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In addition to being a full-time piano technician, I am the rehearsal accompanist for some local high schools...mainly for their musicals, but also some chorus work. Anyone else here play for school musicals? I really enjoy it, and wonder if what other people's experiences are.

While I was teaching math, I was the rehearsal/orchestral pianist for about 25 musicals. It was especially rewarding because I got to know the students and teenagers have an enthusiasm that, I think, is not matched by professionals.

The rest of the orchestra was usually made up of professional musicians which made it especially excting for a non profesional like me.

I agree, the enthusiasm of the teenagers is almost contagious!

Playing for musicals was probably the last thing I thought I'd ever do, but the local high school was starting them up again after about a decade of not doing them. They started with "Oklahoma", and sent out a notice via the school newsletter that they needed people for the orchestra. I called and left a message, but never heard back. About a month before opening night, I checked again, and my message never got to the right person.

So, I had to learn the score in one month, having never played one before. This was back in March of 2004. It wasn't until then that I realized how out of practice I was. The students were so excited to have someone come in to rehearse with them. Up until them, the director had been directing AND playing for rehearsals, and was burned out. Today, I am so much better at the piano than I've ever been -- a great side effect!

Here are the musicals I've done so far: Oklahoma, Cinderella, Guys and Dolls (twice), Elton John's Aida, Seussical (twice), Pajama Game (twice), High School Musical, and State Fair. This week I'll be at auditions for musical #12, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. The school performing it has strong tenor and bass sections, so it should be fun.

I've done a few:

Grease (High School)
Company (College)
Little Shop of Horrors (College)
Crazy for You (College)
Cathy Rigby's Peter Pan (Substitute keyboard for the national tour)

They were all great fun, and it's something I hope I get a chance to do again! I'm hoping to do more Sondheim, I'd love to play Into the Woods; and I'm also a big fan of Les Miserables.

What is the level of difficulty of these scores? Are they only piano solo or also piano duet?

In college I served as pianist/conductor for productions of Weill's "The Threepenny Opera" and Gilbert and Sullivan's "The Sorcerer" - in addtion to playing for a couple of 19th century melodramas. Also acted and played the piano (in character) in a short farce by George Bernard Shaw called "The Music Cure." It was all great fun!!

For me, it was more the length of the scores that posed the problem in terms of time to learn them.

By far the hardest for me was 42nd Street, both in terms of difficulty and because the score was from a manuscript making it much more difficult to read.

I'm going to be playing for "Little Shop of Horrors" next semester - our law school is putting on a production. I've done a lot of accompanying, but never for a whole musical - it'll be fun, I hope.

I think the level of score difficulty depends on the score itself. The scores I use to rehearse with the casts are piano/vocal scores, where the piano part is a compilation of most of the orchestra parts. Of course, I don't have 16 fingers, so I can't play every note. But, the idea is to give the cast a version of what they'll hear when the orchestra starts in with rehearsals -- which in my case is 3 or 4 days before opening night. Most of the orchestra books come with a piano and/or keyboard book, which, sometimes, is very different than the piano/vocal score.

Most of the Rodgers and Hammerstein stuff is pretty straight-forward...yet can be difficult to play at first. The strangest score was for "Seussical" -- it was over 400 pages, in two books. I never really was able to watch the final production because the music never stopped -- but it was fun to play, even with keys changing 5 or 6 times in many songs, and individual songs switching from 4/4 to 3/4 to 5/8 to 9/13 to 2/1, etc.

Larisa, I'm sure you'll have fun. There's really no experience quite like it. There's a great sense of accomplishment starting from day 1, and watching the show progress into an actual production. Granted, there will be some rehearsals where you'll say to yourself, "What have I gotten myself into?", or, "This show is NEVER going to come together!"

This was my usual feeling two days before the show or even at the dress rehearsal.

I've done a lot of theater work, as an actor, director/playwright (nothing major, but substantial enough), and more importantly, as a "musical director" for several different shows. I love working in the field, in all aspects! Theater people are so much fun, and no matter what age, they are all usually very enthusiastic, community-oriented, and fun loving. In most cases I prefer them to the stuffy, competitive, egotist people the music world attracts.

