Piccolo Theater's Comedy of Errors

I wrote music for Shakespeare’s “Comedy of Errors”, which is being produced by Piccolo Theater and was directed by Christopher Marino.  The show opens on September 9 and runs Friday, Saturday and Sunday.  Music will be performed live by members of the Dead Superheroes Orchestra, including myself on piano.  More information is available on Piccolo Theater’s website.

The music for the show is performed by 4 musicians, using accordion, flute, synthesizers, violin, percussion and theremin.  While writing, I sought to emulate the styles of cabaret, circus and gypsy music, while adding in quite a bit of Baroque and Classical style.  The play is filled with quirky waltzes, Baroque recitative-like accompaniment, and a show-stopping cabaret parody of Caccini’s “Amarilli, mia bella”. Below is a video of an exceptional traditional performance of that song.

Writing music for a straight play is quite a different thing than what I’ve become accustomed to with the Dead Superheroes Orchestra.  I have taken on such projects in the past, writing for productions of Shakespeare’s “Winter’s Tale” and Brecht’s “Gallileo”, as well as an adaptation of Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”.  The main difference, and what I found quite troubling this time around, is writing short pieces to be played either under speeches or during scene changes.  Generally, these are vamps or riffs that last 4 to 12 bars and are repeated as necessary. I’ve grown accustomed to composing longer pieces, as those for DSO, which last 4 to 6 minutes and have an extensive ensemble to orchestrate for.  It was a challenge to cut back for this show.  I ended up writing probably about 20 different pieces, each lasting about 2 minutes.  In the end, we scaled that back to maybe 10 ideas that are used throughout the show, with three larger pieces lasting maybe 3 minutes each.  Additionally, it took me some time to come to terms with the styles that Christopher Marino was hoping to incorporate into the show.  Looking back on what I wrote and what I’ve written for previous shows and for DSO, I realize that I mostly struggled with this maybe because I was in denial that someone was actually hiring me to write music in the styles that I generally turn to for inspiration.

The play is in previews now and is shaping up to be hilarious, very unique and enchanting.  Since we have live musicians, we’ve been able to underscore things on the fly during rehearsals, using either the material that I wrote or even simpler things, like a sustained violin note.  The rehearsals and performance feel very vaudevillian at points, with the actors sometimes actually cueing the band to play something under their speeches, or the musicians reacting to an impulse to add underscoring to a scene that didn’t have set music before.

I included some homages to some of my favorite classical pieces and styles.  There’s a parody of Beethoven’s piano sonata “Pathetique”, the aforementioned “Amarilli, mia bella”, some twelve tone passages and some short quotes of Berg and imitations of Mozart. I also made an effort to take some cues from Emilie Autumn’s song “Opheliac” for the arrangement of “Amarilli”, using the harpsichord and making the arrangement somewhat through-composed, aside from the chord progression and melody.  The result is a hilariously lewd song that, through gratuitous instrumentation, reaches a climax point with a little Mozartian style bombast.

The show runs through October 22 at the Main Street Arts Depot in Evanston, IL.