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[0:00] Alan Seales: Welcome back to The Theatre Podcast. Intimate personal conversations with the industry's biggest names. I'm Alan Seales. Our guest today is Charlie Rosen, who was just nominated for a 2022 Tony Award for orchestration for A Strange Loop, which itself just took home the 2022 Tony Award for Best New Musical. That was a fun night. I was on the red carpet and in the media room, so I got to talk to Charlie actually on the carpet and meet him in person. So that was actually really cool to talk to him in person after interviewing him full length here. But this is a dude who loves to create. He loves to have many irons in the fire. Obviously, I can relate to that. You need to actually go Google, go to YouTube and search for 8-Bit Big Band because that is his 50-piece orchestra where he does modern orchestrations of 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit video game iconic theme songs.

And it's just incredible. So we play a little bit of the Tetris theme song in the episode, which we're going to get to, but there's so much more you need to check it out. Anyway, find me on Instagram, Twitter, Theatre Underscore Podcast. Leave a rating, leave a review. You know what to do. Find me on TikTok at The Theatre Podcast. And now we're going to take a quick break and come back with Charlie Rosen.

[1:29] Alan Seales: Today's guest is an experienced Grammy Award and Tony Award winning composer, multi-instrumentalist, orchestrator and music director. He started out his Broadway career as a swing in the pit of the production of Thirteen before moving on to eventually orchestrate some of the past few season's hottest musicals such as Be More Chill, Moulin Rouge, which nabbed him his first Tony Award win. And he's been hard at work prepping for the recently rescheduled revival of Some Like It Hot. Most recently received another Tony Award nomination for his orchestrating work on the Broadway musical A Strange Loop, which as a whole has garnered 11 amazing Tony nominations. Charlie Rosen, holy crap. Welcome to The Theatre Podcast.

[2:07] Charlie Rosen: Hey, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

[2:09] Alan Seales: No problem. Well, thank you for being here. Your schedule seems super light, super easy right now. We are recording this literally in the days leading up to the Tony Awards. So break many, many legs. I'm not going to record the intro for this until after the Tony, so hopefully I'll adjust it depending on what happens on Sunday. And you know what the craziest part about it is, is the last Tony Awards was not even a full year ago because of the situation. So it's pretty crazy to have two within one year. Maybe the only time in history we'll ever do that, hopefully.

[2:38] Charlie Rosen: Well, if it makes up for it, it wasn't even a full Tony Awards.

[2:41] Alan Seales: Yeah, well, you know, that's a whole separate podcast.

[2:49] Alan Seales: So I guess, well, that's a great place to start then because we're talking about COVID and obviously Some Like It Hot was supposed to come out in 2021 and we didn't really have any shows. I mean, at the end of last year, stuff started to come back. Talk me through that timeline because we definitely want to get into how you got into music and orchestration and stuff and we're going to do that. But Some Like It Hot, I just want to start real quick with that because the devastation I have to imagine of feeling, of what you're going through when you're like, I've got a show, it's finally going to Broadway. I've worked years in some cases on some of this stuff and then they're done, right?

[3:21] Charlie Rosen: Yeah, I know. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. The show was scheduled to go out of town in Chicago and have a whole run in Chicago during the time when COVID happened and then COVID hit and they were like, well, I guess we can't do that. And so in lieu of that, they chose to do a very crazy thing where they had like a six week sort of lab workshop hybrid audiences invited, stripped down production actually in the Little Shubert or it used to be called the Little Shubert. Now it's called the New 42nd Stage. I'm not totally sure what it's called. You can fact check me on that. It used to be called the Little Shubert. It's on 42nd and between 9th and 10th. And so we did a staged lab with test audiences to just sort of simulate the out of town experience to get really fast versions of notes.

Normally you would have like three or four months out of town to figure all this stuff out and we had six weeks. And so they did what they could. We tried out some orchestrations with not a full size pit. We were operating at basically six 50 or 60% capacity and just went, okay, here it is. Let's go to Broadway. We're doing it. So it's very crazy. It's sort of like everybody is now playing extreme catch up for all the shows that are going to be coming out in 2022 and 2023. And that's where something like that is, but full steam ahead. We're doing it.

[4:45] Alan Seales: Wow. So you're not actually going to do any sort of official out of town before 2022. It's just like, wow.

[4:48] Charlie Rosen: They chose to just forego it. They're like, nope, we're sticking to the plan. We're doing it. Broadway. Here it comes.

