“Miss Oboist! Oh, Miss Oboe, Miss O-boe!” A paunchy man waved his Playbill over the railing. I raised my eyebrows and smiled at him, hoping for a compliment.
“Danny Kaye—he was a comedian before your time—said, ‘Oboe’s an ill wind that no one blows good!’” He stood there, beaming. Beside him, the fat Scot laughed, shifting his butt.
Bingo! Tartan boxers.
The top classical freelance musicians looked down on Broadway work, but I no longer cared. It paid $1,100 per week in the early 1990s, with three weeks’ vacation, eight sick days, and a pension based on healthy revenues. (I’d signed up for my first physical since junior high, along with an eye exam and a visit to the dermatologist, just in case the show closed right away.)
We could even hire a substitute for half the performances (pay was docked) and had tenure for the run of the show. Like most classical musicians playing Broadway, I continued playing freelance concerts by taking off nights at the show. I quickly learned the ropes. Subs came in two basic varieties: available or good. Available ones bailed you out at busy times, like the last Saturday before Christmas, but never seemed to understand that’s why they got called. The most desirable players repaid the Broadway musician by hiring him for outside work like City Ballet or American Symphony, which not only broke up the show’s monotony but often carried over to provide employment after a show closed.
In addition to base salary, musicians like me got an extra 12.5 percent for doubling on a second instrument, which justified the expense of instrument purchase, maintenance, and time spent making reeds and practicing. Two doubles earned more, and three instruments—or playing the synthesizer, regarded as a musician-replacing device to be discouraged—got 25 percent. Costumed musicians, like the onstage violinist in Fiddler on the Roof or the guitarist in Man of La Mancha, cost producers an extra five bucks a night, and wearing body paint brought an additional eight dollars in pay.
* * *
Like 69 percent of the Broadway shows running in 1990, Aspects didn’t earn back its investment, qualifying it as a flop.1 It closed eleven months after opening. Frank Rich—The New York Times “Butcher of Broadway” who had panned Dale’s show—had flung his cleaver, with a reference to the roller-skating actors in Lloyd Webber’s Starlight Express:
Andrew Lloyd Webber, the composer who is second to none when writing musicals about cats, roller-skating trains and falling chandeliers, has made an earnest but bizarre career decision.... While Aspects of Love, with its references to Huxley and Turgenev, may be the most high-minded of Lloyd Webber musicals, isn’t it also the one in most desperate need of roller skates?
Closing in March of 1991, Aspects’ $8 million loss rivaled the five-show run of Carrie as Broadway’s biggest flop ever.2 The failure didn’t bother me, since I had a blockbuster show waiting; the same contractor who had hired me for Aspects was also picking musicians for the next big musical, Miss Saigon. I’d accepted, planning to quit Aspects anyway, along with the French horn player in my pit band, to join the new show. Even though I wasn’t playing as much classical music as I once had, and I was hidden in an orchestra pit, I still felt there was something important in playing for these hit shows.
Unlike Aspects, the new show promised to be a spectacle in the Phantom tradition, with an onstage Cadillac, a two-story Ho Chi Minh statue, and a real helicopter landing onstage. Young Asian girls in tiny bikinis were almost an afterthought.
On Miss Saigon’s opening night, Sardi’s waiters bore silver platters of the Times review. “This musical is a gripping entertainment of the old school,” penned a kinder, gentler Frank Rich. The Butcher’s blade jabbed only once, in noting the Broadway trend to opulent staging. “The helicopter stunt, which will most impress devotees of sub-Disney theme parks, is presented ... for no good reason other than to throw Andrew Lloyd Webber fans a pseudo-chandelier or levitating tire.”3
I had a hit, and a job for years.
Settled into Saigon, life became more stable. No longer did I worry about gaps in my income. Within weeks, however, I began experiencing the Broadway musician’s nightmare of repetitive work. Four hundred sixteen times a year I would be playing the same notes, accompanying a story that always ended the same way. Broadway musicians who’d worked for years were bored out of their minds but endured the work because it paid decently and offered a flexible schedule. I noticed, with horror, that the repetition paralleled a boring consistency in my personal life, which had lacked anything in the boyfriend department for some time now.
