Okay, the title is absurd. People like Aaron Copland,
Julian Bream, and Lalo Schiffrin write things called My Life In Music. People who have had utterly no impact on the
world of music do not—or at least should not.
Still, here I am. Even an unknown
wannabe can be in love with music for a lifetime. For what it’s worth, this is part of mine.
Through the years, I’ve been fortunate to play in pit
orchestras for a number of community theater presentations, including Guys and Dolls, Applause, and several others, and also for quite a few locally-produced revues.
Of the latter, my perverse favorite was a slap-dash
assemblage of songs and blather far out in the Chicago suburbs, with a band
consisting of piano, bass, drums, trumpet, and clarinet. The producers provided no music. They’d tell us the name of the song, and we’d
work out the key with the performer, and then find a fake book with a lead sheet
for any unfamiliar songs. Though my clarinet was not miked, I was often asked to play more softly.
This revue was probably the most morally objectionable
musical project I’ve ever been involved in, including several for which I wrote,
produced, directed, emceed, and/or performed. Its premise was that a priest was trying to
raise funds for repairs to his Catholic church.
He’d ask assorted town-folk for donations, and they'd all turn him
down—musically. My favorite was a rabbi who declined by singing “If I Were a Rich Man.”
Classy. A black guy sang “Old Man
River”—not that that had anything to do with the plot, but. . .you know, what else would a black guy sing? Ultimately, the church was saved
by funding from a mafia don. So every
base was covered. Far and away the best
part of the show was that, throughout the opening night performance, the obnoxious
writer-producer-director-lead actor’s fly was obviously unzipped.
I would gladly pay to be in another pit orchestra for Guys and Dolls, one of the greatest
musicals ever. I was in the band for a production
in the Davis community theater in California, and the actor-singers were just
incredibly talented. We players in the
reed section would take turns sitting out musical numbers so we could turn
around and watch the actors on stage.
Applause is
another matter. It really has only one
good song, and everything sung by the lead was composed with Lauren Bacall in
mind. She’s an attractive actor, of
course, but she apparently had a vocal range of about three tones. So while she essentially spoke her “music,”
the orchestra did backflips going rapidly in and out of a hundred keys per
song, each generally in 5 sharps or 6 flats, so it would sound like she was “singing.”
When I was a senior in high school, I appeared as an
on-stage musician in an Arcadia Community Theater production of Jean Anouilh’s Thieves’ Carnival, which the handbill
called “a callithump in one act.” It was
directed by young guy named Stan Cornyn—and I believe this was the same Stan
Cornyn who went on to became a Grammy-winning recording industry executive. A graduate of Monrovia High School (near
Arcadia), he was then working on a masters degree in theater at UCLA. It was a very innovative production, and
Cornyn would get the actors into the mood by playing records by Anita O’Day,
and once showed a Charlie Chaplin short.
During breaks, the veteran actors (probably in their 20s or 30s) taught
me how to play blackjack, or 21 (which they called “casino”).
My role in this play (performed in the round) was to
appear onstage in white shoes, white duck trousers, frilly shirt,
ice-cream-vendor-style coat with vertical stripes, bright bow tie, and a boater or straw
hat. My cheeks were highly rouged. I stood around on stage or sat on a high
stool and tootled on clarinet from time to time. Cornyn had me devise theme music for each of the main
actors, and I’d play the appropriate ditty as each character entered or left
the stage. I was also directed to
provide wry musical comments on the action or on characters’ remarks. Yes, I was cast because of my ability to play the clarinet sarcastically. Ahem.
Toward the end of Thieves’
Carnival, I’d go off-stage and change into an Edwardian suit, bowler hat or
derby, and obvious fake beard. When I
re-entered, the central character would accuse me of being a fraud and pulled on the
beard to prove it. The false whiskers
were drawn away from my face, but quickly flew back into place because of the elastic
bands that held it on. This obviously
fraudulent “proof” of authenticity was meekly accepted as convincing by all of the astonished characters. I resist comparisons to present-day political
races.
But the on-stage performance that lives brightest in my
memory was in a production at the San Gabriel Civic Auditorium (then called the
Mission Playhouse, I think), a very large venue right across the street from
the old San Gabriel mission. This production,
aimed at an audience of kids, was called Woodland
Fantasy, and was loosely modeled on Peter
and the Wolf. It was written (music,
words, and book) by the mother of an Arcadia High School classmate, who
recruited us. Alas, this play seems not to have outlived its
initial production, and now survives only in my vivid but sometimes unreliable
memory.
My memory is this.
In the play, some kids are lost in a forest. As they stumble about, they encounter a
number of animals who are at first frightening but turn out to be friendly and helpful. Each animal
plays a different music instrument.
For example, my friend Bob Winn, a gifted oboist, played
a wise owl. Dressed (I seem to recall)
in some sort of feathered coat with a feathery hat, and wearing over-sized,
round-lens horn-rimmed spectacles, he’d speak a few lines and then play a song
on his oboe to the delighted kids on stage (and possibly to the hundreds of
kids whose parents had brought them to the auditorium).
I, however, played a clarinet-wielding squirrel, and I
had an actual costume that the show’s producer had made up. In other words, and there seems to be no
other way to put it, I was dressed in a squirrel suit. Small openings permitted access of my mouth
and hands to the musical instrument.
The squirrel suit was made of an unattractive, ratty
brown, but very sturdy fabric. From my
perspective, however, that was not its most salient feature. Rather, it had been designed and stitched
together with a much shorter actor/clarinetist in mind. So getting into it was very difficult. Even so, if I crouched over while garbed in this
costume, things went tolerably well, and I could totter about the stage and
even speak my lines if I tilted my head to one side. But when I stood up straight in order to play
clarinet, the unforgiving suit exerted considerable pressure on what must be
referred to as my crotch. Not really my
crotch, exactly, but. . .you know. Thus,
besides producing tones on the clarinet, in front of several hundred young
spectators I would simultaneous produce eerie yowls of pain. Three agonizing performances, as I recall.
As I have said countless times, a life in music is no bed
of roses.
The interior of the old San Gabriel Civic Auditorium
(not pictured: the slouching squirrel)
