Behind the Scenes and Screens of a Broadway Conductor
John Yun is the Musical Director for Maybe Happy Ending on Broadway.
A key staple of going to a Broadway show is acknowledging the tuxedo-clad figure at the helm of the stage, waving fervently to signal a crescendo, a ritardando, or a rest. The presence of the conductor reminds us that the instruments we hear in musicals are, well, live, and not pre-recorded karaoke tracks. Acclaimed Broadway conductor Kimberly Grigsby describes the live orchestra as “its own character,” as important as any character that you see on stage. “It is giving you information of landscape. It’s giving you information of time. It’s giving you information of emotion,” she says. “You have acoustic information that is in the same space as the audience.”
As sound mixing technology has evolved, set pieces have become more complicated, and the demand for more seating has increased tenfold; the appearance of the pit looks a lot different than the large sweeping 40-piece orchestras of the 1940s. So does the role of the conductor. At the Belasco Theater, John Yun not only plays the sole keyboard book but also conducts ten musicians in separate rooms at various levels of the theater from four screens on his piano (one for the stage, two for the other pit members, and one to look at himself).
The Maybe Happy Ending orchestra is divided into “sky pit” and “earth pit” and plays the entire show from three tiny dressing rooms. “Sky pit” is on the fourth floor, level with the top of the stage where the lights hang, and houses Yun at the keyboard behind a soundproofed wall, along with John Bailey on trumpet, Rick Heckman on woodwinds, and Julie Dombroski-Jones on trombone. Across the hall on the same floor is Joshua Mark Samuels on percussion in his own room with his own conductor camera and screen. “Earth pit” on the first floor, level with the stage, holds the string section, consisting of violinists Cenovia Cummins and Rachel Handman Robinson, Orlando Wells on viola, Jessica Wang on the cello, and Conrad Korsch on bass. The string room contains 12 to 13 microphones, so sensitive that even a cough would reverberate throughout the whole theater. Each musician hears the others through an ear monitor and follows Yun on iPhone-sized cameras on their music stands, culminating in the ultimate Broadway Zoom meeting.
Conducting in this manner is no easy feat. “The biggest challenge is that it’s one camera feed for all ten musicians and for all four cast members on stage,” says Yun. “In a traditional orchestra pit, if I needed to get your attention, I would just give you my torso. So if I turn my chest to the left, my body language suggests I need you for this moment. When I’m looking straight into the camera, no one knows if it’s for them or if it’s for the next person because it’s all one frame.”
His job becomes more complicated with the added responsibility of being the only keyboard player on a rather tricky book that he claims should have been split between two players. In his one position, he juggles firing QLab (metronome information) with his left foot, playing the score, firing his own piano patch programs (synthesized sounds/underscoring) with his right foot, and counting the orchestra all at the same time. “Any one of those events by itself is not difficult, but it’s the combination and sequence of them happening all at once that makes it difficult,” he says.
This version of conducting has its pros and cons. When you play and conduct at the same time, you have the opportunity to play your way out of trouble. “If someone misses a cue and jumps a couple bars, I can jump with them instantaneously,” he says. “I can keep playing with them and jump on my talk-back microphone and count the orchestra into whatever measure we’re in.” But in his configuration, he lacks proximity to the stage to verbally control any slip-ups from the actors. He recalls a production of West Side Story he conducted in a traditional manner, where the actor playing Riff started one beat early at the top of “Tonight Quintet”. “I can’t make the whole orchestra jump one beat, so in that instance, I can immediately just start shouting where he’s supposed to be, and then he jumped back to it, because we can’t move.”
After a year and four months with the same ten players, all of whom have stayed with the show, the spatial separation and tricky cues become second nature. However, certain moments in the score become harder to correct in real time when there are subs. During the “Touch Sequence,” when Oliver and Claire share an intimate “first touch” choreography, the music is deliberately ambiguous, with the piano playing consistent eighth notes and none of the other instruments entering on the downbeat. “If you come in and you get lost, there’s not really a way to get back on because there are no goal posts.” If one entrance is off, all of the other entrances will be off, and in turn, the kiss, a major plot point in the show, will be off. It is a particularly stressful moment in the show that he has had to fix in real time.
But he wouldn’t trade the difficulty of his book for what they can achieve on stage in this configuration, and he commiserates with his talented sub-conductors over the adversity it entails. Productions move the orchestra out of the pit for various reasons, often because producers try to create more seats to sell tickets. Other productions will make artistic choices, such as moving musicians onstage. For Maybe Happy Ending, it was both the challenge of creating the space for their high-tech set and creating the emotional “Fireflies” moment, in which “earth pit” has a quick change into orchestra blacks and gets on a hydraulic lift, equipped with a second set of instruments, for this pinnacle moment on stage.
However stressful 100 minutes of Zoom orchestra might be, Yun’s chill attitude keeps the morale high. “He really leads through excellent playing and excellent direction,” says trombonist Julie Dombroski-Jones. “He’s also a really relaxed person and I think it creates a great dynamic in the orchestra.” Bassist Conrad Korsch describes him as very kind, fair, a great listener, and un-anxious. “He doesn’t get flustered,” says Korsch. “I’ve seen people with a lot more experience who get flustered very easily.” As a leader, the conductor not only literally keeps everyone on the beat but also regulates the emotional rhythm of the orchestra. At the top of every show, when Nat King Cole’s “L-O-V-E” starts playing, after they get through the second chorus, Yun holds up a sign into the conductor cam and exclaims “sky pit!” and the members on the fourth floor will yell “sky pit!” in response. He then does the same with “earth pit.”
When asked what they hoped the audience knew about working in a Broadway pit, the Maybe Happy Ending orchestra members wished that the audience knew that all the music is live every night, even if they cannot see the players. Watching and feeling a live orchestra is akin to seeing a tight-rope walker; there is an acute awareness of the “live” nature of the thing, that anything could happen at any moment. Yun expresses a different sentiment. “I don’t know if I need the audience to know what the job is,” he says. “I feel like if I’m doing my job correctly, they don’t need to know I’m there. I’m not at the center of the performance.”