[4:54] Alan Seales: That's insane. So what do you normally then get from as an orchestrator in your position, the musicians for the show? I understand when you're going through out of towns and even previews, you're still adding things and cutting things and whatnot. And when it comes to choreography, directing scene, the writer, the actors, there's very obvious things that are changing, but from the musical perspective, what's changing in your world?

[5:16] Charlie Rosen: Right. Well, the whole process from a show's inception to it's being put on stage on Broadway musically, generally the order of operations is the composer writes a song and they play some degree of piano or guitar or something and they make their demos. I've had stuff as simple as somebody playing into their iPhone or sometimes they have more musical recording chops and they can make demos on their computer and I get those. And then the next step is like, okay, this is great. Let's have a sit down and we're going to talk about what is the world of the show? What's the sound of the show? What genres does it use? What instruments does it need? What vocabulary are you drawing from? What are your inspirations?

We normally have a listening session where we dive deep into YouTube videos and Spotify and figure out like, okay, what is the palette? How do we build the palette? What colors are we using? Then the logistical part comes in where it's like, okay, but how much money do we actually have? How many musicians do we get? Every musician is very expensive. And I've worked on shows where it's sort of like, well, you get five. You do your best. In the case of Some Like It Hot, it's very well-funded. And so we're going to have, fortunately, an orchestra of 18, which is so fantastic. I feel free, unburdened by the restrictions of budget and general management to do what the show needs. And so things that might change from out of town to Broadway, generally it wouldn't be pit size because that's sort of agreed upon at the inception.

But crazy things have happened. Songs have been cut and changed. New songs go in. New dance breaks go in. Underscores change because the scenes change. And so when people rewrite scenes, it means the music that accompanies those scenes needs to change duration, change dramaturgy or energy depending on the acting choices. And the biggest benefit of doing a show out of town is you can watch the show, put on your audience member hat and go, oh, okay, now that I'm seeing the way that the actors are delivering these lines and delivering these lyrics, how does that affect my choices dramaturgically utilizing the colors that are available to me as an orchestrator? Because one thing that I really think makes a great orchestrator, composer, arranger, musician in general, but particularly in what I do is being able to recognize the dramaturgy, the through line of the script, of the lyric, pull the emotion out of it and translate that into instruments. That's what we do.

[7:41] Alan Seales: Wow. Okay. So I'm trying to separate this all in my head in terms of tracks because you've got, you've got a lyricist who is literally just writing lyrics, which can be different from your book writer, which is the script, the dialogue and everything people are speaking. And then under, so the, I guess under all of that, the lyricist is a lyricist, like walking down the street in 42nd street and be like, Hey Charlie, I got this, I got this hook. I need you to do like, I'm walking down the street. You put that to a 12 piece band.

[8:09] Charlie Rosen: Yeah, more or less. So you're kind of describing what it is. I mean, a lot of people, you know, the word orchestrator is an interesting word, right? A lot of people don't know what it is. And admittedly, before I got into theater, I didn't, when I was younger, I didn't totally know either. And it is sort of an antiquated term that we really only use in theater and film scoring and orchestra settings. Like orchestrator is not a term that we use outside of theater a lot, but what the definition of the orchestrator is, and you could swap it out for terms that are more common in other places, like a music producer, the producer of a pop song and arranger of a jazz band, you know, arranger, orchestrator, producer, top line person, hook writer, like all of these people basically take the building blocks of somebody's vision, be it the composer, lyricist, sometimes the same person, sometimes they often are like one unit, essentially, and hear the unrealized potential in a piece of music, right?

So you hear what they've done. And because you've developed such a large vocabulary of music through listening and absorbing and writing and learning and being analytical about music and picking apart its DNA and going, what makes this genre, this genre, what instruments does use, what melodies does use, what rhythms, what harmony, what chord changes, what grooves, you know, what country is it from? You have this bag of tricks, and you hear the unrealized musical potential in their music, and then you explode it with all your bells and whistles. That's what being an orchestrator is. And that's what the process is. And it happens very fast.

[9:37] Alan Seales: I feel like that is so under-related, or under-appreciated. Is that what I'm looking for? Because, like, Michael R. Jackson wrote the lyrics for...

[9:47] Charlie Rosen: And the music.

[9:50] Alan Seales: Okay, okay. So there you go. What's the difference, then, between the orchestrations and the music for this?

