Once Upon a Time in the Recording Studio : INTO THE WOODS

What do you say to a woman who introduces herself as Cinderella’s stepmother?

Then again, she probably feels right at home. Just across the room, Cinderella herself is chatting with Little Red Riding Hood. The wolf is reading Stendhal, while Jack and his mother talk beanstalks. Prince Charming is loading his camera.

But this is no ordinary meeting of fairy-tale fugitives. RCA is recording the original cast album for “Into the Woods,” the new musical from Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine. So their emissaries from Fantasy Land are on hand to sing Sondheim’s 22 songs about the pleasures and perils of getting what it is you think you want.

From the narrator’s opening line of “Once Upon a Time”--for 13 hours one day, six hours the next--some of Broadway’s best voices belt out some of Broadway’s best music.

Sondheim is there every single minute, concerned about every single detail. Working out of RCA’s cavernous Studio A, the same place that Sondheim and Lapine’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Sunday in the Park With George” was recorded, not to mention Sondheim’s film score for “Reds,” nearly 40 cast members and musicians are playing to posterity.

It starts on a cold Monday morning, less than a week after the show’s Broadway opening. The first call is at 11:05 a.m., and aside from the Witch (star Bernadette Peters), who is scheduled for late afternoon, the other players take their places. Musical director Paul Gemignani is at the podium, while behind a glass window Sondheim, author-director Lapine, record producer Jay David Saks and assorted technical people are waiting to hear a score unaugmented by sets, lights, costumes and other theatrical magic.

At one end of the stage, Cinderella (Kim Crosby) and her rotten family sing about the Prince’s festival while at the other end, the childless Baker (Chip Zien) and his wife (Joanna Gleason) lament their fate. At center-stage, sweet young Jack (18-year-old Ben Wright) and his mother (Barbara Bryne) discuss the kid’s weird fondness for his cow.

Forget ball gowns and epaulets. These people are wearing sweat shirts and sneakers. The best-dressed person in the place is Jo Read, Wright’s mother who is visiting from Indianapolis. Many of the others are wearing “Into the Woods” lavender sweat shirts. Their elixir is generally tap water, although usually from an Evian bottle, and Monday’s dinner is the pick of the lot at Burger King.

While the stars spend most of their time waiting their turns--Cinderella planned to write thank you notes for opening night flowers--hired help get few breaks. Sitting at a long table near the back wall, three people are copying last-minute changes from one piece of sheet music to another. Two women from RCA are in the sound booth reviewing Sondheim’s libretto, word by word, to make certain the singers sing what the master wrote.

Where It Happens

Studio A is on the fourth floor at RCA’s offices at 44th and Avenue of the Americas, where an elevator empties onto a nondescript waiting area. Performers sit out here to read, sometimes to eat, sometimes to talk with the many reporters who stop by during the two-day session. Rooms off the hallway are being used to master cassettes and compact discs, so Christmas music, Elvis Presley and even Sondheim’s “Side by Side” blare out at varying volumes all day long.

For the “Into the Woods” sessions, each song is first rehearsed, then recorded. People move continuously in and out of Studio A’s double doors during rehearsal. Many also move about the studio itself, a huge hall stretching up 35 feet and out 60 feet wide, 100 deep.

Arguably New York’s largest studio, this is the place “Oklahoma!,” “The King and I” and “Porgy and Bess” were recorded, as well as Van Cliburn and Artur Rubinstein.

Chelsea Music Service’s Mathilde Pincus and her copyists inhabit the back of the room, musicians fill the center and performers move on and off the raised stage up front. Boxes and trunks of extra microphones and wires are off to the side of the stage, near the percussion area; and behind the drums, triangles and bells is a sizable sound booth with a window to the recording studio. The room “has the sound of the theater,” says Zein. “We’re not tucked away in some booth.”

(Actually, this booth is enormous, easily accommodating the 25 or more people who turn up during some playbacks. Engineers work at an MCI console--it is, for those who care about such things, the JH600 series, with 36 faders, accommodating 72 inputs--and there’s a 24-track board. Sondheim is sitting back in the corner near two Sony 24-track digital tape machines.)

Co-engineer Anthony Salvatore, who won an engineering Grammy for “Sweeney Todd,” considers the sessions a “kind of a challenge because when I saw the instrumentation, I didn’t think there was enough string strength. That was before I started the recording. But it works. That’s the challenge, trying to get it to sound as Sondheim and (orchestrator Jonathan) Tunick want it to sound.”

Besides the cast and musicians, assorted friends and associates move in and out of the studio and sound booth, offering advice, reading reviews, running errands. Producers Heidi and Rocco Landesman pass through, as do assorted RCA executives. Sondheim, Lapine, Saks and Peters all have assistants on hand, but none seem very busy. (Peters’ longtime manager Tom Hammond is also present and enchanted by a watch that Peters gave him opening night, “and I didn’t give her anything.”)

