Musical Theatre

Music lies at the very heart of musical theatre yet it is also the area where productions can suffer most, owing to its challenging nature and demands on performers and creative team alike. In some shape or form, everyone involved in a production of a musical encounters the music - whether that be as an instrumentalist in the pit, a choreographer setting a dance, a director blocking a scene, or a technician operating the microphones - and many of these people will have had no formal musical training. Numeous musical challenges present themselves to a production company. How do you pare down a band, for instance, to suit your budget and venue size? How do you work with singers who cannot read music? How do you go about most effectively choregraphing a musically sensitive dance break? How do you balance a stronger voice with a lighter one on a sound system? How do you warm up a large cast with a variety of ages and voices? And how do you keep a score fresh when you may be performing it every day for six months? The Musical Director is pivotally placed at the centre of the musical, guiding the talents of performers and creative team in the rehearsal room, and musicians in the pit, to create a unified and thrilling experience for the audience. In this book, Mark Warman, one of the UK's foremost Musical Directors, imparts his immense knowledge and experience of working on highly successful productions to guide every performer through the musical aspects of a show. He will combine his own voice with others from the professional world of musical theatre to create an authoratative and entertaining account of how best to serve the music in musicals.