[9:54] Charlie Rosen: Great question. It's a really great question. So in the pure sense of the definition of an orchestrator, they write what the orchestra does. We decide what the orchestra does, right? And so, you know, Michael doesn't have experience writing for all the various instruments that are in his orchestra. He plays the piano, and he plays some guitar. He writes a song. It's on one instrument, one instrument only. He writes the lyrics. And so I take, just pure definition-wise, you take the one instrument, and you go, okay, that's great. So the guitar will play this. The second guitar will add on to that by playing this. The drums should play this. The piano should play this. The saxophone should play this. The second piano will enhance the first piano's part by playing this.

[10:50] Alan Seales: Yeah, so by its definition, it's purely deciding, based on your vocabulary, what other instruments' depth can we bring to this piece of music by adding in more colors.

[10:56] Charlie Rosen: Yes, and well, you know, so the legendary Broadway orchestrator, Robert Russell Bennett, he orchestrated, you know, Rodgers and Hart, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Jerome Kern shows, Kurt Weill, Cor Porter shows, George Gershwin shows, Andy Gets Your Gun, Oklahoma, Anything Goes, Showboat, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, Camelot, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, South Pacific, The King and I, Kiss Me Kate, Allegro, like, you know, this is, Vinny's Rainbow, this is a heavy cat. And he has a great book with some essays at the end of it about, like, what it means to be an orchestrator. And he says something that I really love, where, like, if an orchestrator also themselves didn't feel like they were a composer, then they wouldn't be a very good orchestrator.

So there is a very close relationship between the composer and orchestrator, because they're both fleshing out the composition of the music, for sure, without a doubt. It's a very, very hand-in-hand relationship.

[11:49] Alan Seales: And so then where does the relationship between, if they're all different people, the music, the lyricist, the orchestrator, and the director, and the director comes in, and are they giving you, if you're building a cake out of these songs, are they giving you the raw ingredients, or are they putting the icing on the top?

[12:06] Charlie Rosen: Yeah, that's great. That's a great metaphor, first of all. You know, first of all, I think what makes a show successful, what makes a musical successful, is if all departments, even though we're all have, we have different disciplines, we're all aligned in the same aesthetic. Everybody agrees on whatever the abstract aesthetic, whatever the abstract message, dramaturgy, and direction of the show is, and everybody is interpreting it correctly, and adding to that with their skill set. As far as who builds the scaffolding and who makes the cake, it's sort of like the initial foundation of the shape of the cake is done by the composer, and the lyricist together. They decide, okay, the cake's going to be a three-tiered cake, and it's going to be three squares. Then the director goes, okay, I think we should maybe think about embellishing this cake with these various colors of frosting, and what is this for?

[13:02] Charlie Rosen: Is it a wedding cake? Is it a birthday cake? Like let's figure out like what the function of this cake is. Then the orchestrator is like, you know, the step of the process where we are like, okay, well, we're going to use this type of frosting and this type of nozzle to make this shape. And then I'm going to put a flower here. Then I'm going to put a little bride and groom on top, you know? And then I'm going to like, we embellish. I also like to say like the composer and the lyricist are the architect of a building. And the orchestrator is the interior designer. Like they build the foundation and the scaffolding, but the orchestrator is the person who makes it a functional living space. And the functional living space, I mean, the inside can make or break a building.

That's, I love that metaphor. And it's sort of like, okay, you've built this house. What is this room for? Oh, this room is for, this is a living room. Okay. So it needs X, Y, and Z. It needs these things to feel good and look good. And like, what vibe do you want? What color palette do you want? That's the orchestrator.

[13:52] Alan Seales: Oh, that's, that's incredible. I think that's a whole, a whole line of career focus that people don't even know about. They're just like, oh, I'll write songs. And then how do they get to be these big band or big thing? And they are completely different skill sets as somebody who does both, you know, coming up with like the key melody, that is the core of a song that is a completely different skill set to then going, okay, how do I want to decorate this melody? And what's going to play it? These are, they're complimentary, but, but separate skill sets for sure.

[14:20] Charlie Rosen: Well then, as I said, I started out actually playing in the pit of 13. And so, and then the next, the next credit you have, I think was going straight to Bloody Andrew Jackson. Yeah. Bloody William Jackson was the first time you worked with, with Alex Timbers, right? Yeah. So, and then came back around for Moulin Rouge. So be the person you want to work with the next time. That's a great advice. So I guess at what point did you decide that, that you wanted to continue, I guess, evolving your skillset, right? Because you could make a career out of just playing in the pit.

