Making Records: The Scenes Behind the Music

by Ramone, Phil

  A good cast album preserves the spirit of what the story is about, and what the audience saw in the theater. Since each person leaves the theater with a unique impression, structuring a cast album can be complicated.

  As Hugh Jackman recently said:

  “It’s deceptively hard to do a live version of a show album because the temptation is to make it like a studio recording. What often happens is that the cast recording doesn’t resemble the show. People who buy the CD want to remind themselves of what it felt like to be at the show.”

  The producer’s mind-set has a lot to do with how a cast recording takes shape. Some shows make the shift from stage to studio more seamlessly than others.

  Since I generally approach a cast recording as though it’s a radio broadcast of the show, including a bit of connective dialogue often helps smooth out areas with awkward transitions. Many contemporary musicals, such as those written by Stephen Sondheim, require a great deal of ingenuity to transform into a successful cast recording.

  Sondheim wrote the lyrics to West Side Story (1957) and Gypsy (1959) with Leonard Bernstein and Jule Styne, respectively, but it is shows such as A Little Night Music, Company, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George, and Into the Woods that made him a legend.

  As one who has produced several of Steve’s cast recordings (Passion, 1994; Company, 1995; and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, 1996), I can assure you that the twists and turns he takes with rhyme and meter place great demands on the performer, engineer, and producer. Only Burt Bacharach’s rhythmic complexities compare to Sondheim’s.

  But when Sondheim writes a show, he has a complete understanding of the plot, his music, and the voices and characters before him. Since the choreography and staging of a Sondheim show are as elaborate as the music, bringing his productions to life on a cast album demands ingenuity.

  Passion was a complex show, and we agonized over how to transform its story and music so that the lead character—a tortured, unattractive woman—would be understood without visuals. I consulted with Steve and orchestrator Jonathan Tunick, and we decided that using orchestral sounds to heighten the sense of drama would be most effective.

  A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum posed a different problem.

  I’d always felt that Zero Mostel’s performance on the original cast recording (Capitol Records, 1962) was too aloof for the salacious character he played. I’m sure that the thinking at the time was, “This is a show with a lot of absurd moments, but it won’t play well on record because there aren’t any visuals.”

  Audiences expected more from a cast recording in 1996, and I mentioned my feelings to Stephen Sondheim and Nathan Lane. I explained that I wanted to bring the zaniness and joviality that I saw on stage into the recording studio. “It’s okay to be over-the-top—to be the same character you play on the stage,” I told Nathan. “That’s what the show is about, and that’s what I want on the record.” Sondheim felt the same way, but there were times during the Forum sessions when Nathan thought he was playing it up too much, and Steve and I had to reassure him.

  Because the pace of bringing a show to Broadway is frenetic (music and script changes are made and rehearsed right up until the hour of the first performance), actors in a show have very little time off—especially during the first few weeks of a run.

  Since a cast recording must reflect those last-minute changes, it’s usually made during the first week of the opening. And if the show is a runaway hit, you want the album to be on the shelves as quickly as possible.

  That is why Broadway cast albums are usually recorded in a single day.

  The practice dates to the late 1940s, when producer Goddard Lieberson (then president of Columbia Records) began recording shows like South Pacific and My Fair Lady. Back then, the cast would get a day off to record the entire album, for which they’d receive one week’s salary.

  The limited time allowed for recording can cause considerable pressure and anxiety. It’s easy to fall behind when you’re packing so much work into such a short amount of time, so I map out trouble spots before we begin and parcel our time out carefully.

  I start by seeing the show.

  If I’m scheduled to record a show, I try to watch as many previews as possible. I’ll also try to see the play two or three times after opening night. It might sound excessive, but I’ve got to understand the author, composer, lyricist, and director’s concept of the show before I can determine what portions of it will work for the recording.

  Before I produced the off-Broadway cast recording of Little Shop of Horrors in 1982, I spent almost two months watching the play. At the time, the production was tiny: it was housed in a small theater on Second Avenue, and the pit “orchestra” consisted of only three musicians. During those preview sessions, Howard Ashman, Alan Menken and I sat and made judicious cuts for the recording. Making cuts is always difficult; the cooperation and consent of the writers, producer, and director are essential.

  Since my production coordinator Jill Dell’Abate must painstakingly block out the entire day of recording segment by segment, she often joins me for the prerecording previews. With all of the singers, dancers, and actors involved in a Broadway production, the scheduling of meal breaks and such must occur so as to maximize the use of the talent we’ve got access to from eight in the morning to eleven at night.

  When I record a show, I record the first run-through from start to finish. Then, I do at least two full takes on every number. I’m also a believer in playbacks; the actors should have the opportunity to feel the rhythm and hear the voice. I love getting the cast hyped up about what we’re doing.

  In addition to conceptual and interpretive changes, there are certain technical considerations that accompany the recording of a cast album.

  First, the pit orchestra often needs expansion.

  What sounds pleasing in the theater can sound thin in front of the microphones, and adding two cellos, two violas, and some extra woodwinds gives the recording a much richer sound. I often bring in a spare trumpet player for the long day of recording, too.

