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[0:01] Lauren Van Hemert: Welcome to Beltline to Broadway!

[0:07] Lauren Van Hemert: Oh my, let's get through about tough times.

[0:11] Lauren Van Hemert: Broadway, hooray!

[0:14] Lauren Van Hemert: Let's all tune in to Beltline to Broadway.

[0:19] Lauren Van Hemert: What do you say?

[0:22] Lauren Van Hemert: You could binge any day, listening to Beltline to Broadway.

[0:37] Lauren Van Hemert: How can you not smile when you hear that opening?

[0:41] Lauren Van Hemert: Hi everyone, I'm Lauren Van Hemert. This is the Beltline to Broadway podcast, and that new intro is written and performed by Huck Borden.

[0:54] Lauren Van Hemert: Huck has been featured in so many triangle productions, including the North Carolina Theater production of Newsies, Cape Fear Regional Theater's production of Shrek, and Theatre Raleigh's The Adventure of Peter Rabbit and His Friends. He's planning on attending the Berkeley School of Music in Boston this summer to study piano and is raising money by writing songs. If you would like to help or follow Huck's journey, follow him on Instagram at Huck underscore Borden.

[1:33] Lauren Van Hemert: From one piano man to another, on this episode, I'm talking to David Loud, whose memoir Facing the Music was released by Simon and Schuster last month. Loud is recognized as one of the most respected music directors and arrangers on Broadway, having worked on the original Broadway productions of Ragtime, Curtains, The Scottsboro Boys, and Steel Pier. He also originated three Broadway roles as an actor, including appearing in the original cast of Stephen Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along. Interestingly enough, Loud tells me it was the autobiography of another Merrily We Roll Along creator that lit a fire inside him and changed his life. And that is where our conversation begins.

[2:31] David Loud: Well, Act One is of course the autobiography of Mozart, the playwright and director and man of the theater that he was. And he wrote it in such a way that you feel that you are there on every page.

[2:59] David Loud: You know, how hard it is and how terrible rejection is and failure is in the theater. It's a complete look at what professional theater was like at that time, and done in a way that makes you just want to be there at every little moment that he is remembering. I found it overwhelming when I read it, and I had to read it again right away. There was so much of it. And that's what I wanted to do for the rest of my life after reading that book. I said, I have to be in New York doing theater. And I never wavered from that.

[3:34] Lauren Van Hemert: It's so interesting to me because when you describe his book, I think of your book, because I have never wanted to be in a pit more than reading your book. To be in the Broadway orchestra pit is literally the best place in the world to be on the podium conducting a Broadway show. You've got the actors in front of you and the musicians below you and the audience behind you, and you are at the center of this organism that exists to sell a story. Literally the beating heart of the musical. And it's a very privileged place to be, and I loved my time on the podium. I spent 34 years music directing Broadway shows, and every one of them was precious. It was a glorious way to make a living, you know, to be the center of all that focus and concentration and energy, and sometimes the thrill of making music would just overwhelm me.

[4:33] Lauren Van Hemert: For you, I feel like your gateway into musical theater was these original Broadway cast recordings. Do you still have an extensive vinyl collection?

[4:47] David Loud: No, I have to say I've turned my trust over to the libraries in that department. I don't have a big collection of vinyl. I do have a huge collection of CDs, and less and less places to play them, of course. I think it's a very common story. People who were sort of got the bug by listening to their parents' recordings of South Pacific and My Fair Lady and West Side Story and Gypsy, middle-class families had cast albums in the 60s and in the 70s, and maybe a little less in the 80s, and rarely in the 90s, and probably not much anymore. But there was a time when people my age were growing up when it was very common to have a few cast albums lying around the living room, and I would listen to them over and over. And I was one of the ones that got infected with that need for that music. It's still my favorite thing in the world to do is to hear one of those Broadway cast albums from the Golden Age.

[5:49] Lauren Van Hemert: The Golden Age. Do you have a favorite cast album?

