Breaking the Sound Barrier
Composers parlay their experience as sound designers into new musical forms
by Mark Blankenship
It's getting harder and harder to spot a musical. Take Lady Madeline, a "musical re-imagining" of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" that opens at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company this month. The show will feature several songs co-written by Andre Pluess, but he wouldn't call it a musical. And Scott Killian wouldn't use the term to describe William Gibson's Jonah's Dream, which ran at Connecticut Repertory Theatre in Storrs last October, even though he himself co-wrote almost a dozen tunes for the piece. Not even Mark Bennett will definitively say he's written a musical, though his show Most Wanted, currently in development at California's La Jolla Playhouse, closes Act 1 with a big song-anddance number.
| Sound and Composition Excerpts: Mark Bennett 2) The Country 3) Pericles 4) Tartuffe Scott Killian 1) The Father 3) Lorenzaccio 5) Sarah, Sarah Andre Pluess and Ben Sussman 1) Pericles 2) Passion Play, a cycle and Whitman 3) Moon for the Misbegotten and Pericles |
If these people aren't writing musicals, then what are they writing? "It's complicated," says Killian with a laugh, and he's telling the truth. The three shows mentioned above are part of an emerging genre that increasingly integrates music into a stage project without creating what's commonly understood as musical theatre. Pluess, for example, says that when he and collaborator Ben Sussman got the idea for Lady Madeline, they specifically wanted to craft "a great project that was musical but not 'a musical.'" For them, that meant making sound so integral to the show that songs wouldn't become breaks from an otherwise "natural narrative flow." The pair weren't looking to create a modern opera or a sung-through piece, either—they wanted what Pluess calls "a rich sonic atmosphere," something that would expand the traditional notion of how sound functions in telling a story. In other words, Pluess elaborates, they wanted to write a show that "played to our strengths both as composers and as sound designers."
That dual identity is a key to how Pluess and his contemporaries experiment with music theatre. Though all these artists are creating original material, they work primarily as composer/ sound designers. When they started in the business, all four expected they'd take a straightforward route to writing song-and-dance sensations. None of them saw sound design on the horizon. "I've been told," admits Bennett, "that I backed up into my design career, and that's true. But it's a happy backup."
Indeed, design has been lucrative for Bennett, Killian, Sussman and Pluess. All have worked on and Off Broadway and at major regional theatres. Pluess readily acknowledges his "outstanding luck," noting that his "income comes solely from designing sound and choral music for plays."
Yet despite their success, these four sound-design pros—and many like them—are itching to create their own work. There are overlaps in their professional histories and future plans, but each has a unique perspective on his artistic trajectory. Their stories help explain why "plays with music" singkeep springing up next to old-fashioned musicals on the American stage.
Jonah's dream marks a return to Scott Killian's roots in several ways. For one thing, it's his first collaboration with composer-lyricist Kim Sherman since 1993, when the longtime friends created the well-received docudrama The Last Living Newspaper for Virginia's Theater of the First Amendment.
An earlier project on which he had teamed up with Sherman almost turned Killian off theatre for good. In 1983 the twentysomething pair were plucked from Minnesotan obscurity by Joseph Papp to write the musical Lenny and the Heartbreakers for the New York City's high-profile Public Theater. "To put it simply," Killian now recalls, "it was a devastating experience. It was like every story you hear about making musicals that flop. The director was fired. I rejected Madonna for a lead role. I didn't know what I didn't know, and I naïvely came to New York thinking I could write a musical."
Feeling traumatized by the sudden lessons in all he hadn't learned, Killian left theatre and found a new outlet in composing for dance. By the '90s, though, his growing success had led him back to the stage as a composer/sound designer at venues like Huntington Theatre Company in Boston and Baltimore's CENTERSTAGE. In working closely with directors and other artists, Killian's eyes were opened to how sound affects a production's overall feel. He says he's constantly reevaluating "what works and what doesn't in terms of sound pushing the play forward or heightening a moment."
Recently, for example, while working with director Anders Cato on the 2005 Berkshire Theatre Festival production of Strindberg's The Father, Killian dabbled for the first time in blending the works of classical composers with music he had written himself. This created a fractured soundscape that he felt encapsulated Strindberg's tone. By mixing sound effects and original composition, he also created the aural palette for a 2004 Berkshire Theatre Festival production of The Miracle Worker, William Gibson's warhorse about Helen Keller and her teacher. Killian's efforts resulted in an invitation to write songs for Jonah's Dream. He was returning at last to the world of musical theatre.
Even though he's reuniting with Sherman (in fact, he requested to have her on board), Killian is not the novice composer he was in 1983. The insight he's gained as a sound designer has not only given him confidence but also expanded his understanding of what sound can accomplish in the theatre. He declares, "Now, to me, sound and music are inseparable. The notion of having sound cues built for a production and then music separate from that is strange. I've done it, but it feels strange." In Gibson's new play, Killian feels his input bridges sound effects, music and orchestration. Sherman agrees. "When we say sound," she notes, "we also mean music, so the vocabulary is huge."