  There’s an art to physically arranging the cast in the studio, too.

  Actors are accustomed to using their bodies while singing, and you can’t restrain that. They have to be comfortable and feel as though they’re on the performance stage.

  For this reason, I like to put the whole cast in the back end of the studio so they can have a clear view of the conductor and the band. I’ll put up some screens, but everyone should be able to see the conductor on the podium. If arranging the studio that way is impractical, we’ll set up a video monitor to make him visible to the entire cast.

  It’s also important for me to remind the solo singers that singing into a microphone is much different than projecting their voice in the theater.

  The seminal stage musicals of the 1940s and ’50s (such as Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, Carousel, and South Pacific) contained songs that had simple inner rhythms. The lyrics weren’t crowded together, which helped the actors articulate (and audiences hear) the words more clearly.

  Today the lyrics come fast and furious.

  Contemporary composers and lyricists such as Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Stephen Schwartz (Godspell, Pippin), Jonathan Larson (Rent), Marc Shaiman (Hairspray), Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx (Avenue Q), and Elton John, Tim Rice, and Lee Hall (Aida, Billy Elliot) all write with far greater rhythmical and lyrical complexity than their predecessors. Singers and dancers, therefore, make enunciation and articulation a priority.

  This is when striking a balance is imperative.

  What point would it serve to rein in a dynamic actor like Hugh Jackman?

  When he goes for the big notes, I want him to pull from the bottom of his body to reach them. I give the performer plenty of room to work, and set things technically to deal with the energy being directed at the microphone.

  How does recording a cast album in the digital realm differ from the way we
did it in the 1960s?

  Not all that much. Digital is well suited to recording cast albums, because it gives us more room on the hard drive, and we can make far better edits. But we still record everything in one day.

  As I mentioned, Broadway cast albums are recorded soon after opening night, and the cast has gone through a grueling month to reach that point.

  It may look like they’re fresh, but the truth is, when a show opens, the cast is usually worn out. When they come in to record they frequently have sore throats, colds, and other maladies that they’ve been able to prevent up to opening night.

  It’s frustrating that there isn’t more time allotted to either break up the sessions or permit an actor to come back in for retakes. Why shouldn’t they have a chance to fix small mistakes? A performance of the show is fleeting; the cast recording will stand for all time.

  You’d be surprised at what a little breathing room can do.

  In London, the producer of a cast recording has almost unlimited access to the cast and plenty of time to work. Recording isn’t confined to a single day.

  I recently recorded the London cast of Elton John’s Billy Elliot, and the absence of time constraints made working on it a pleasure.

  The first Broadway cast recording I produced was Promises, Promises in 1968. The show was a musical adaptation of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, starring Jill O’Hara and Jerry Orbach; Burt Bacharach and Hal David wrote the score. The show’s best-known song, “I’ll Never Fall In Love Again,” helped immortalize the production, making it an indelible part of the Broadway firmament.

  Although I won my second Grammy for the cast recording of Promises, Promises, the show has special meaning for me because of my work on its sound production.

  As Burt and Hal discovered, the sound inside of a Broadway theater left much to be desired. After a few acoustically dismal rehearsals, they stopped by A&R with a proposal. “Can you help us give audiences inside of the Shubert Theater the kind of sound they’re accustomed to hearing on a stereophonic record?”

  As I’m sure you realize by now, I’m an inveterate problem solver, and I instantly took Burt and Hal up on their offer.

  To meet the challenge Don Frey, Hank Cattaneo, Jim Scherer, and I set out to do something for the theater that it long deserved: let the music enhance the visuals without overpowering them. “Why not swaddle the audience in sound, the way Walt Disney did with Fantasia?” we asked.

  The goal was ambitious, and achieving it required us to do something that wasn’t ordinarily done with theater acoustics: combine reverberation and direct sound.

  Our approach was practical, rather than theatrical.

  First, we analyzed the acoustics in the Shubert Theater using measuring devices and techniques that had never been used inside of a theater before. The process we used was called Acousti-Voicing.

  The testing involved placing a microphone sixteenth row-center, where it picked up high and low frequency noise emitted by the test speakers. The sonic information captured by the microphone allowed us to chart the precise frequency response at each point in the room.

  Then, we designed a system that relied on speaker placement to create the illusion that sound was coming at you (the audience member) from the stage. The system incorporated a set of graphic equalizers, twenty-four amplifiers, one hundred and eighty microphones, eighteen Altec speakers, a custom built Langevin broadcast board, and an EMT reverb plate.

  A sound engineer manned the mixing board in the rear of the theater; he controlled the reverb and equalization, and fed the audio signal to the speakers scattered throughout the theater.

  I designed a customized acoustic orchestra pit with a ceiling and sound baffles between sections of the orchestra—and added a vocal group in the pit. This was the first of its kind.

  Any acoustician looking at the system we devised for Promises, Promises would have been perplexed, because the equipment employed wasn’t designed for what we were doing. The techniques may have been radical for Broadway, but they worked. Soon, sound designers and audio technicians from the surrounding theaters came in, and when they heard how the system sounded, began adopting our methods in their own venues.