[5:54] David Loud: I don't. It's usually whatever project I'm working on at the moment. I have many that I treasure. I mean, I think of my album of Sweeney Todd, A Little Night Music, my recording of She Loves Me, My Fair Lady, the original Broadway, not the London that came out three years later when they were all exhausted. The genius of A Little Night Music, I feel like is overlooked sometimes.

[6:20] Lauren Van Hemert: I agree. It also happens to have one of the better scripts that a musical has ever had. Just so sophisticated and funny and sarcastic, and that play is so rich in the way that it looks at love and sex and where love and sex meet or don't meet. And you know, he had sort of warmed up for it with two more complicated, sort of negative looks at marriage in Company, and then sort of these decaying marriages and follies that had been wrong for so long. And then in Night Music, he's dealing very specifically with this sort of sexual innuendo and words meaning two or three things at the same time, and nobody quite sure where they stand in these relationships. It's fascinating to see him writing about the problems of love in so many different ways.

[7:15] Lauren Van Hemert: Your first Broadway show was Merrily We Roll Along. And you liken that to being in the room with Alvin Ailey and a master class. Describe that experience of working with these two geniuses.

[7:32] David Loud: Well, it was a complete dream come true. I came into Merrily We Roll Along already a huge fan of theirs. I had discovered Sondheim's shows through the albums. I'd seen Sweeney Todd on Broadway, which was again life-changing for me. So I knew who was in the room that I was in as we started. It wasn't wasted on me that this was an opportunity to work with Sondheim and Prince. I just listened. I hid in rooms where I wasn't supposed to be so that I could hear what was going on. I would sit in the back of the theater during tech and just watch what everybody was doing. I needed to learn. And I took that opportunity, sort of to be my graduate degree in musical theater, my how to fix a troubled show.

[8:20] Lauren Van Hemert: You know, I think so often as artists, we're so fixated on the finished product and we overlook process. What did working with them on that show teach you about the process of creating art?

[8:38] David Loud: Well, that's a very complicated question. Merrily was a mess. It was ambitious and had a difficult structure. It kept going backwards. And at the end of every scene, you kind of want to know what happens next, but instead you found out what happened before. And I don't think anybody has ever really solved that problem. I've always thought if you could write a scene that required that you know immediately know what happened before, then it would make sense, but that's not really the way theater works. But to see how Prince and George Firth and Stephen Sondheim wrestling with this problem, and literally day after day after day, they would bring in a new scene, a new lyric, a new this. We can restage this this way, it'll be much clearer.

This will be funnier if we do this, we can cut this. Thorny of a patch to be working in, they worked harder and they worked better, and just to watch them, I mean, these giants of the industry struggling with this material, and for the most part succeeding. I mean, the show got so much better during the five weeks of previews that we had because they worked so hard.

[10:08] David Loud: We never did the same show twice. There were always changes in every performance, and that was a whole chaotic nightmare. I mean, because the things that would go wrong in that show were spectacular. You never knew which scenery was supposed to come on from where because it had been changed that afternoon, and you could get hurt very easily if you were looking the wrong way, and Merrily We Roll Along. But to watch them grapple with it was so stimulating. And I would go home and I'd think, well, what would I do? How would I fix this scene? And I'd come up with an idea, and then I'd come in the next morning and hear Stephen Sondheim's solution to it, you know, which was usually much better than mine.

So that was thrilling. And the fact that they ultimately kind of failed, I mean, that was in my long perspective looking back, that was a great lesson to learn as well. That the giants could fail, and the theater is really hard, and every show you have to start from scratch. There's no formula, there's no magic potion that makes the next musical easier. You have to grapple with it all once again. And I've found in my years since working on Merrily that the shows start telling you what they want to be when they get in front of an audience, and all of a sudden there's a mechanism that begins with the overture and starts telling the story, and the audience either falls in love with the characters or they don't. They either identify with the problems or they don't. They understand the story or they don't, and it becomes the show that tells you how it has to be told.

