Tag: theater

In 1970, the year of the first Earth Day, I wrote a song called “X-Rays Coming Out of My TV.” It was a satirical folk-style song, inspired by Tom Lehrer’s “Pollution,” about how technology was destroying the environment. It was pretty sophisticated for an eighth-grader, but was seriously mediocre on any objective scale. My mother, however, was convinced that it would be my ticket to fame and fortune, and she somehow found a music publisher in New York City who was willing to talk to me. He scheduled an in-person meeting and requested that I bring a demo of the song.

I recorded my guitar and vocal on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and borrowed a second recorder so I could add a vocal harmony track and, for good measure, a tambourine. Realizing that a devious New York publisher might try to take advantage of a naïve boy from the suburbs, I took the precaution of filling out an application and paying a fee (taken out of my allowance) to register a copyright with the U.S. Copyright Office.

The music publisher was surprisingly diplomatic. He listened to the demo tape, told me that it really hadn’t been necessary to add the tambourine, and gave me a couple of albums to listen to — John Prine and Randy Newman — to assist in my development as a songwriter. Then we went home, at which point I assumed that my mother would stop embarrassing me by bragging about my song. But that was not to be. “My son had a song copyrighted!” she told everyone who would listen.

Despite my explaining to her many times that anybody could have anything copyrighted, she talked about my copyright proudly for years. The time I’d put into writing the song didn’t matter; the important thing was a routine transaction that had taken me a few minutes. Since that time, I’ve noticed how often, in the same way, people place value on insignificant things at the expense of significant ones.

Jugglers and acrobats have a variety of tricks in their repertoire. Some are easy but look difficult, and some are very challenging but look easy. According to my college roommate Jay, who has juggled professionally for more than 40 years, an underappreciated item in the juggling repertoire is two people juggling eight clubs. “It takes an incredible amount of practice to get it,” he says, “but once you do, it looks just like juggling seven clubs.” Ideally, the audience would appreciate the skill and discipline required to make such a difficult trick look easy, but instead, they reserve their biggest reactions for the less-subtle tricks. “Juggling an apple and eating it,” Jay says, “is not particularly hard.” But it’s a guaranteed crowd pleaser.

Aerialists — those acrobats who perform high over your head, dangling from ropes or trapezes — take years to learn their craft. Audience members typically remain silent as they watch the performers execute their intricate maneuvers, but one thing every aerialist learns is that if he or she (usually she) simply does a split, the audience responds with instant applause. Aerialists actually have a name for this phenomenon: “claps for splits.”

One thing I’ve always wondered is — to borrow a trope from Jerry Seinfeld — what’s the deal with tap dancers? They can create incredibly rapid, varied, syncopated rhythms throughout a piece of music, but the climactic move is always the one where they lean forward, face the audience, and run in place while swinging their arms. That always seems to bring down the house, despite being the least artistic part of their act. I can only imagine that audiences applaud wildly at that point only because of many years of conditioning.

My experience as an actor in, and writer for, a children’s theater troupe taught me that the one surefire way to get an audience of children to laugh is to have a character fall down. There’s always a moment near the end of a show where the kids get restless and their attention starts to wander. I always made sure to write a pratfall into the script at that point, regardless of whether it was motivated by the story. Nothing else — no matter how clever a joke is, no matter how elaborately a gag is set up — gets the same reaction.

As a community college teacher of digital art courses, I’ve always been surprised at my students’ response when a classmate shows an especially skillful piece of work to the class. Instead of asking what inspired the work or how it was accomplished technically, they tend to ask earnestly, “How long did that take?” Then they marvel at the amount of time the artist devoted to the work rather than at how well done it is.

I suppose that’s not much different from my parents’ attitude toward my own work. No matter what I produced, whether it was for school or for personal expression, they were much more concerned with how it was received — whether it got me a good grade, or whether it won an award, or whether it got me into the local newspaper — than the thing itself. And that extended into my adulthood. Ten years after I wrote “X-Rays Coming Out of My TV,” I wrote a one-act play called “Reel to Reel,” about the troubled owner of a recording studio. By this time, I had graduated from college, was working in publishing, and was living on my own in New Jersey. I decided to enter the play in a local playwriting contest, but first, I again took the precaution of registering it with the Copyright Office.¹

I won the contest, my play was produced, and my parents came to see it on opening night. Despite not having read the play and knowing nothing about it, they presented me with a plaque they’d had made to commemorate the occasion. Engraved in brass affixed to a cherry-wood rectangle, it said, “Congratulations to Mark Alan Schaeffer, author of the prize-winning play ‘Reel to Reel©.’ ” It was a sweet and thoughtful thing for them to do, but the thing my mother most wanted credit for was that she’d made sure the copyright symbol was appended to the title.