Hoping to meet some new men, I signed up for a wine class at Windows on the World, the restaurant atop the World Trade Center. “Business attire required,” the brochure said. Probably not the pit musicians’ duds of faded black jeans, sneakers, and T-shirts. I owned only fancy formal wear and knocking-around clothes, but nothing in between. I bought a tight corporate-style suit with my new gold card. And since I could also afford a Paris Health Club membership, my body fit into the size-zero miniskirt.
I had swooped in on Doug by the third class, on Côte d’Or wines. We tossed back our Bienvenue-Bâtard-Montrachet like seasoned oenophiles. Dark and gorgeous, he’d just started at a big Wall Street law firm, and he asked me out for Saturday night.
I worked on Saturday night. Doug was one of those day-job types. He’d need training that my work was every bit as valuable as his, even though it happened to be at night. Doug would learn the three-show rule. He’d accommodate my schedule until the third date. Only then would I forfeit a night’s income to accommodate his.
Date one went well. I played a concert at Carnegie, a job one of my subs had tossed me as a thank-you in return for work, while Doug sat in the audience. Impressive, I thought! Tonight was date two. He’d meet me at the stage door for a late drink, which I thought might sound glamorous to an outsider.
First came the show, though. I walked through the stage door, down a narrow set of stairs to the labyrinth of basement lockers, and into a sea of gay actors in their briefs, waiting to dress in show costumes. Outside the orchestra pit, the sound man tucked body mikes in between nubile bodies and their G-string costumes. I stole glances at a burly stagehand, wearing a dress, who was halfway through his series of sex-change operations.
It was a typical night backstage. Male musicians in faded black jeans and T-shirts lounged on the sofa, draped by beautiful Asian actresses in bikinis who massaged shoulders and cooed in their ears. I poured myself some coffee.
“Places! Orchestra to the pit!”
The only woman among winds, brass, and percussion, I slid into my seat behind our saxophonist, poking at the dismal selection of reeds soaking on a shelf beneath my stand. Someone slid the heavy steel pit door shut with a crash. Now, only a slice of light connected us to the outside world, a space where the stage extended nearly to the front row. Netting to catch flying props and actors covered the rest. Since our music was piped through a sound system—completely inaudible for the three minutes while the helicopter landed—our playing didn’t matter much more than our scruffy looks.
The door creaked open again, and Timmy, the large flutist, heaved into the pit bathed in sweat. He was lugging a large bag of new CDs from Tower and two books on the futures market. Timmy complained nightly about his wife, a “ball and chain” who played in another Broadway pit, and he acted out with a toy box that included a fart machine, three different electronic screaming balls, a toy gun with a BANG! banner, plastic vomit, rubber dog shit, mooing cow toys, and an actual condom that he produced in conjunction with dirty jokes to intimidate female subs.
Timmy also collected a fee as first-call substitute on the bamboo flute book. Though he refused to learn the difficult instruments, his fee was set in stone with his initial union contract, and the dollar amount could not be reduced after the show opened. Despite his pay, Timmy was always broke, complaining about the mortgage on his expensive new house.
Timmy put his flute together as our loud pit conversation commenced. Those wearing earplugs sho
uted because they couldn’t hear; those who refused to wear earplugs shouted because they were practically deaf. Hearing loss was a serious workplace issue in the music business, whether in a symphony, rock band, or orchestra pit. The musicians’ union provided free annual hearing tests and a voucher for custom-fitted earplugs.
Our conductor, Dale Rieling, entered the pit, barging through the woodwind section to reach the podium. He picked up the phone attached to the pit railing to communicate with the stage manager, then hung up to start the show. As Rieling raised his baton, I tried evaluating his mood, which changed from sweet to nasty by the hour.
A size 14 foot poked through the fabric hung overhead. Its mate appeared, and a clod of something ricocheted off my ponytail. I rooted around in my tray for the Wite-Out I kept for the occasional changes we were asked to make in our parts, painting a big L on his right sole, an on the left.
Clang! An aluminum trombone mute, the conical plug that goes in the instrument’s bell to change its timbre, slipped from its owner’s fingers, hit a metal music stand, and crashed to the floor. The sound woke Jack, the trombonist who dropped it, five bars before his solo in “I Still Believe.” He scooped up the device, inserted it in his horn, and played beautifully. A Broadway presence since 1957, Jack had played with Maynard Ferguson, Woody Herman, and Buddy Rich and arranged music for Garrison Keillor’s radio show, all while teaching at Manhattan School. A polymath, he stayed up all night calculating pension-related actuarial tables, composing music, scheduling lessons, planning union agenda, and learning music software.