And Merrily didn't give up its secrets very easily; it was a hard one. And they've never stopped rewriting it. I mean, Steve was rewriting it till I think months before he died. I think it's just gonna be one of those shows that people will always think they can fix.

[12:21] Lauren Van Hemert: Well, speaking of that, the revival was announced. There's gonna be a big revival with Daniel Radcliffe. Do you think that this is a show that can be fixed or that was ahead of its time in some ways?

[12:38] David Loud: Well, the score is gorgeous and smart and funny and interesting and complicated in the way it develops, sort of backwards, as he writes preprises instead of reprises. You know, the whole going backwards thing is so complicated. And musically, sometimes it just embraced that. But the set didn't embrace it, and the clothes didn't embrace it. And the production didn't quite know what to do with all that. I've never seen Merrily work. I've been to many productions of it. I've seen it almost work, and I've seen it be better and sometimes not so good. When we did the 21st-year cast reunion concert for various complicated reasons, we did it more as a song cycle. We just did the songs and we didn't do the script.

And you know what? It was fantastic. And it was the first time that we, the original cast, had ever played it to an audience that enjoyed it. Because they really didn't like it when we did it in 1981. I mean, I've never seen an audience turn on a show like they did. But 21 years later, when we just did the score, it worked.

[13:53] David Loud: You worked with Kander and Ebb. You talk about the two of them coming to a sing-through of And the World Goes Round and sharing with the actors the insights of what they were feeling, their intention when writing those songs. Can you share any of those stories?

[14:13] David Loud: With Kander and Ebb, it was always the little details, you know. Fred would want a word pronounced a certain way. Like in "Ring Them Bells," he was always very concerned about the phrase "the Tony Cognoscenti," meaning the high-class people in the know, the Tony Cognoscenti. Little things like that were important to him that they be understood a certain way. John is really a poet, and I mean he's a brilliant composer, but he also is a poet the way he talks about language. And he would point out things about Fred's lyrics and how he had set the words in certain ways that really help the actors sing them. Like the structure of the song "A Quiet Thing" is unique, and it has rhymes that are sort of what I call long-term rhymes, rhymes that you're not as aware of as you go through the lyric as you might be, but they add up in the end to a song that feels very finished.

I can never do this off the top of my head, but it's when it all comes true, just the way you planned. You think you'd hear a choir sing. It's a quiet thing. When you hold the world in your trembling hand, and now you've got this hand that rhymed with planned at the beginning. And that's a sort of a long-term rhyme that your ear doesn't necessarily pick up as a simple rhyme, but it's there. It goes through the bridge. There are no exploding fireworks. Where's the roaring of the crowds? Maybe it's the strange new atmosphere. Why appear among the clouds? For I don't feel, I don't hear the drums, I don't hear the band. That's the third one: band, hand, and plan that ring not in the obvious places for rhymes to be.

And once an actor understands that, they can, you know, subtly bring that structure into their interpretation, and the song is much better. Those are some examples of technical little tidbits that they gave to us.

[16:25] David Loud: There were also things like, I mean, the title song in And the World Goes Round can be read many different ways. And you can sing it as a song that is meant to cheer somebody up, or you can sing it as a song that anguishes in the way the world has just treated you. I mean, there's really many ways you can tip it. And Fred was really great about not letting the actors play the victim. It's always saying, find the positive choices. Where are the moments that you are not going to be defeated? Because they write about the underdog, Kander and Ebb. They write about the person from the wrong side of the tracks who wants to get to the right side of the tracks. And that struggle, you know, the audience is just primed to fall in love with a person like that.

[17:20] Lauren Van Hemert: I love this. I feel like I'm in the room with them through you.

[17:25] David Loud: Well, you are, you know, in effect, I mean, theater is an oral tradition. You know, we learn and we pass on to others in the room. Working as a music director with Stephen Sondheim, which I did, and working as the music director for John Kander are very, very different experiences. Stephen Sondheim labors over every single note that he writes. And you, as the music director, my job becomes to ensure that what he wrote appears in the show exactly the way he wrote it. Because it's going to be, you know, interpreted by actors, it's going to be orchestrated by an orchestrator. But I want to hear, and he wants to hear exactly what he wrote. And John Kander is just a different kind of composer. He'll write a vamp and he'll write a melody, and then he'll collaborate with the music director, the choreographer.

