The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940
by John Bishop

Directed by James H Slusser and presented by the Bloomsburg University Alumni Players. Running dates were 7/27, 7/28, 8/3, 8/4 and 7/29, 8/5
Gross Auditorium in Carver Hall, Bloomsburg University

Secret passages, sloshy songwriters and scary slashers. What fun! It was interesting to explore the music of the late 1930s and early 1940s. I was struck by the variety and optimism, despite the turbulence of the time. Makes one reflect on the common purpose that seemed to exist then, but which is seriously lacking today.

When I first read the script, the biggest challenge appeared to be writing music for two short 1940’s-style musical theatre songs. John Bishop (the playright) had supplied lyrics, but the music was open for interpretation.

Mark Lehnowsky, the actor who would play the composer, (named Roger), would need to either play the piano or convincingly mime the part as several other actors sang live. After a brief phone call about some ideas, Mark and I met for dinner one night to talk about our approach. Mark already had the seed for one idea in mind, which was good because I had only begun acquiring CDs of Jerome Kern and Sigmund Romberg music, and some other composers of the era. Unfortunately my Amazon order was delayed and it took longer for me to get into the musical style. Most of my work is guitar-centric, and my keyboard playing is not up to par for your typical musical.

Luckily, Mark is a talented composer with experience using Sibelius notation software. The first song, “White House Merry Go Round” came rather quickly, while the second took some time. With scores and MIDI files exported from Sibelius we were able to supply PDF copies to the singers and a reference track for rehearsals. On some days Mark just used the laptop until the final touches were done. But we were still left with a problem: Mark had written pieces that were beyond his own piano playing ability.

Our original plan was to record the stage piano with a real piano player to get a human feel, and then use that signal for Mark to mime to for the performance. That plan fell through when our piano player ran out of time to prepare the parts. Two backup pianists also fell through. So instead, we worked with the Triton and Sonar to set the quantization, reverb and piano sound to something passable. In the end I was fairly pleased with the result, but the lacking directionality that was possible on stage still gave us away. We had hoped to have an on-stage speaker, but that too fell through due to lack of time on the set designer’s part.

One of my favorite lines from the play is when Roger says, “I do not steal from Jerome Kern!” In fact, Mark did pull a lick from a Kern song for “Everyone Can Do It Better” as a tribute. For now I am holding off on posting the songs here until I get permission from Mark, as he may wish to offer these for another production. If anyone is interested, I can put you in touch with him.

Radio
Rather than record a clean signal with lots of compression like you would hear on modern radio, the radio announcer voice (me) was made by running a cheap dynamic mike through some analog effects and a tube amp to get a degraded signal. EQ was applied and the signal was combined with some additional static effects. Tuning dial sounds were added as needed. For one of the passages where I needed background radio, I found an old time commercial from the web that was public domain and mixed that in. Multi-track mixing on the PC was done in Acid, simply because it is so easy to use.

During early rehearsals I was asked to provide squeaks for the secret passages. I found some decent patches on the Triton and used those until we got a set with a real creaking door. Jim said he wanted the squeaks for the production, but in the end I didn’t use them because they were too corny. The other problem was that timing them with the stagehands (who often changed from night to night) would have been too crazy for the amount for impact they would give.

Misc.
Other sounds were your typical dog barks, wind and basic stuff that I have plenty of options for and can obtain easily. 8/7/07