The summer of ’84 I stayed home alone in Berlin while my parents left on vacation. It was my choice to spend the six week break between my junior and senior high school year spending 8-14 hours every day working on writing the arrangements for a 15 piece orchestra for my musical Once Upon a Frog. I had been told that without these orchestrations Once Upon a Frog would not be considered as the John F. Kennedy School’s next English language musical production. I might as well have been told if I managed to pick all the lentils out the ashes I would be allowed to go to the ball. The promise was an empty one, but I didn’t think about that and sacrificed my summer to write orchestrations that would never be played.
I have already written about growing up in West-Berlin, Germany, loving musicals and participating in the musical productions at the German-American school I attended. Shortly before my 15th birthday I started writing a musical of my own, Once Upon a Frog. Within a few months I’d invited our school’s drama director Mr. Bishop and the current music director for school musicals Mr. Poland to my home and, with the help of my opera singer mother, performed some of the songs from Once Upon a Frog for them, in hopes of winning them over to the idea of it being performed on John F. Kennedy School’s main stage, much the same way the high school had put on Bye Bye Birdie, Guys and Dolls or Oklahoma previously.
I was writing a show suitable for our school stage, with lots of leading solo singing parts (ten, I recall) and a big chorus, to provide students with as many performing opportunities as possible, just as previous musical productions had done. There tended to be a total of about 35 cast members on stage each time JFKS put on a musical. High School musical productions were my whole world. I lived for them, performed in them, made my friends in them. It was my highest aspiration at the time that a musical I created would be produced at the John F. Kennedy School.
Mr. Bishop offered to meet with me regularly to help work on the script of Once Upon a Frog. By the time I had completed a piano/vocal score and libretto I was in 11th grade, and a new teacher had been hired to act as music director for JFK S’ musical productions. This was Mr. M– . I would rather not give his full name.
Mr. Bishop told me we would need Mr. M– to agree to put on Once Upon a Frog as the school’s next musical in my senior year. So I told Mr. M– about my show and offered to play or give him the score. Mr. M– told me he could not consider doing Once Upon a Frog unless it could be done with the same kind of full orchestra we had just used for our most recent musical production South Pacific. That had been a 15 piece orchestra: flute, three clarinets, alto saxophone, two trumpets, trombone, percussion, piano, two violins, viola, cello and double bass. Mr. M– told me I would have to provide him with a fully orchestrated score before he could even consider whether to agree to music direct Once Upon a Frog.
Now, can we just sit back and raise our eyebrows at the unreasonableness of this demand? No Broadway producer, or theatrical professional of any stripe, demands to see a fully orchestrated score to evaluate a musical’s viability. They look at the script. They look at a piano/vocal score. Heck, most Broadway musicals are not even orchestrated by the composers themselves. Even granting the importance Mr. M– placed on leading a 15 piece orchestra during the high school musical performances, the ethical thing to do would have been to evaluate Once Upon a Frog’s script and songs, make a preliminary yes or no decision and, if it’s a yes, then deal with the issue of orchestrations.
It is now obvious to me that Mr. M– had no intention of music directing a student written musical regardless of its quality. But he also didn’t want to be the one to say no. He figured it was highly unlikely a 17 year old would write out orchestrations for a 15 piece orchestra for a full length musical with nearly 20 songs, all by himself. As unlikely as picking a bowl’s worth of lentils out of a heap of ashes. I would fail on my own and the question would be moot. He wouldn’t need to say no.