Let's figure out how this song is gonna go. We're gonna do two courses, maybe then modulate, and we'll do another bit of it here. Wouldn't it be great if we had the bridge again here? Fred, I think we're gonna need more lyrics. It becomes a group experience.

[18:31] Lauren Van Hemert: Is there a sound to musical theater? Particularly contemporary musical theater that is definitive?

[18:41] David Loud: Well, musical theater has become many things in the, you know, when we say contemporary musical theater, that can mean Hamilton, which is brand new and found a new medium to tell a story in such a creative, you know, thrilling way. It can mean a show like Dear Evan Hansen, which has, you know, pop ballad after pop ballad after pop ballad, but manages to have the sort of contemporary, neither here nor there quality about a lot of its material. But also, you know, a show like Ragtime was written, you know, so recently, and that's a contemporary musical that is using music in the tradition of Broadway a long time ago. You know, it recalls actual ragtime music from 1910 and uses a vernacular that is more like Carousel and My Fair Lady and, you know, the great musicals of the Golden Age.

So musicals I think are very many things right now, and that's frustrating for people because they don't quite know what they're gonna get, maybe when they go to a Broadway show these days. They call the theater the fabulous invalid because it's always dying. It's always the end of the road, you know. And then something wonderful comes along.

[20:14] David Loud: And you know, before Hamilton, there was a couple of years where there weren't many great musicals. And then all of a sudden there was Hamilton, and that was a new way for somebody to tell a story that none of us had seen before, and was so thrilling on every level. You know, the staging was imaginative and the use of the rap, you know, which you think as you go into the show to judge it, you think, well, this is gonna be terrible. And literally about 20 seconds in, you realize, oh, this is gonna be fantastic. And it's so great to be wrong about something like that. I love that. I love being shown that my judgy attitude was wrong.

[20:58] Lauren Van Hemert: You were diagnosed with Parkinson's.

[21:01] David Loud: I'm dealing with that in my own family right now.

[21:05] Lauren Van Hemert: Oh, I'm so sorry to hear that. And it feels like such a, you know, you get that diagnosis, it feels like this game over moment. Talk about what Parkinson's has taught you about overcoming obstacles.

[21:23] David Loud: Well, you can't overcome Parkinson's right now. There's no cure for it, and it's a progressive disease. It's gonna get worse and worse as it goes along. When I was diagnosed in 2007, my job was a very physical job that required my whole body to do the job. I was a Broadway conductor, you know, standing on that podium, wired into all these people, and Parkinson's was exactly the right disease to destroy my career. It affected me physically. I'm slower, it's hard for me to move sometimes. I'm not as coordinated as I was. I don't have the power to do eight shows a week of a Broadway show. And that was devastating to me. And of course, my first reaction when I was diagnosed was that nobody must know about this.

Because I thought, well, I wouldn't hire me to do a Broadway show because I know it might be a disaster. So I didn't tell anybody, and I just pretended that everything was fine, which was ridiculous because everybody could tell that nothing was fine. And after a couple of years of that ridiculous behavior, I started to tell people, and everybody was so relieved. They were like, oh, thank God we can talk about it. And nobody abandoned me and nobody said, don't work with me anymore. They found different ways for me to work, and we figured out different ways for me to work. You know, I would supervise a show instead of conduct it eight times a week. I focused more on arranging, you know, rather than the hard physical work of music directing.

And eventually, you know, I decided that I wasn't gonna conduct anymore. But that was a decision that I was able to make almost independently of my Parkinson's. A wonderful opportunity came up at Manhattan School of Music, and I've been teaching there for the last five and a half years and couldn't be happier.

[23:31] Lauren Van Hemert: Does it make you a more compassionate artist, more compassionate musician?

