Musicians Have a Score to Settle

When the touring Broadway show “Oliver!” opens Tuesday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, Charles Dickens’ tale of 19th century London orphans toiling in the workhouse will be told through song and dance.

But one thing will be missing from the musical -- most of the musicians.

In a first for the arts center, the show’s two-week run will be backed by a Sinfonia -- an electronic virtual orchestra that has been embraced in recent years by some cost-conscious producers while stoking the anger of concert musicians nationwide. Most notably, it was an issue during last year’s strike of unionized musicians on Broadway.

Members of Local 7 of the American Federation of Musicians, who would normally be in Segerstrom Hall’s pit Tuesday, plan to picket outside, asking theatergoers to complain to the arts center.

The musicians say the machines, which use digital sampling to mimic instruments, threaten their livelihood and undermine the art of live music.

“This is a very slippery slope leading to the extinction of live music,” said Frank Amoss, a drummer and president of Local 7 of the musicians union, which has 900 members in Orange County. “The next step could be lip-syncing.

“The whole thing hinges on whether the audience cares or not. If they do, the [arts center] will take notice. The center doesn’t care if we’re just out there protesting.”

Not true, said Jerry Mandel, president of the Performing Arts Center -- and a saxophonist. “If I didn’t have this job -- if I was trying to make a living as a musician -- I might be out on the protest line myself,” he said.

Mandel is no fan of music machines. But he said they had become a Hobson’s choice dictated by the economics of staging expensive Broadway shows and running an arts center that subsidizes most fine music performances.

“Producing a touring Broadway show is a very expensive activity.... To go on the road with one of these shows costs hundreds of thousands of dollars a week. They’re trying to save money in lots of ways,” Mandel said. “Personally, myself, I hate machines like that. I like live music. It’s not something we want to do, but when we are presented with Broadway shows, we have to take the shows the way they are.”

Of the scores of productions put on by the arts center each year, only the Broadway shows -- six this year -- are profitable, Mandel said. “Oliver!” will yield about $100,000 during its two-week run -- money that will be used to subsidize other fare.

“You wouldn’t do it,” Mandel said of using the music machine, “with opera, or ballet or classical concerts.” People who buy tickets to those shows are “coming for the live music experience.”

“People who go see [touring] Broadway are generally there to see the show and watch the dancers. As long as the music sounds good, they’re not wondering whether there are 24 musicians in the pit.”

For “Oliver!,” 10 to 12 musicians will accompany the music machine to give the score depth. They’ll earn $157.64 per performance, according to the union. As many as 28 musicians would be needed to perform the score live, Mandel said.

Conflicts between musicians and technology are nothing new, touching on advances as old as Edison’s invention of the phonograph or as new as electronic sampling by hip-hop artists.

“I wouldn’t go to something like that; I wouldn’t have any interest,” Dean Corey, executive director of the Philharmonic Society of Orange County, said of a show backed by a music machine. “You want imitation crabmeat or real crabmeat? If you use a recording, you lose the spontaneity of live music.”

Whether the ticket-buying public cares is another matter, he said.

“There may be a market out there that doesn’t care,” Corey said. “What the public thinks of this -- I think the court’s still out there.”