I have never played for a musical, per se, but my favorite show was "Good," a very serious drama about moral ethics and such in the context of WWII. Its protagonist/antagonist (a very tragic man, ultimately, and the play raises the question of whether or not he is a "good" man, and actually the term good is applied from different perspectives, and most people would say he's just lost in an evil world I suppose...) has a constant musical backdrop in his life, sort of a mental illness that accompanies events in his life, and at various stages in the play, songs are sung in occasionally outrageous ways. A lot of fun, and the pianist sits in the middle of everything, optionally accompanied as I was by a few musicians. The end has this very dramatic monologue that is accompanied by a slow, but constantly accel.. version of Schubert's Marche Militaire. Wonderfully touching!

I have also done a unique version of Cinderella for which I arranged a ton of Christmas carols, wrote my own music, and taught a sextet of actors how to sing (well, sort of; it isn't exactly my pedagogical expertise! But they did all right)--then organized a rather sizeable pit orchestra with all sorts of percussion equipment and everything. Again, what fun! I had a digital piano set up to a synthesizer sound module and navigated through organ sounds and other odds and ends, and all the musicians had our inside jokes and pranks we'd do in between cues, because the audience couldn't see us, so unlike in "Good" we were not the center of attention...

Also, I've done a few other things, one of the crazier of which was a sort of small group that did a pretty weighty feminist play (I can't remember the title, and I'm not just saying that!) which was very tediously written and not very good at all, even disregarding the subject matter--but for my part, I was being paid and was fine with it. The job involved playing a wide range of music, from Scott Joplin to my own, "eerie" (as the director wanted) transcription of Hush Little Baby--but more amusing was that I was just surrounded by all sorts of sound fx devices; rainsticks, thunder sheets, drums, whistles...just about everything.

Sorry to go on, I just enjoy thinking back on some of my theater memories. For anyone who hasn't ever worked in a theater, I would strongly recommend it. You'll probably meet some great people and who knows what you'll end up doing on the side..

Great fun. Shows I've done have included Showboat, My Fair Lady, Fiddler on the Roof, Oliver, Orpheus in the Underworld, Iolanthe - but the best fun was Cabaret, where as well as musical directing, I was part of an on-stage band in the Kit Kat Club- in black fishnets & leotard and smoking a cigar between numbers. My fellow bandsmen included a bearded percussionist in drag. We were on the revolving part of the stage and played as we turned. It was a hoot.

I just checked all my old programs for the shows I played for:

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat
Stop the World, I Want to Get Off
The Music Man(2)
The Fantasticks(2)
The Me Nobody Knows
Amahl and the Night Visitor
The Play of Daniel
Carnival
You're a Good Man Charlie Brown
Hello Dolly
Bye Bye Birdie
42nd Street
Godspell
South Pacific
Oklahoma!
Man of La Mancha
Camelot
Jesus Christ Superstar
Guys and Dolls
Once Upon a Mattress
On the Town
Fiddler on the Roof

Whoa!! I've played for lots of shows, but never in fishnet stockings. Which is a really good thing. Me in fishnet stockings would almost certainly be a sign of the end times.

I actually spent a memorable snowy Friday evening at the old Studio 54 in Manhattan experiencing Cabaret. It had snowed around two feet the night before, so nobody got in, nobody got out. Cheap ticket. The stars were Molly Ringwald and Neil Patrick Harris. While both were terrific, he was unbelievable. Little Dougie Houser, all grown up.

Hmm... where to begin? I've done well over 100 musicals and countless productions for schools, colleges, community playhouses, cabarets, and dinner theatres - both as a peformer and a director. I've done many of the better-known musicals, but have done quite a few odd ones too.

I've done tours here and abroad and created several musical revues; I've even won an award or two. Or three.

But I haven't done theatre work in many years - my current work takes up almost all of my time. I accompany lots of choral groups these days - the classical music is much more to my liking, but I do miss the cameraderie of theatre folks.