[23:39] David Loud: Well, I think so, yes. How could it not? I mean, everybody is tasked with something terrible to deal with. Nobody makes it through unscathed in this life. And I was so blessed and lucky and charmed for so long, and I don't think there's any way I could have been aware of the kinds of things that people have to struggle with in this world because it hadn't affected me yet. But when it did affect me, all of a sudden you notice other people who have similar challenges and similar trials to go through. It's just one of the many, many things that people have to learn about and learn about themselves by either confronting it or giving in to it or struggling with it, or however you're gonna get past that hurdle, it's gonna change you. And Parkinson's has changed me in that respect.

[24:41] David Loud: I have a friend who believes very strongly that there are life lessons to be learned in musical theater and lyrics. What can musical theater teach us about life? Well, when I look at the songs that Stephen Sondheim wrote in the 70s, you know, for Company, for Follies, for Night Music, for Pacific Overtures, for Sweeney Todd, I think I learned how to be an adult from listening to those lyrics. You know, why is a relationship with another person so hard? Well, because you feel contradictory emotions at the same time. You're sorry, grateful, you're regretful, happy. That is the truth about personal relationships. Nothing's gonna be great all the time. How could it be? It's gonna be hard, it's gonna be contradictory, and it's not gonna make sense all the time.

And I think in the way that musical theater lyrics can be wonderfully specific. Now I always come back to Sondheim when I come back to lyrics because nobody does it better. I think of little details in like Sweeney Todd when Mrs. Lovett says, "A seaside wedding could be devised, me rumpled bedding legitimized," and all of a sudden we know that they're sleeping together. He's not behaving like he's sleeping with her, he doesn't treat her very well, but you realize, oh, they're sleeping together, and nobody mentioned that in the script. You know, sometimes Sondheim is as good a playwright as he is a lyricist and a composer. His way of evoking emotion and sharing story resonates with every single person as if he's writing that for you.

[26:43] Lauren Van Hemert: Yes, absolutely. By being so specific, it becomes completely universal.

[26:48] David Loud: You've worked with so many giants of the stage who have left an indelible mark on this industry. What do you hope your legacy to theater and music will be?

[27:08] David Loud: Well, I know that when I work on a show, I think it's the most important thing in the entire world. And I give everything I have to it. And I think I require and inspire the people around me to feel the same way, to take it that seriously, to take it as the most important thing one could possibly be doing. I know it's not the most important thing one could possibly be doing. I'm not curing cancer. I'm not, you know, solving world hunger. But if I'm in a rehearsal working on a song, finding what the story is, helping an actor tell that story in the most effective way, working with the pianist, you know, whatever my job is, arranging a song so that it gives a certain different quality that nobody had quite seen in it before, I want everyone around me to treat that as the most important thing in the world as we are doing it. And that's a gift I can give to people, I think.

[28:27] Lauren Van Hemert: It sounds like it's a tremendous respect for the work.

[28:31] David Loud: Absolutely. It's an amazing form, the musical theater. I mean, to take something as unbelievable as a person bursting into song after speaking, and making that seem like the most natural thing in the world, and in a way, you know, an inevitable outcome of speech. And then, you know, the way music can develop a song, that a song that starts a certain way can then suddenly have a huge burst of energy, or suddenly become passionately slow, or, you know, suddenly break into a jazzy thing that you hadn't heard coming, or a swing feel. There are so many possibilities when a song begins. And having the job of making those decisions is thrilling.

[29:29] David Loud: You know, so often people ask me to recommend books to them about the theater, and I can tell you that if you are a fan of musical theater, particularly the process, then my book, Facing the Music, is a must-read. I'll put a link to the publisher's website in the episode notes.

[29:50] Lauren Van Hemert: If you like what you've heard, please consider subscribing to this podcast, leave us a review, follow us on social media, on Facebook or Instagram at Beltline to Broadway or Twitter at Beltline2BWay. Or visit us online at www.beltline2broadway.org. Until next time, I'll see you at the theater.