That's a good thing, because Jonah's Dream demands a massive vocabulary. The wildly imaginative play tracks its title character—a reinterpreted version of the biblical hero—simultaneously through ancient times and New York's Lower East Side. Puppets interact with live actors, mermaids chat with humans, and a Greek-style chorus does all the singing. The songs are just as varied as the performance styles. Killian says the songs have "one foot in Yiddish theatre and klezmer music, but also dabble in gospel and tons of other aesthetic styles."
And sound design blends seamlessly with the compositions. In one stormy scene, for instance, wind comes from three sources: recorded tracks, in-house wind machines and the live vocals of the chorus. A constant blurring between sound effects and songs allows an all-encompassing soundscape to emerge.
Every sound draws on Killian's experiences as a composer who's absorbed the dramaturgical power of sound design. "As a sound designer," he explains, "you sometimes have something like 32 seconds to take a play from a very angry moment to a very peaceful, loving one. You have to know how to change moods efficiently, to respond to the whole piece."
It should be noted, of course, that "plays with songs" have existed for ages. Few would peg Mother Courage and Her Children as a traditional musical, but the songs in that play obviously serve a vital function. Killian points to Robert Schenkkan's The Kentucky Cycle as a recent inspiration for the type of drama he himself is writing now. Killian is, in fact, only one of the rising number of sound designers who are stepping from behind their booths with creative ideas. And there seems to be institutional support to match the flurry of creativity.
Mark Bennett and playwright/lyricist Jessica Hagedorn have joined forces before, on a musical adaptation of Hagedorn's novel Dogeaters. Directed by Michael Greif in both the 1998 La Jolla Playhouse premiere and the revised Public Theater production in 2001, it featured what Hagedorn describes as "a wide array of musical and cultural influences—everything from American pop music to traditional Filipino songs." The team reunited when Bennett had the idea for Most Wanted, a piece loosely inspired by the life of Gianni Versace's murderer, Andrew Cunanan. "I was working on sound design at La Jolla," Bennett recalls, "and I was reminded that [Cunanan] was a kid who had grown up in the area. That spurred me on."
La Jolla quickly got on board with the project, as did Hagedorn and Greif. None of them were prepared for the storm of controversy that met the project's first workshop, which many saw as a glorification of Cunanan's criminal acts. Bennett, though, points out that the show is only partially grounded in the young killer's life and is much more focused on our larger culture of celebrity obsession. Despite the controversy, La Jolla remained supportive, and the Sundance Theatre Lab invited the team to develop the piece in July 2005.
The creators say that support has been invaluable in helping them weather the uproar and focus instead on how to tell their story of a man left hollow by his quest for fame. For Bennett, the public unrest only proves the validity of Most Wanted's subject, and he wants the show to reflect that tension. "This story doesn't end with hope pulled out of the magic hat," he says. "This story ends with questions, and I think this subject matter demands a rethinking of conventional musical form."
Bennett pegs his conception of form to his sound-design experience. "A lot of my work as a sound designer and composer is to find a rhythmic gesture for a scene," he muses, "and on this project, I feel if we can find that rhythmic gesture for each element of the story, then we've found a way in."
These formal contrasts are being utilized to shape the contrasts between Most Wanted's three musical worlds: the lead character's childhood, his rise in fashionable society, and the realm of a journalist who wants to reconstruct his story. Sonically, the milieus will be represented by a collision of influences: An actor may rap in French for one scene, only to spend the next performing a classically inspired operatic song. The overlap of motifs will become the show's aural signature.
This musical schizophrenia makes perfect sense to Bennett, since he sees his protagonist as having "a kaleidoscopic pattern of reference." But those references would collapse, he says, if he were not working with a team that "appreciates what sound can do for a story." Like Killian, Bennett stresses his gratitude for finding artists outside his field who can "think of sound as a dynamic means of storytelling." For him, this openness helps answer a question that he says faces many in the field: "How de we keep from simply being part of the formula? How do we as sound designers and composers serve up as honest a story as we can?"
Bennett's question points to the ambiguity of the term "sound designer." Though most people easily make the distinction between technical design—which involves the complex science and practical application of sound technology—and conceptual design, the scope of the latter category seems endless. Original composition, live effects and recorded sound all require different skills, yet they're affixed with the same label. Creators of music-theatre projects thrive within those flexible boundaries.
As Pluess puts it, "The gray area between music and sound composition is what we [composer/sound designers] have to offer to the American musical theatre. Our part in the dialogue is bringing in our background in all the ways that sound and music can be used in storytelling."