During a soft passage we suddenly heard a retching sound, followed by a toilet flush, booming over the music. Some actor, I supposed, had forgotten to turn off his body mike between scenes.
I couldn’t see the percussionists behind their 165 Asian gongs, rain sticks, and other drums. Before he started this job, percussionist Michael Hinton had landed a yearlong gig as Jefferson Airplane’s drummer, moving on to Buddy Rich’s band and appearing with the Grateful Dead. He and his Japanese violinist wife had migrated to Saigon from Les Miz.
As we started “Sun and Moon,” two synth players hammered away at their silent keyboards, the tinny sounds blaring from speakers aimed at the 1,700 theatergoers above. Mysterious digital readouts ran across their control panels, the ones and zeroes of digital audio simulating a larger string section.
Lino, the clarinetist, was lost in thought during a rest in his part. As a little boy sailing from Cuba twenty years back, Lino had dreamed of his career as a successful reed player. Saigon filled in the rare free spots in his busy and diverse schedule. Not only was Lino a fine classical clarinetist, he doubled on flute and saxes in a variety of musical styles. His dreams had come true, and he played as a substitute musician with the Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera, performed with a saxophone quartet, and played jingles. He’d recently won a regular spot as the baritone sax player in the Saturday Night Live band, but the television show asked him to tint his beautiful salt-and pepper hair dark with Fanci-Full temporary dye, which was part of the deal to make seasoned musicians look young enough for their viewers.
Miriam, another clarinet sub, played a solo, and Timmy whipped around.
“Pretty good,” he hissed, “for a girl.”
Suddenly, Rieling motioned for us to play softly. Whoever played Kim right now had a bad body mike. Without amplification, she was almost inaudible. Why could opera singers project to the top of the Met’s 3,800-seat house, while these performers couldn’t be heard in a theater half that size? The band responded immediately, playing in subtones to let the actress’s tiny voice project.
Playing Saigon was old hat by now; we’d been at it for ten months. Down the street, Cats was in its fourteenth season and Phantom its seventh. Musicians watched their kids grow up during long runs like this. Yet what happened onstage was a mystery. Except for a few musician-actress liaisons, we didn’t know many of the cast members—or the stagehands, who ran computerized sets as complex as our instruments were simple.
The theater suddenly shook with a bomblike kaboom. David Letterman’s staff had warned our company managers that he’d blow up a taxi in the street between his stage door and ours. He waited until showtime to perform his outdoor tricks, when the tourists were safely inside.
Rieling started a tantrum, flailing wildly with his right hand and picking up the phone with his left. What now? Looking up through the slit, I could see the chain-link fence which dropped near the stage lip to protect the audience from the helicopter’s whirring rotors. In this scene, actors boarded a helicopter’s hollow body and exited out the back before it ascended. I followed Rieling’s eyes up to the fly space, where the chopper had snagged on a bank of lights. For the rest of Act II, few of the computerized cues worked, and glare bathed the musical’s tragic ending.
After the show, I put away my instruments, hauling the case onto my back. Outside, couples snuggled under the marquee, sheltering themselves from a driving rain. Others crowded the stage door.
“She’s one of the chorus girls!” cried one teenager, pointing at me as I exited. Her friend snorted contempt.
“Nah, that’s nobody,” she said, straining to see if there might be a real actress behind me. Exiting past the fans and onto the sidewalk, I glimpsed Letterman ducking into a car at his stage door across 53rd, where bits of taxicab chassis spilled out from a Dumpster. His crew was always neat, cleaning up the mess made by the show’s stunts, which could involve anything from explosions to high-diving acts.
Searching the crowd, I found Doug standing in a tiny dry patch beneath the theater’s fire escape. We stopped in at Joe Allen’s for a drink, but Doug didn’t stay long. Adjusting to my three-show rule, he’d worked late at the office. His alarm would buzz at sunrise, and then he’d cab it to work, tired from the late night, to write briefs, attend meetings, and search old cases until dinner. Just when he was ready to slow down, I’d be leaving for my two and a half hours of work.