Danielle Ferland, 16, who plays Little Red Riding Hood, missed her school dance the prior Saturday night, but did use one of her breaks to take in the movie “Less Than Zero.” Chuck Wagner, who plays a prince wed to Rapunzel but smitten with Snow White, went home for lunch with his family the first day, but it took so long that, for dinner, he joined a group at Burger King. And RCA record producer Saks, buying a sandwich at the deli down the street, laughs when he notices the song on the radio there is “Losing My Mind,” from Sondheim’s “Follies.”

The Mother

The friendliest person in the place is clearly Jo Read, a voice teacher and acting coach from suburban Indianapolis who came to town for the opening and this session. “He’s alone here,” she says of son Ben. “He doesn’t have family, and I try to come once a month to let him know his family is with him.”

The middle of three children, Ben Wright has an older sister, 21, a younger brother, 11, and a 120-pound Labrador retriever named Brick. Pleasant and innocent-looking, Wright played the part of Jack in “Woods” at San Diego’s Old Globe last year, then moved with the show to New York. Also attending NYU, where he is planning to major in philosophy, Wright says he is keeping a journal about his work on “Woods” that he’ll turn into two “scholarly” papers for academic credit.

Read is at the back of the hall Tuesday afternoon sewing a needlepoint cover for the show’s program so Ben “can lay (the program) on the coffee table and it won’t get banged up.” Done partially in gold metallic thread, it reads: “Broadway debut, Ben Wright, Into the Woods, Sondheim-Lapine, Nov. 5, 1987.” In the bottom right corner, she embroidered “Love, Mom.”

Read, who has seen the show 16 times here and in San Diego, is later in the sound booth mouthing the words as Wright records one of his songs out on the stage. Clearly nervous, he worries aloud about his performance, and his mother appears to be in anguish. “He is his own worst critic,” she confides. “I told him: ‘You just get into your own character. Pretend you’re in costume, with the cow, on the stage, and just be Jack, not Ben.’ ”

He tries again, his voice more steady, and she sighs as he finishes, her thumbs up. “People who don’t record a lot listen to the wrong things,” explains music director Gemignani. “They start judging themselves before it happens. Nobody sounds like they think they are going to sound on tape, and that can make people nuts. (Ben) sounded great. We said: ‘Let us judge if you sound good or bad. But don’t you think about it, because it sounds fabulous.’ He just needed a little support.”

How It Happens

While Pamela Winslow, 22, playing Rapunzel, and Wright are making Broadway debuts, this is largely a group of Sondheim regulars. Orchestrator Tunick has been with him since “Company” in 1970, and musical director Gemignani nearly that long. Peters and Robert Westenberg (who plays both the wolf and Cinderella’s Prince) starred in “Sunday,” and several other players and musicians have worked in either “Sunday” or other Sondheim shows.

Pincus, who received a Tony award several years ago honoring her service to Broadway, says proudly that she has copied music for all of Sondheim’s shows since “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” in 1962. “I’ve worked for Mr. Sondheim for 20 years,” she says. “Or so I think. He says it’s 25 years.”

The most commonly used word in the studio is “Steve” and Sondheim moves like he has springs on his feet. Small and lithe, he is almost continually in motion. From his seat back in a corner of the recording booth, the 57-year-old composer-lyricist listens intently to each take with his eyes down, a yellow legal pad on his lap. Then, after nearly every round, he gets quickly to his feet and rushes out to the studio floor.

His manner is warm, but his words are crisp. Conversation--or at least the part that the reporter hears--is minimal, businesslike, always polite. Peters calls it a form of verbal shorthand as Sondheim says to shorten a pause, make a passage more sinister or alter a phrase. Consider his reaction to “Last Midnight,” a new song for Peters that replaced another just days before the opening. Neither the gnarled witch of the show’s first act nor the beauty of Act II, she is today in black baggy pants and sweat shirt, belting out song after song as midnight approaches. It may have been an excruciatingly long day, the session may be running two hours overtime, but everyone applauds as she finishes. Sondheim’s applause is verbal: “Wow. That was terrific.”

Peters says she appreciates having “a couple of shots” to do each song--”On stage you come up and you do it, and if you’re not revved up, it’s just too bad”--and an observer can document the subtle improvements.

The next morning, for instance, Westenberg is recording “Hello, Little Girl,” a flagrantly erotic encounter between Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf. (Westenberg sings such lines as: “There’s no possible way / to describe what you feel / when you’re talking to your meal.”) Sondheim calls Westenberg’s first run-through “too benign,” and the singer tries again, snarling more menace.