On that subject, Pluess is charged with excitement, particularly when talk turns to Lady Madeline. "The only reason this piece is happening in this way," he asserts, "is because I worked as a sound designer and learned to think about creating a cohesive sonic aesthetic to tell a story."
After cutting their teeth on pieces like 2004's musical adaptation of Winesburg, Ohio, Pluess and Sussman are using Lady Madeline to refine their theatrical vision. (They're joined by playwright Mickle Maher and Winesburg director Jessica Thebus.)
With great enthusiasm, Pluess reports that "now we have unfettered access to sound and music while authoring this piece from the ground up." That access promises singular results. For example, the show's lead character, Roderick Usher, will literally construct his world with sound. Pluess describes a scene in which a housekeeper opens a door to discover Roderick and a friend. First, we experience the friend's perception of the servant's entrance, complete with everyday sound effects. When the scene repeats from Roderick's agitated perspective, a cacophony ensues: The creak of the door becomes percussion, the jangle of keys becomes harmonic notes and the clatter of footsteps develops a rhythm. Sound effects bleed into music.
This is how the landscape will function in Lady Madeline. Songs will spring up from the sound of wind, and notes will dissolve into household shuffles. For Pluess, it's a gratifying extension of how he sees the world anyway. "I grew up around sound and theatre," he says, "and that's what excites me."
He freely admits that while he admires the new wave of contemporary musical composers— he specifically mentions Adam Guettel and Jason Robert Brown—he and Sussman (and, by implication, other aficionados of the wider palette of sound possibilities) will never make theatre the way those artists do. He concedes, "The musical theatre community could easily argue that we're not making real musical theatre, but I prefer to say we're trying to find something—a new context. How exciting is that?"
It could be excItIng indeed, though all such innovations will still be subject to the same simple question: What do these shows sound like, exactly? It's not surprising that many of these projects are obviously indebted to the musicals that have come before them. In Jonah's Dream, for example, the chorus is often simply singing a mixture of chants and klezmer flavored refrains to highlight Jonah's travels.
Several sections feature recognizable song structures (verse-chorus-verse) and Broadway- friendly vocals, suggesting that Killian and Sherman have not entirely forgotten the days of Lenny and the Heartbreakers. But there are also segments of Jonah's Dream that are much harder to define. One section of Jonah's trek, in which he tries to get aboard a chariot after fleeing from God's wrath, is supported by almost four minutes of remarkably diverse sound: Wind effects give way to a plucked bass, whose notes comically suggest a man stumbling while he walks; meanwhile, the chorus narrates bits of the action, sometimes speaking rhythmically, sometimes belting a line in full-on song.
As the scene progresses, the bass gives way to the oom-pah rhythms of the play's opening number, this time topping off the musical strains with some finger-snapping and hand-clapping for texture. Such a moment strikingly displays the hybrid nature of Killian's influences. There's no song, exactly, for the chariot scene, but there's too much rhythm and singing to simply say it has been "sound designed."
However they're working, though, the sound and music are undeniably telling us how the characters feel and what they're doing. Removing the sound from this section would mean removing both its emotional tone and narrative thrust.
Bennett and the team of Pluess and Sussman will undoubtedly be aiming for the same aural vitality in their work. At press time, neither Most Wanted nor Lady Madeline were complete enough to be sampled, but a listen to some of Pluess and Sussman's earlier projects lends clues to where this blended form of music-theatre may be going.
In both Winesburg, Ohio and Pulp, a lesbian noir parody Pluess wrote with Patricia Kane and Amy Warren, familiar stand-alone songs are the primary musical vehicles. These songs, however, are the opposite of showstoppers—rather, they seem to slide effortlessly out of the dialogue, barely breaking the rhythm of the show before they slink away again into the flow of information. The music is so unobtrusive that it seems as organic as any of the spoken text.
Some critics have berated Pluess and Sussman's compositions as forgettable, but another argument would be that the tunes are so fully woven into the fabric of the material that they decline to call attention to themselves in the ways we are accustomed to. In Winesburg, certainly, the point is not to deliver splashy "numbers." The music's predominantly minor keys and brooding tempos enhance the overall mood of the show. The songs become just one telling piece of a complex dramatic structure.
In a way, this may be a significant hallmark of the work Pluess, Sussman, Killian, Bennett and their contemporaries are trying to create. As they craft new storytelling aims for sound and music, they may necessarily make those elements less obvious, less hummable than traditional stage music. But at the same time, sound will be seeping into the DNA of their work, so that—as in the chariot scene in Jonah's Dream—the shows simply cannot exist without their aural element.
As these artists continue to sharpen their skills at inextricably building sound into their material, their progress will necessitate an exciting reevaluation of theatrical genres. Eventually, the very fact that a piece of theatre is not a musical could be one of the most important reasons to listen to it.
Mark Blankenship is a New York City-based writer about the theatre.