In the world of the pit orchestra, there is a soldier’s awareness that anything can happen at any time. It’s your bad if you aren’t with it; all the mistakes are on you. Like in the rigors of Westpoint, it’s not your training — how many years you’ve fingered or blown into your instrument — but how well you perform when called upon for duty.
In the Sir William S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan operetta staged in Wilder this past weekend, Pirates of Penzance, everything rests on duty. Trainee-pirate Fredric renounces his apprenticeship vows — promising to turn against his former comrades — to emphatic vengeful orchestral chords. It is your duty to play those chords. What should be your focus? Pitch, togetherness, color, sonority or forget all that and just play “crunch?” Survival in this world is complicated.
Most of your fellow orchestra musicians knew nothing of the production until less than a week before the performance. Singers in the production, who had been slaving over their lines, secco recitatives, arias and dance numbers for months, had plenty to lose if their work was in vain. In the final number of the entire work, when all the actors are on stage — the Pirates, the police, the Major-General, his entire chorus of daughters, Fredric and Maybel — the orchestra, in all its glory, gives the downbeat that the singers listen for to finish the night off strong. Once you forget the cue during rehearsal, and the grand finale suddenly became a lot of confusion. Unfortunately, that part of the story happened a long time ago. Wrong act. Everyone is supposed to finish the operetta singing in unison, remember? Your excuse: but we only got the music a week ago! Doesn’t fly. Duty is so complicated.
By opening night, about half the orchestra have played through both acts of Pirates entirely. Virtually none of you had made it to all the rehearsals, and the cohesiveness resembles the national consensus on abortion. Despite abortive attempts, you have never played through either act without stopping at some botched cue or after exposing some singer’s faulty memory. The audience looks so naïve, so expecting! Of course there were a couple exposed spots that you touched on in practice, but not even those are perfect. Certainly you hadn’t dissected the music and pieced it back together or anything elaborate like that.
Upon taking your seat, it strikes you that, with a piano in between you and the conductor and scenery between you and the audience, there is barely room to breathe. In fact, to accommodate another player, who showed up for the first time on performance night to “help out,” you turn your chair so it is actually partially backing the crowd. The piano doesn’t fit in the pit area, that’s why it juts out between you and the podium into a staging aisle, where the pianist watches the conductor from the rear. The conductor, Lauren Harrison, doesn’t have room either, and later in the show her baton will fly sharply against the wall — three feet away — after being wrenched out of her hand by the underside of a music stand. She will conduct three numbers without her instrument.
But now you look into the audience, anticipating the opening downbeat of the overture, praying for the operetta to be over already. In between, you all know anything could happen. The conductor counts off the prep beats, helping the many instrumentalists who haven’t been around to know what the tempo is. Everything is ready. You are a soldier, lined up in the trenches, ready for battle.
The singers are magical, the staging, lighting, direction and choreography precise and engaging. The humor — sometimes archaic, sometimes corny, always clever — catches the audience and disarms them. Fifth-year Caleb Stokes helplessly struggles with his sense of duty as the young Fredric. Senior Elena Krell wows the audience with her 10-something pitch rendition of her character’s name, Ma-a-a-a-(etc)-a-bel. The Pirate King — first-year Andrew MacIver — is quick to point out that “compared with respectability, [my] profession is relatively honest.” And sophomore Jason Bayus brings sparkle to the role of the fatherly military official, especially in his tongue-twisting patter song, “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General.” By the end, the whole episode has been dubbed a considerable success. The stage director, first-year Matthew Ozawa, and music conductor, senior Lauren Harrison, bow to an upheaval of applause.
For the orchestra, no one gets recognized. That’s a job well done. For the most part, everything that could have gone right did, and whatever did go wrong was slight enough not to draw attention. The only time you get attention in a pit orchestra is when you make a mistake. That’s life in the trenches.