For some reason, there wasn’t a third date. I was frustrated and didn’t understand why Doug didn’t call. On the second date, we had talked about his cases and trials. I dismissed it all as boring, yet I had an uncomfortable sense that I was missing some larger picture.
CHAPTER
16
Beggar’s Opera
SCHLEPPING BACK FROM a church gig in Jersey, I held my instruments tightly while passing through Port Authority. The bus station had long been known as a magnet for crime. However, today it felt safe, even bucolic, as Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik echoed down empty corridors. New York had discovered “musical bug spray,” a term coined by Northwestern University professor Robert Gjerdingen. The technique was first used in 1985 to chase away loiterers at a Canadian 7-Eleven. The trend spread as Pavarotti cleared out Denver parking lots, Chopin thwarted Toronto thugs, and an endless loop of Mozart blared from bullhorns across a Florida slum. Fort Lupton, Colorado, even punished its noise violators by forcing them to listen to Barry Manilow, songs from the kids’ show Barney, and excepts from Beethoven’s Fifth.
I thought about the message of Port Authority’s Mozart. It was 1994, and the sound of classical music had become offensive enough to be used as an effective weapon against crime. How could we, the industry producing the stuff, demand that our fans pay top dollar for the same treatment? Ironically, the public’s distaste for classical music opened up a new market for repackaging symphonies and sonatas as cultural spinach. Mozart may be yucky and boring, went the reasoning, but it’s good for you.
Author Don Campbell trademarked what he called “The Mozart Effect,” capitalizing on research performed in 1993 by Frances Rauscher, a conservatory classmate of mine who’d turned psychologist. Rauscher had observed only a brief improvement in spatial reasoning after listening to classical music. However, Campbell expanded Rauscher’s theory to meet the needs of America’s quick-fix culture by claiming that listening to classical music could increase intelligence.
Anthologies
of classical favorites soon appeared with titles like Baby Loves Bach, Mozart for Mothers-to-Be, The Most Relaxing Classical Album, and Classical Music for People Who Hate Classical Music. Georgia and Tennessee would later jump on the bandwagon, providing each of the states’ newborns with a classical CD in 1998. The popularity of these Top Forty classical music albums wasn’t surprising. The layman, bewildered by a confusing array of classical music in the record stores, had little idea of where to start listening. Unfortunately, the quality of many of these recordings often reinforced preconceptions of classical music as a boring genre, as labels recycled old monophonic cuts onto undistinguished remixes.
Orchestras also dumbed down their marketing strategy while trying to appeal to a younger audience. Baltimore’s symphony sold itself as that city’s Other Major League Team, while Philadelphia rocked Gen X (to sleep) with its “ClassiX Live: No sex. No drugs. No rock ’n’ roll. Come anyway.” Juilliard professor Greg Sandow critiqued Lincoln Center’s view of youth in the Village Voice:
“The New York Philharmonic Proudly Presents Life Beyond MTV,” the poster scrawled, in wavy green type superimposed on a blurred image of an ear.
But the text that followed was the real showstopper: “Become a Young Friend of the New York Philharmonic, and discover how live classical music can be as much a part of your musical life as classic rock!”
Now, this was a blunder. The Young Friends program aims at kids 12 to 17. Classic rock (which MTV doesn’t play) isn’t part of their lives. It’s music of the ’60s and ’70s, music their parents listened to, which means (a) that they’re likely to hate it, and (b) that the Philharmonic has made itself foolish, linking itself to the one musical style teens might find stuffier than Beethoven.1
These advertising formats were created in response to spiraling deficits, sparse attendance, and rising costs, as documented in the Wolf Report, an exhaustive 1992 study of statistics and data analysis that evaluated the industry’s financial future. The American Symphony Orchestra League (ASOL), which commissioned the work, rejected the Report’s dire findings and countered at its 1993 convention with a guide for selling dead white European men’s music called Americanizing the American Orchestra. This volume was skimpy on data but heavy on anecdotal and emotional description, which revealed the industry’s conceit in the guide’s opening statement: “Our greatest challenge is Americanizing the American orchestra. What are we about, if not continuing the great experiment that is these United States, through our symphony orchestras?”
Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music Page 23