Cathy Rigby is Peter Pan
Recorded, edited and mixed the orchestral score for the Branson staging of the show Cathy Rigby played, on and off, for the better part of thirty years.
The show
Cathy Rigby was an Olympic gymnast before she was an actress, which is the entire explanation for how she could fly the way she flew. She played Peter Pan on and off from 1974 into the 2010s and picked up a Tony nomination along the way. The production came to the Mansion Theater in Branson, Missouri in 2009, and I recorded, edited and mixed the orchestral score for it, tracked at the Mansion Studios right there on site.
Tracking in the same building the show plays in is a luxury, and it is not one I've had often. The room the score gets made in and the room it has to work in are usually a few hundred miles apart, which means you are guessing. Here I wasn't.
What theatre audio asks for
Recording an orchestra for a stage production is a genuinely different problem from recording one for a record, and I'd argue it's the harder of the two. Well… Ok, that depends on the day. But a record gets made once and then sits still forever. A theatre score has to survive being played back into a room full of people, night after night, underneath performers who are moving around, and in this particular show, flying over the audience, while a stage manager keeps the whole machine on cue.
It has to sound like an orchestra in that room, at that volume, every single night, with nobody out there ever once thinking about where the sound is coming from. The moment somebody in row F wonders about the speakers, you've lost. That is the entire job.
Related
The other Branson credit is Presleys’ Country Jubilee.
Wondering which half of your own work is at risk?
Ten questions about how you actually get paid, and my honest read on what's exposed and what isn't. No score, because a score would be a number I made up.