from years of CD listening to their favourite soundtrack — in WSS’s case probably one of the many ‘deviant’ recordings — resulting in ingrained habits that are hard to break.

This can be partially alleviated by providing them with a more ‘faithful’ recording, one that most closely matches your own interpretation (in my case the Leicester Haymarket and the Bernstein’s own Deutsche Grammophon) — and insisting their other one(s) go into hibernation for the duration of the show. That’s only half the challenge though – you’ve got to persuade people to take a copy (or — in case the lawyers are reading — in my case I asked them to buy it) and, apparently, this is quite some effort :-/

Rehearsal discipline is poorer in this bunch than their classical counterparts. This is partly due to the point above about music reading; if you work with the music then they quickly become distracted and frustrated trying to follow something on the page they don’t understand. But also, the temperament of your typical am-dram type — the ‘look at me, look at me’, attention seeking behaviour — means that as musical director, you come up against a lot more noise and general barracking than is conducive. They are certainly attention-seeking, and not attention-giving. The effect of being talked over when talking to — in any endeavour — is pretty irksome and can result in even the most laid back dude losing their rag. But only teachers can really get away with this. If you’re a musical director, you’ll soon earn yourself a reputation as a prima donna or a sour-puss.

I find that extended warm-ups help with this; a combination of giving them a chance to shine (how about some gospel numbers where they can sing their hearts out and show off how high and loud their voices are?) and getting them to quieten down and focus. Also, my experience is that music theatre singers are curious learners; they don’t often have the benefit of bona fide musical mentoring so giving them something tangible that may help their technique will really get and hold their attention (some at least).

My overall advice is to embrace the approach and embrace the people. If you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em, and all that.

If all of this fails, and you still find yourself overcome with frustration and contempt in the face of your haughty musical expectations, go sit in on a choreography rehearsal, or some drama, and see just what else it is they are capable of. It’s quite humbling to observe.

Why insist on blogging everything, Tim? Well, partly for my own posterity but more specifically in the hope of being a shining beacon to future versions of myself, in the same lost, bewildered situation I was, and who turn to Google as their first port of call.

Especially so with MD-ing West Side Story. Given the masses of online material about Bernstein and (superficially) about the show, there is a surprising paucity of recorded experiences from those who’ve been involved with directing, choreographing or music directing amateur (or professional for that matter) productions.

So I’ve somewhat failed to set up a dedicated blog, granted. And I’m 4 months into a 5-month project, but my own existing blog will do, and as for timing — well, these things happen when they happen; I actually feel best placed to start blogging now (ironically because I’m at my busiest with the real work for it), and hope my wisdom (such as it is!) will be of value to someone down the line.

Here’s some of the learning experiences I intend to share in the next four weeks of blogging:

• Coping: how to cope with life, work, relationships as your life gets turned upside down by your involvement in the show (I’m really selling it aren’t I?)
• Theatre singers: how to manage this peculiar breed of musician
• Score preparation: understanding Bernstein’s masterpiece and interpreting it for others
• Piano: rehearsal pianist or learn it yourself?
• Recruiting the band: where to start and how to
• Band placement: where do you fit this unconventionally large pit orchestra?
• Programme notes: what can you say that hasn’t been said before?
• Amateur operatic societies: what you can bring to them and how you can understand them