  With ticket prices exceeding a hundred bucks apiece, theater patrons now demand that the sound they hear in the theater equals or bests the quality of the story, songs, and acting.

  Today, theater soundboards rival those found in the studio, and each actor—as well as every instrument in the pit—has their own microphone. Where we once hid wired condenser microphones inside of sets and props, wireless mikes are now integrated into the actors’ costumes, hair, and makeup, and are virtually invisible.

  While sound historically took a back seat to the visuals in a stage production, sound design has become an integral part of the Broadway experience.

  None of what we accomplished with Promises, Promises would have worked without the faith that David Merrick, Burt Bacharach, and Hal David had in us. I enjoyed the break that designing multimedia productions and theater sound gave me, and the opportunities it provided for me to prove my theory that no obstacle was too big to overcome.

  With Liza Minnelli Phil Ramone Collection

  TRACK 22

  The Broadcast

  I’m not ashamed to say that television has been my greatest teacher.

  In the mid-1950s, I entered and won on Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour—the American Idol of its day—and became a frequent guest on Family Hour, Mack’s Sunday night television program. Back then I was billed as “Phil Ramone—the Velvet Tone.”

  Being involved with Ted Mack and his traveling show was invaluable for a kid like me. The old vaudevillians had learned all sorts of tricks, which they generously passed along.

  “When you leave the stage, keep one foot outside the curtain so the audience knows that if they applaud enough you’ll come back for an encore,” they would say. Or, “You’re stepping out of the spotlight when you deliver your punch line—don’t do that!”

  Whenever I produce a stage or television show, I still tell the performers, “Look directly at the audience, and don’t forget the balcony. The camera will love it.”

  Sound has historically been given the short shrift on television productions. Twenty or thirty years ago the thinking was, “It’s coming from a tiny monophonic speaker. How good does it have to be?”

  Those days are over.

  Home theater setups with big screens and surround sound have become the focal point of home entertainment, and people want high-quality music programming. Whether they’re watching a sitcom, variety show, music special, or feature film, today’s viewers have high expectations for the audio that accompanies the visual part of a program.

  I never took the low road when it came to audio for video. Every television show to which I contributed became a new opportunity to elevate the quality of the sound.

  Few artists appreciated my efforts more than Liza Minnelli.

  Liza and I met in 1972, when she was preparing to do Liza with a “Z”—a legendary television special in which choreographer Bob Fosse had Liza sing and dance live. The show was filmed on 16mm film before an invited audience at Broadway’s Lyceum Theater, but it was performed from start to finish with no breaks or editing.

  I came into the production because some of Liza’s dancing was strenuous, and Fosse wanted to prerecord several of the songs. He didn’t want it to seem as though she were struggling to sing and dance at the same time, but he was adamant about not wanting it to appear that Liza was lip-synching, either.

  I saw immediately how instinctive a performer Liza was, and it gave me an idea. Why not prerecord the songs, and use a combination of the prerecordings and Liza singing live? There were physically demanding moments—when Liza was dancing—where prerecording her vocals would be helpful. But when she wasn’t dancing, she could sing live with ease. The difficulty in executing the plan was in finding a microphone that could be secreted inside Liza’s provocative dress.

/>   As Liza recalls, the weeks leading up to the filming were full of anxiety:

  “Halston designed my costumes, and we weren’t sure that the standards and practices people would allow them to be seen on television. We rehearsed for seven or eight weeks, and Bob Fosse insisted on filming it live. He also insisted that no one—not NBC, or Singer [our sponsor]—would see anything before the night of the performance.

  “Somehow, on the day of the show, a lady from the network censorship department got into the theater and saw the Cabaret sequence. ‘Stop!’ the censor lady said. ‘You can’t wear those costumes—you’re practically naked.’

  “My dress was cut rather low, and there wasn’t a bra within fifty miles. Bob Fosse and Fred Ebb took her into an office, and when they returned I said, ‘Is it all right for me to wear these costumes?’ ‘Yes—the censorship lady said it’s fashion.’

  “It was Phil’s idea to use a wireless radio mike, but it required a cable and a transmitter to work. But the microphone, cable, and transmitter box all had to be hidden inside that skimpy red dress! Phil somehow figured out how to use a small transmitter, and how to run the wire up through my stockings and into the transmitter, which was in the small of my back. I kept it on through the whole show, but it was only turned on for the first dance set.”

  Bob Fosse was skeptical when I explained my plan to combine lip-synching with live performances. “Liza and I will practice,” I said, “and then we’ll run through the number with you. If you can tell the difference between when she’s singing live and when I’m covering her with the prerecording, I’ll agree that she should lip-synch the entire show.”

  We prerecorded the numbers, and I placed a microphone inside the chest of Liza’s costume. She and I rehearsed so that when she was coasting she’d sing live, and when she was dancing full out I could fade up the prerecorded vocal track so she could lip-synch. I said, “When it comes to a part where you’re singing live, slam the mike on your chest with your hand so it bangs—that way people will know it’s live.”