[14:54] Charlie Rosen: Totally. And people do, and they have great careers, long lasting careers, but you know, I've always been somebody, I grew up in a very musical family. My mother is a classical bassoonist and plays a bunch of different woodwind instruments. And my dad is like a jazz musician and a pianist and an organist and guitar and banjo and accordion. He plays all sorts of stuff. He also plays silent movie theater organs. So we have a theater organ installed in our house in LA, like this big pipe organ and we would screen silent movies and he would play them. So play them too. Yeah. So like before talkies, but when there were still silent movies, usually these theaters would have these organs installed and that they would watch the show and they would score the silent movie live with an organ or if they couldn't afford an organ, it would be a piano.

That all being said, I grew up around a lot of large ensemble music, right? Orchestras, big bands, concert bands, wind ensembles, you know, my parents had a 4th of July party every year where they would get like 60 people and we would play John Phillips Sousa marches with their friends and they'd play the Brandenburgs. I grew up around a lot of just like big sounding music. So I've always just loved big sounding stuff. And so what, you know, once I got into a sort of middle school, I wanted to play in bands and I was playing guitar and bass and drums and whatever. And so I got into all of that stuff. And then in California I was doing a lot of ska bands. So those always have horns. So it's sort of like evolved.

I've always had a fascination with big sound, you know, like and what makes that sound and how you combine other sounds to make them more than the sum of their individual parts. And why does that work?

[16:20] Charlie Rosen: I didn't know I was going to fall into Broadway until I was in high school and I did 13 the musical in LA. And the gimmick of that show for people that don't know is that it has a teenage cast and a teenage orchestra. Jason Robert Brown felt really strongly about having an onstage teenage band. That was my way into theater. And so I moved to New York to do that. And then that same theater company in LA did Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. And I did that as a junior and senior in high school and then moved to New York. And those two shows happened to move to New York one year apart to Broadway in the same theater, actually the Jacobs. And so I had a foot in the door inside of playing in pits. Then I could sort of look around internally and say like, okay, there's all these other shows and they have these huge orchestras and I'm looking at this music and I'm gigging, I'm playing in cabarets and concerts and meeting people.

And it always says orchestrated by and like, oh, what is that person? What are they doing? Oh, they're doing this. Oh, they're doing this. This is the thing that I love. So that was sort of when I found out, like I think this is what I want to do. And I learned that theater is a really great place for me because it involves being such a Swiss army knife of a musician, sort of like being a musical chameleon because every show is a different genre. And so it requires you to have like a really deep understanding and appreciation of as many genres of music as you can so that you can utilize them if you need to, to when certain shows pick a genre to dramatize, you know? So it's really, it's really great for someone like me who like, I just enjoy so many different types of music and put that to work.

[17:43] Alan Seales: We're going to take a short break. Stay tuned for more of the episode.

[17:58] Charlie Rosen: After Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, you went to One Man, Two Governors, Sierra and O, um, Honeymoon in Vegas, uh, Nancy Opal, shout out, love her. She's one of my oldest friends in New York, American Psycho, underrated Prince of Broadway, Be More Chill. Yeah. So the Be More Chill, uh, the Be More Chill craze. Yeah. We'll call it the great, like it came to Broadway because of Spotify and it's in something you said very on a really interested in me because you said that when you're, when you're going through and setting the mood or I forget how you phrased it, but when you're trying to get the overall feel of a show, you, you, you're looking on Spotify and you're looking on YouTube and other things and you're using the internet and social media to figure out what path you want to head down.

And I guess how did that particular, did you always do that sort of thing when it comes to how you were building, um, when you, how you were building shows and how you're building your orchestrations and then how does that influence Be More Chill specifically?

[19:56] Charlie Rosen: Yeah. I would say every time you orchestrate a show, you definitely, definitely have some sort of musical, you know, meet and greet with the composer to be like, what do you like? Who are you musically? What things do you listen to? What's influenced your writing? You know, what do you listen to for fun? What is this? You know, and I actually, as it relates to Be More Chill, I just opened my email because I know for a fact that I have a, from like 2015 when we first worked on Be More Chill, a like Joe Iconis music inspo email in which he sort of cataloged, like here's what inspires me. Here's what inspired Be More Chill. Like here's a bunch of really great, you know, horror movie soundtracks from the eighties.

John Carpenter score, these, you know, Halloween and, and, and, uh, The Shining and, you know, stuff like that. We want some of this stuff. Here's some like fifties sci-fi. It's got Theremin in it. I want some of this stuff in there. Here's some like ska, here's some punk, here's some singer songwriter, here's some, you know, so it, he was very clear about like these are the things that inspired the show. So just listen through all of it, get it in your head. Then when it comes time to work on the music, you'll see what I meant because he doesn't play all those things. So he plays the piano. So, you know, I listened to his piano playing. They go, ah, I see what you meant. I see what you meant. Because you've made it very clear what inspired you to write this way.

