Gemignani by Margaret Hall

Author:Margaret Hall [Hall, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781493061051
Publisher: Applause
Published: 2022-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Fun for the Whole Family

Paul Gemignani is a true legend in our world of musical theater. The dynamism of his conducting creates an absolutely palpable tremor of passion and power in any group of musicians and actors he leads in performance.

—ALAN MENKEN (COMPOSER)

PAUL HAD SAFELY RETURNED TO CRAZY FOR YOU WHEN MIKE OCKRENT gave him a call. He and Susan Stroman had begun work on an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol with Alan Menken and Lynn Ahrens, and they wanted Paul on the team as music director. A seasonal production, they would run for a few weeks during the holiday season, and then everyone would return to their normal lives, with Alan returning to his work on the Disney Renaissance and Lynn returning to her writing partner, Stephen Flaherty.

Paul signed on immediately. He had missed Mike and Stro, and the creative environment they had created together, but the idea of A Christmas Carol as a musical would have grabbed him regardless of the team. As a child the Alastair Sim film had been consistent viewing every Christmas, and now as a father he had continued the tradition with Alexander. He loved the story, and when he went to Lynn’s apartment to read through the script and hear snippets of the score, he was hooked.

They knew it had to be big—big in scale, big in scope, and especially big in audience. When a show has as short of a shelf life as a holiday production, it is key to get into the biggest space the production can fill in order to make back the investment a large-scale musical requires—instead of having months to pay back investors, they had only weeks, which meant a 600-seat theatre wouldn’t cut it. Instead, they picked the Paramount Theatre at Madison Square Garden, with room for more than 5,600 audience members at every performance. It was a massive space, but Mike had an idea up his sleeve to make it feel engagingly intimate.

The Paramount had originally been a grand movie house during the golden age of cinema, and it had a steeply raked seating area with no balcony overhang. Audience members entered through doors at the top of the space and would walk down to their seats, with large aisles on either side allowing for the immense amount of foot traffic. In these aisles, Mike had a series of shops installed, selling little nutcrackers, candies, and souvenirs. Each shop was made up to match the set onstage and was manned with salespeople working in character to make its audience members feel that they had stumbled into Victorian London before the show began.

Children would pour into the space with their parents, their voices echoing over one another to create so loud an atmosphere that it was earsplitting. The moment Paul would raise his hand and start the overture, the space would go silent. It was as if someone had muted the audience, only to turn the rapture up to eleven after every number, which would be applauded and cheered for at the top of their lungs.

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