The first Broadway show I ever saw was “Hello, Dolly!,” which had recently been recast with Pearl Bailey and Cab Calloway in the lead roles.¹ It’s hard to recapture how thrilling it was to experience a fully staged musical for the first time. The sets! The lighting! The costumes! Singing and dancing! A live orchestra! I was totally transported.

Well, almost totally transported. There was something weird about Pearl Bailey’s voice. At first I thought that she was lip-syncing to a recording. She was, in fact, performing live, but she had apparently been fitted out with a primitive wireless microphone hidden in her costume, and her voice seemed to be coming from everywhere but her mouth. Her audio was piped through a set of loudspeakers flanking the proscenium, producing an effect similar to hearing the principal give a speech at a school assembly.

What I had witnessed was the early encroachment of amplification into stage performances. Nowadays, every performer in a Broadway show is miked, and there’s little effort made to hide the headsets and transmitters. Shows have sound designers, and audio technology has improved, so there’s no longer any “Hello, Dolly!”-style artificiality. In fact, I’m sure that most people don’t notice the amplification, or if they do, don’t mind it. Perhaps they even appreciate it, since it makes every performance sound as smooth and balanced as the cast recording they can buy in the lobby.

But something has been lost in the process — the raw immediacy of the live performance. In what sense is the performance “live” if what the audience hears is not the sound coming directly from an actor’s mouth, but instead an artificially mediated facsimile? The actor’s voice is being converted to electric signals, amplified, processed electronically in any number of ways (volume, tone, reverb), mixed with the output of the orchestra and the other actors’ voices, and pumped through speakers that are nowhere near where the actor is. (In fact, one of the sound designer’s jobs is to make the voice appear to be coming directly from the actor’s mouth, even though it isn’t.) Add to that the fact that every note is precisely timed — the orchestra is almost always playing along with a metronome-like recording called a click track — and what you have is a performance that might as well have been prerecorded.

In fact, in some cases it is prerecorded. It took me a while to realize it, but the musicals I’ve seen on cruise ships are performed almost entirely to digital tracks. The only voices that are live are those of the male and female leads. None of the other performers are miked, and the voices we’re hearing are not necessarily those of the people we’re seeing onstage. The fact that none of this was immediately apparent — that the experience of hearing canned performances is pretty much indistinguishable from hearing live ones — is less a compliment to the quality of the recordings than it is a knock on what we’re now willing to settle for when we go to the theater.

I must admit that the introduction of amplification has brought some advantages. For one thing, it has greatly expanded the range of styles that are considered suitable for a musical. Songs no longer have to be belted, Ethel Merman-style, or loaded with vibrato; they can be crooned, or whispered, or rapped. The type of rock-and-roll musical that Andrew Lloyd Weber pioneered with “Jesus Christ Superstar” wouldn’t have been possible without amplification both of voices and instruments. I’d hate to have to sacrifice “Hamilton” on the grounds that it’s technologically impure.

I’ll even grant that amplification has made the experience of the audience more equitable. Very few theaters have perfect acoustics; there are always going to be some seats from which actors’ voices can be heard better than from others. Modern audio technology allows everyone in the theater to hear pretty much the same thing. Not to mention that — as I can tell you from personal experience — having a mic makes the actor’s job much easier. I don’t blame Pearl Bailey for wanting to have that advantage.

Still, I can’t help but lament what’s been lost. There’s something qualitatively different about hearing sound waves that come directly from the vibrations of human vocal cords or a musical instrument. It’s an experience that we rarely have anymore outside of an opera house or a symphony hall.

For the past ten years, I’ve been working to preserve that experience by holding acoustic concerts in my living room. (I’ve had to suspend them since the COVID-19 outbreak, but hope I can bring them back when it’s over.) The concerts are obviously on a much smaller scale than Broadway musicals — the performers are folk musicians, jazz ensembles, ragtime pianists, classical duos and trios, a cappella groups, and the like — but they all have one thing in common: no amplification and no electric instruments. It’s an opportunity to hear music the way it’s meant to be heard.

My wife tells me that I’m the only one who cares about the no-amplification rule — that people come to these concerts because they like the musicians I book, not because they get to hear them unmiked. That’s probably true. But if nothing else, I’m exposing people to the now-revolutionary idea that music doesn’t have to be linked to audio engineering. Sometimes it’s just enough to put musicians and listeners in a room together, and let the sound waves propagate.