[20:13] Alan Seales: But the social media aspect though, like how would you have done it before the rise of Spotify before the, the ease of being able to just go, hold on a second. Oh, here's a thousand songs to choose from. You know, that's such a great question because I've never, I've never done this in an age where all music wasn't readily available to you. So it does make you wonder how, what did they do in the past? I mean, I guess they got together and like somebody had a bunch of records and they would just put on records and listen to records and say, oh yeah, check out, check out this record. Let's listen to it together. You know, I bet it was something like that.

[20:48] Charlie Rosen: I guess. I mean, it's, it's really cool to me. It's fascinating how everyone's different process works and especially when it comes to, uh, yeah, to, to a composer, right? Who's working with another lyricist. And then now you're adding in the orchestrations, right? Because the, the composer is like, oh, I'm going to write these songs. I need to come up with the melody. But then some people have melodies in their heads and they have no words to go with it or they'll put the words down and then someone's got to put a melody. Every composer, lyricist team has a different, a different place that that line is. Some are purely like you go first. Now I go first. But some are like, I wrote this melody. Can you want to set it? And some are like, well, I, you know, I put, I wrote this verse. And then it really is like the line is blurred. It's totally different for every team. That much is true.

[21:34] Alan Seales: What do you prefer to do? How's it, what's your preferred method in a perfect world?

[21:38] Charlie Rosen: I prefer to start with lyric because I don't write lyrics. And so I prefer to look at a lyric and find the rhythm and the, and the melody in the lyric and see like, oh, this lyric is an emotional high point. This, this, this word is important. It should be held out longer. This, uh, you know, we need something to go between this verse and this chorus to build into it. Like I prefer to start with lyric and set the lyric. And then sometimes if you need to change a word here and there to make it fit into the music you do, but I prefer to go lyrics first, but that's totally just me.

[22:09] Alan Seales: Well, when did you get involved with, with A Strange Loop then?

[22:12] Charlie Rosen: So I got involved with A Strange Loop in 2019 and now just for background, Michael Jackson has been writing this show for like 20 years. You know, it's been around a long time in many, many, many different forms and iterations. But it wasn't really ready for orchestrations until like 2000, late 2018, 2019 when it was going off Broadway to Playwrights. Now the sad part of it is before me, before I got involved, there was another person named Darius Smith, who was a great musician who was very, very close to Michael. And sadly he passed away way too young. He was, he was ill and he passed away and he was going to orchestrate the show. And so that was a few months before it was going off Broadway, which is very, very sad, very tragic.

But the director of Strange Loop also directed Be More Chill. So in 2019 I was doing Be More Chill and the director came up to me at the Lyceum and said, hey, we're kind of scrambling like a sadly, you know, our orchestrator is in poor health. And I think we need somebody to step in. Do you think you could do it? And I thought, you know, of course I've, I've always like been a fan of Michael's writing. Like whenever I've seen him in concerts, sort of been like, this guy's the truth. Can I curse on this podcast? I was about to say this guy's the fucking truth. You know, like every time I'd hear him play and sing a song he wrote, I was like, yeah, fuck yeah. More of that. Say that shit. You know, like don't fuck yeah.

Don't fucking hold back. This is your, your fucking truth. And you write it and you write it the way you write it. And he's always been like that. And it feels like finally the world kind of like kind of the world kind of caught up with him and the way that he expresses himself through song. And so when he asked me, I was like, oh shit, of course I would love to work on this show. Thank you so much for asking me. So yeah, that was 2019. We did the off Broadway run. The pandemic happened, uh, which was sad, but during it, he won a Pulitzer. And you know, also, I think there was a lot, this, this whole reckoning surrounding Broadway and what Broadway is saying and who's it saying to and why is it saying, I think gave rise to people higher up in Broadway who are maybe more closed-minded going, you know what, maybe now is the time for Michael Jackson to speak his truth. And I'm really glad that the world finally caught up with him and Broadway, I finally caught up with him and it's paying off, you know, it's, it's just all so exciting.

[24:22] Alan Seales: Yeah. There there's a lot of the modern, the modern things are speaking exactly to what you were talking about. It's ironic. Cause I went to go see Wicked last night actually. And which has been around like 20 years, I think 2003 or something. Yeah. So 19 years. Yeah. And I was like, what is it about this show that has made it last so long? Because it's, it's, it's good. It's good. But it doesn't like to me, and there's nothing against Wicked and like Cats and Chicago and Wicked. And there are these shows that run forever that when you, when you leave, you're like, that's really good. That's the change that has influenced me, but it like, I don't walk away feeling changed. Right. And so that's what a lot of these, the shows these last few seasons have just been so incredibly personal, I guess. Is that what, is that what I'm trying to get at? Yeah. It's like the, the writer and the music team too has made things so incredibly deep and personal on a level that I haven't seen.