Westenberg may have looked menacing the first time around, but he apparently didn’t sound menacing enough, and sound is the key element here. RCA producer Saks says he never looks out the glass window into the studio once the take starts, and neither do Sondheim nor Lapine.

“We don’t want to see them,” says Lapine. “We want to hear the emotion in their voices. If we see them, they’re communicating something with their body language or their facial expression and you just want to hear the voice because that’s what you hear on the album.”

At one point Sondheim tells the cast, “Don’t be afraid of overacting,” and Saks feels likewise. On an album, Saks explains, “There’s nothing visual to relate to. You can get confused, no matter how many times you’ve seen it. (He’s seen it six times.) On an album, what works is only what you hear. Many times, the cast had to be reminded. Many felt they were overdramatic, getting overemotional. They wouldn’t dream of doing that on the stage. Nor should they.”

So we find performers frequently bouncing in place and nearly always keeping time with their hands, sometimes their feet and arms as well. “You have to generate your own excitement because the audience isn’t there,” says Tom Aldredge, who plays both the Mysterious Man and the Narrator. “You do things to get yourself juiced up. They don’t see you so you have to generate a certain excitement in words and music.”

Sometimes the excitement is nervous energy, as musicians and cast members operate under assorted financial and performance pressures. For one thing, original cast albums are expensive to produce--this one will run upwards of $200,000 just for the raw costs--and time is truly money. Cast members receive a week’s salary for each continuous nine hours of recording, and musician’s union rules set a limit on the amount of finished music that can be taken from any three-hour session.

Also, unlike a recording which involves several different tracks later put together, one person’s mistake can mean that everyone starts over. Music, lyrics, even spoken dialogue are adjusted continually and “you have to keep in mind all of the cuts,” says French horn player Ronald Sell. “There’s more pressure than in the pit. It becomes routine. Everything happens when you expect it to happen.”

An album is also final. “This is what the general public will hear,” says percussionist Adrienne Wilcox, brought in for the recording session and a substitute on the show. “You don’t want the mistake to be yours.”

Adds performer Zien: “You’re looking posterity in the eye. Five years from now, when you’re riding around in your Saab, your kids put it on your tape deck.”

There Are Luxuries

Ferland, from Stratford, Conn., who also appeared in “Sunday,” finds the session a lot easier than her stage performance. For one thing, she wears a tight vest as Little Red Riding Hood--it isn’t exactly a corset, she explains, but it does constrict her a little--plus she is skipping in place for half the opening number. In the first song, she also has to sing with a chunk of apple in her mouth; the script calls for her to bite the apple, but she has no time to swallow it before she sings again.

It’s also easier for Tom Aldredge, who has 12 costume changes in Act I alone. At one point, he has only five seconds between parts, “but I have four dressers waiting for me in the wings.”

The orchestra also has some breathing room in the studio that it doesn’t have in the pit, and orchestrator Tunick was able to add such things as a celesta, a small keyboard instrument that “I’d like to have used in the pit but there was no room.” There is also room here for a harp and harpist, a second trumpet for fanfares and a second percussionist.

The show’s one-person percussion part is shared by two musicians during the recording. In the orchestra pit, Robert Ayers has to move so quickly from one instrument to the next that he is literally surrounded with instruments hanging off the ceiling, behind him and on walls, explains second-percussionist Wilcox. Given the ground Ayers has to cover, he sometimes winds up playing the triangle with the bell mallets, she says, but during the recording, he can play the triangle with the triangle beater.

But Dangers Lurk

The studio’s artificial air isn’t great on the voice, however. Saying “it’s so dry in here, I just inhale steam to keep things loose,” Carson is inhaling steam with menthol. Peters brings along a humidifier, and on her music stand are a paper cup for water, two boxes of Lakerol lemon mints and a box of Olbas Pastilles (“pure plant remedy clears the head, soothes the throat”).

Food and sleep aren’t always good for you, either, say both Prince Charmings. Wagner tries not to eat too much when singing: “You try to keep the mucous-producing agents out of your system when you’re recording.” And Westenberg does crossword puzzles when he isn’t reading because the thought of napping is worrisome; if you fall asleep, he says, the chest resonance lowers your voice and it can be deadly.

How It Works

What you hear in the studio isn’t necessarily what you’d hear over at the Martin Beck Theatre a few blocks away. The most obvious change is that songs are sung out of sequence in order to both keep costs down and preserve voices. Songs requiring the most musicians go first, explains Tunick, “so that if you go into overtime, you do so with the smallest number of people possible.” Similarly, all of Bernadette Peters’ songs are recorded in one long chunk, so as to avoid the expense of having a high-paid star on hand for two days.

Tempos sometimes change as well. “Usually for the record, you try and forget what you do in the show and place the tempo where it feels good for the record, realizing people do not see what you are used to seeing,” explains musical director Gemignani. While there are exceptions, tempos tend to go faster because the visual is missing.

