(… dad jokes now, is it?)
Musical Director, Sue Chandler!
“Tell us about yourself. We have precious little information…”
I am born and raised in the great State of NJ. I have been involved in community theatre as a music director and band member for almost 30 years. I love playing piano and doing musical theatre and now that I am retired, I can do more of it! I have also been seen on stage a few times, type cast as a pianist – and that is where I met our director. She was a tap dancer and I was the piano accompanist in “Stepping Out” at Nutley Little Theatre.
As the music director, are there any specific challenges the score of 1776 presents for you?
For the band? When Laura first presented the project to me, my first concern? Can women sing the score that was written for a primarily male cast? Although it is easy to transpose songs on an electronic keyboard, we needed to keep the music in the same key as much as possible, to allow us to have additional instrumentation. We have an incredibly talented cast that has been flexible and able to work within the written score and they sound great! The orchestration has been reduced, respecting the size of our performance space, so we will have violin, viola, cello, clarinet, oboe and percussion in addition to piano. I think we have an incredibly talented group of musicians, some of them coming from NYC.
Why do 1776 with an all-female cast?
In my experience, there seems to be more talented women coming out for musicals in community theatre. This is a wonderful show that is infrequently done – perhaps due to the need for so many strong male leads – so why not?
As the question of Independency has already been put to a vote… let us move on to another, highly divisive question: Pumpkin Spice- Yea or nay? Nay. Keep it real – only in pumpkin pies.