[25:27] Charlie Rosen: On the thing that I think I love most about A Strange Loop is that this show being sort of semi autobiographical autobiographically inspired is just sort of like, it's so specific about Michael's experience growing up as a queer black man in the church and moving to New York and finding himself. That is such a specific thing. And obviously I am a straight white Jew. So I am none of those things. I'm none of those things. But I think that if you try to write a show for everybody, you write a show for nobody. Right. And so he wrote a show for him and his experience. And because it's so specific and so honest, it is accessible if you.

[27:05] Charlie Rosen: The musical genres of A Strange Loop are like Michael's sort of his history and his musical tastes. And so the way he describes it is like it's one part sort of like white girl singer-songwriters. You know, there's like a lot of Tori Amos inspired, Liz Phair, Joni Mitchell, that kind of thing. And then the other half is like drawing from the music of his youth, which is like the music of the black church and like how those two things meet, which colors we use when to say what. And so without giving too much away, like kind of the way it's shaken down is like the main character's inner journey is expressed through these like singer-songwriter things that you might hear at a rock club. And like so that could be like exciting.

Like there's an exciting rock song called Exile in Gayville about it's kind of twisted. It's about him like trying to find somebody to hook up with on Grindr on his phone and striking out. And then there's some really sensitive sort of like guitar strumming ballads when he's talking about like his past and his experiences. And then the external stuff, when his thoughts are telling him like, no, fuck you, you're a bad person and here's why. Or like his experiences with his family, like the stuff externally that's happening to him, experiences in the church are all sort of like preachers saying things to him about how homosexuality is a sin and they're sort of more church inspired. And so again, me and Michael sat down together in 2019 and just went on a deep dive of music.

And I, again, I didn't grow up in the church. I'm Jewish. I grew up in the temple. But that being said, it is undeniable that the music of the black church has influenced basically all pop and contemporary music to some degree for the past hundreds of years. And so like inevitably, like I think it's important, especially as a white person who plays music that is derived from the music of the African diaspora, like we have to get into that stuff and know where it came from and why and where the roots are in that deal. So I had some experience with it, but it was really Michael that'd be like, okay, let me guide you through like, let's get into the deep stuff, you know what I mean? So that was really fun. And then the sort of singer-songwriter stuff for me, I was like, I got that's fine. That's easy. That's stuff that I know very well. But yeah.

[29:18] Alan Seales: Do you take, I guess when you're starting a new project, do you just wait or take all your initial direction off of the songwriter, the lyricist, the composer, and the director in terms of looking for that inspiration? Like who sends the initial Spotify list? Or are you sitting down with them? Like Michael R. Jackson came with a specific thing in mind already. It was a show that was already, you know, in the works for a long time. But like if I were to come to you with a new project right now, and I'm like, I've got the idea for water bottle, the musical, I'm holding in my water bottle. And it's going to be about a cup that falls in love with a plastic spoon. Like where do you start?

[29:59] Charlie Rosen: Usually it's the composer. The short answer is, you know, they, you have to sit down with them and you don't generally as an orchestrator have a ton of one-on-one interaction with the director necessarily. Until the exception being like, if you come to rehearsal in preparation for orchestrating the show, you show up to rehearsal and then you can talk to the director about like, you know, the scene, like what are the characters feeling in this scene? Like, how do you want this underscore to feel? What do you want things to feel like? You know, what's what dramatically matters to you in the text of the script that you want to pull out? When do you want music to start and stop? If it's a big dance show and the choreographer has a lot of opinions about like, okay, I really need these dance hits accentuated.

There's a kick here. I need something in orchestration to mirror this kick or this throw or this leap or this toss or this spin. That stuff is very, very common. And if it's, if the director is also the choreographer, which is common, then you have an even closer personal working relationship because they not only tell you how it needs to feel, they're also telling you like, okay, well in this four bars, the dance suddenly becomes a cha-cha or a Charleston or whatever. So like, can you, can you reflect that in the orchestration, especially in big dance shows that have long dance breaks that sweep and go all around. And in those shows, you'll often have someone called the dance arranger whose job it is, is to come up with that initial material with them and then figure it out on the piano. And then you take their piano part and blow it up. So, you know, you can add that person to the mix as well.