Recording session changes sometimes wind up back on stage. Gemignani recalls, for instance, that they speeded up a song called “Everybody Loves Louis” in “Sunday in the Park With George,” then moved it back into the show that way. In this show, tempos didn’t change but the show’s most popular song, “No One Is Alone,” was sharpened; instead of having two characters 20 feet up in a tree and two others 15 feet away and at stage level, the four singers were placed next to one another in the studio.

Similarly, Peters comments after the taping that her witch’s rap number, a classic Sondheim exercise in intricate rhythm and rhyme which is part of the show’s opening prologue, came out much stronger at the studio than on stage. “I hope to take it back to the stage with me,” she says. “I learn a lot about the numbers that way.”

Adds Tunick: “This is the chance for the composer and lyricist to restore material they liked that had to be cut from the show for dramatic or length reasons. And they often do. In this case, a whole middle section of ‘A Very Nice Prince’ was cut from the show--we had to cut about an hour from the show--and that was restored.”

Into the Stores

Although his office walls are lined with 21 Grammy nominations--resulting in three wins--and he’d worked on several Sondheim albums as associate producer, Saks, 42, was making his debut as producer of an original cast album. Saks listened to “Sunday in the Park With George” at home and says that during recording sessions, he asked himself several times: “What would Thomas Z. Shepard do in this situation?”

Shepard is an industry pro and former division vice president at RCA Victor Red Seal, the company’s classical music division, which also records original cast albums and film sound tracks. Shepard moved to MCA but Sondheim chose to stay with RCA, his label for almost a dozen projects. Saks said composer Sondheim’s involvement in recording sessions is extensive “and should be. He’s the producer as much as I am and perhaps more. There were many times we did a take that sounded fine to me and I could live with it, but he was looking for a particular nuance.”

Recording sessions usually occur within 3 to 10 days of the show’s opening, explains Saks, because “the market for a cast album is almost exclusively people who have seen the show. You want to deliver an album to the stores as soon as possible, while the memory of the reviews--hopefully favorable--is still in their minds.”

The down side, of course, is that cast members are pretty worn out by the time they get through opening night (which in this case had been postponed a week due to assorted last-minute changes). “The cast came in tired,” says Saks. “They hadn’t had a day off in quite a while.”

“Into the Woods” had been evolving for more than two years, beginning with a reading at Playwrights Horizon here, then playing the Old Globe about a year ago. It underwent substantial changes, then opened on Broadway Nov. 5.

Reviews had come out the previous Friday--Variety scored them as 15 favorable, four mixed, two unfavorable and two pans--and the show was doing terrific business. Called by Time magazine “the best show yet from Stephen Sondheim, the most creative mind in the musical theater today,” it broke house records at the 1,282-seat Martin Beck Theatre and grossed $350,000 over the first weekend alone.

Although most original cast albums are recorded in one very long day, this one had too much material. RCA and Sondheim discussed the possibilities of a two-record set, but opted for one record--which would obviously sell better than a more expensive double set--after figuring out that all would fit on one album. Saks expects the finished record to run just over 70 minutes, the maximum for albums and CDs.

Saks said cast albums like this generally run $200,000 to $235,000 for talent and engineering--everything up to the point of a finished master tape. A Beethoven or Brahms symphony would cost considerably less, he points out--a solo album by a non-superstar could even run as low as $15,000, he guesses--but an opera would be considerbly more. Peter Elliott, director of U.S. sales and marketing for RCA Victor Red Seal, said marketing and related expenses generally add a minimum of another $50,000 to launch a cast album.

The marketing department completed album mock-ups before the record was even taped; final artwork approvals were done before the session ended. Saks and associates now spend several days listening to tapes, putting them in their final, running order. Sondheim, Gemignani, Tunick and Lapine then get to hear it all and make comments.

After re-editing based on those comments, the recording is mixed. Sounds are balanced and blended. The volume of instruments and voices is adjusted. Four or five days later, Saks emerges with a digital stereo master tape, which is again played for Sondheim and colleagues, corrected and duplicated. It then goes off to the manufacturer and magically appears in record stores across the land a few weeks later. In fact, records and tapes should be in stores before Christmas, with CDs following in early 1988.

Although the first day ran two hours into overtime, ending at midnight instead of 10 p.m., everything was over after Take 153 at 5 p.m. Tuesday. It ended simply enough with Saks saying, “Thanks a lot, folks.” The place was nearly deserted within minutes.

For an Encore... There may be new life in the cast albums biz due to CDs, but. . . By Paul Grein, Page 56.

Cast Albums: The best thing that could ever happen to musicals. By Dan Sullivan, Page 57.