[31:00] Charlie Rosen: Wow. I didn't know there's a dance arranger too. So there, that has nothing to do with the actual choreography. That's the music that goes along with the choreography.

[31:06] Charlie Rosen: Yeah. In big, in big shows, in big, broad, big, like high budget dance musicals that have a lot of dancing, there will often be someone who is a dance arranger and usually the dance arranger and the choreographer have a very close relationship and they do a lot of shows together. So the composer will write the songs. And then the, before the orchestrator even comes in to dance, the director says, okay, I know I want a big dance break in this song. So can you take the song and stretch out the middle of it and write a, and the dance arranger composes a bunch of stuff inspired by the song in the middle. And the choreographer says, okay, I'm going to do like a kick here and a Charleston here and a Mambo here and this here, some kicks here.

I want this, like, they're going to tiptoe around cause they're really scared. So can you make the melody really scary? You know, so the dance arranger will craft and shape the, again, the architecture of the dance breaks before the orchestrator does that. That's in big dance shows. Not most, I would say like half and half. I have, the only show I've ever worked on that had a dance arranger so far is Some Like It Hot. Not even Moulin Rouge, I was going to ask. It seems like that was every song in Moulin Rouge.

[32:35] Charlie Rosen: I know there was no dance arranger. I mean, not an official one, but, you know, Justin Levine as supervisor and Matt Stein as the track producer would work closely with Sonia to be like, what are you thinking here? What kind of, you want something hard hitting, you want something like expansive. And so they would put, they sort of were the dance, the de facto dance arrangers by the fact that they were producing the tracks.

[32:56] Alan Seales: Yeah. That's, that's so cool. I love that there's no right or wrong way, like there's no black or white way to, to do any of this stuff because once you get in, you, you go where you're needed and you fill in holes. And this is, I mean, look at your credits too, cause you've played multiple instruments in the pit and you were a swing, I think, right? For 13, right?

[33:16] Charlie Rosen: Yeah. Cause 13, 13, 13, like, because they were all teenagers, they couldn't hire, you know, random adults to be the band members because I was on stage. So I had to swing all the instruments.

[33:26] Alan Seales: Right. Well, that, that was something else that, of course, you know, looking back on it, I'm like, of course that's right. But when I found out that pit has swings and alternates and standbys too and everything, right? Like you've got to have protection in the music, just like you have protection on the stage. And that's a whole other, that's a whole other, like a framework and scene that you just would never know. You would never know unless you were a pit musician, but there's a whole thing of like, everybody has to have five subs and the subs have three tiers of how good they are. Basically, like how many times, if they've played the show one time, they're a first time sub and you can't have any more than like three first time subs in a pit.

If then they can become like, they can be asked back. They're a tier two sub. So you can have more of those. Then there's a thing called designated sub. If the, if the music director sort of Knights them and they're like, they dumped them, like, okay, you have proven yourself. You are designated. Now you are considered as good as the original person and you can come in whenever you want. You don't have to check. You're as good as it doesn't matter how many of them there are. You are as good as the original.

[34:19] Alan Seales: So there's three levels.

[34:24] Charlie Rosen: Wow. I didn't know that. That's cool. And then, and any interest in, in being a musical director or conducting?

[34:30] Charlie Rosen: You know, when I was earlier in my career on in theater, I was doing like a lot of music direction stuff. And, uh, I love me. I love music directing. I love conducting. I love conducting orchestras. You know, I conduct my own personal orchestras. I have one called the Broadway big band, which is a 17 piece jazz orchestra that plays Broadway music. I also have a 35 piece jazz orchestra called the eight bit big band that plays all video games. You can drop that in. Yeah.

[35:06] Alan Seales: This is, this is, yeah, it's a jam. This is on my track now. Yeah. Right. Tetris theme song.

[35:14] Charlie Rosen: Hey, I want to say, right. Yeah. Gentle fade, gentle fade. There we go. Yeah. So that band I conduct, I do all the arranging I conduct and I play, I love conducting and I love music directing. The thing is about theater music directing specifically is that the, the music director is truly one of the most unsung heroes in the entire show, I would say, because they are a member of the creative team. So they're there from day one in development of the show all the way until the show closes or they leave the show. They're the only member of the creative team to continue on after opening. So they are like babysitting the show. They're responsible for upkeeping the show long after the entire creative team has left they're there.

And they're required to be at all the rehearsals all the time. They're not only do they have to be great conductors, they have to be great piano players. They have to be great vocal coaches. They have to be good managers because they're managing these pits of, of musicians and managing these actors because they're the only ones left from the creative team after they're gone. So it's like, it takes incredible interpersonal skills, conducting skills, piano playing skills. Yeah. And also on top of that, they're sometimes asked to like improvise stuff and make up stuff on the fly and do all sorts of things that are required for them. And they have to sit at the piano at rehearsal a lot of the times forever.

And so it's such a demanding job. It really honestly should probably be two jobs. There should be somebody who's in rehearsal, teaching vocals and music directing the rehearsals. Then there should be somebody who takes over as the band director and conductor who runs the show because, and there are people that do all those things and they do them great. And that is mind blowing. And there's no Tony award or any recognition for them. Nothing. There used to be, there used to be a music director Tony award and there's not anymore.

[37:04] Alan Seales: When did that go away?

[37:09] Charlie Rosen: 1964, the 18th Tony award was the last time there was a conductor music director Tony. And so because of all that, and because you're required to be there all the time means like, that's your job. You can do that. You can't be at home. You can't work on other shows. You can't do anything. That's your job.

[37:19] Alan Seales: Right. And so for me, I like to have a lot of irons in the fire and be working on a lot of shows. And as an orchestrator or supervisor, you have a lot more flexibility to be like, okay, so this show has band rehearsals and tech and opening for this month and a half. And then you're like, great. That's great. Next show. Also, it takes a, there's a special kind of mental fortitude that it takes to play the same show every single night, eight nights or seven nights a week, eight times a week with one day off. And that I, because I just have so many ideas and so much like other things I want to be doing. It's not for, it's not for me. And that's why I moved away from pit work and music directing, because I like to be doing multiple shows, movies, my, my jazz, video game music. Like I sort of like to be doing all these different things and I feel a little bit locked down running shows.

[38:09] Alan Seales: That's what I was actually going to ask about next was bring up the, the 8-Bit Big Band is, is I'd love, I love all of this was looking at the website. So it's cool. Like for the 8-BitBigBand.com, like your first album, uh, album one press start came out in 2018. Like it's the Super Mario 64 theme song, uh, Super Mario Brothers, Mambo, Lonely, Lonely Star, Zelda, Lullaby. Um, what else? Oh, the Final Fantasy theme. One of my favorites. That's great. And then you got so much more that you've got on YouTube, which is where I just pulled that Tetris, uh, audio from, but I cannot believe, uh, just how good it sounds.

[39:01] Charlie Rosen: Thank you. Well, you're welcome. It's and, and it's, but it's one, that big band music is like that one genre and you've applied it to, uh, some nostalgia that I think so many people can relate to myself included. Like I'm a child of the eighties. I grew up with all those games. Right. And, but you just mentioned video games and, and other things outside of theater, right?

[39:08] Alan Seales: So, is the budget obviously different for TV films?

[39:14] Charlie Rosen: That's for sure.

[39:15] Alan Seales: Out of theater. So, like I was, I'm thinking back to what, what, what, making, making a Frozen 2, whatever that, you know, when Disney Plus first came out that one of the behind the scenes things was like how they made Frozen 2 and I remember very vividly the one episode where they heard the orchestrations being recorded in the studio for the first time with like a hundred piece orchestra and it was the most moving, beautiful sort of experience that like they captured it beautifully in this series. And obviously this is Disney money. We're talking Disney budget for Frozen 2, which is going to do well, but is, do you, do you gravitate to these other projects for any particular reason? Is it, is it the ability to do a hundred pieces or do you like smaller, like video games is that is a completely different thing.

[40:05] Charlie Rosen: I like big, big, big, big. I like as many musicians as you can cram in a room. That's, that's where I like to be. And, you know, I gravitate, it's not necessarily the budget that brings me into these other worlds some, but which is great. Obviously there's more money there and that's fantastic. And so I'm thrilled about that always to keep my lights on and keep the rent paid. But the, it's just, they're just different. They're just different mediums. You know, they're different crafts. They require different approaches. They have different processes. And I just find that very fascinating. You know, what works on the theater, what works on stage, the same sort of base skill sets are there, which is seeing a visual and understanding what it needs musically to support its drama.

The base ideas are there, but the delivery vehicles are different. And so they require different skill sets, technical approaches, production approaches, you know, producorial music, produce, producing, taking pen to paper. They all have just different approaches. And video games is really cool because it's a completely different way of thinking because things have to loop. The player is like the film editor based on how they play. So things have to, music has to change dynamically based on what's going on on screen, which you can't predict on like traditional media, which is linear.

[41:14] Alan Seales: Oh yeah.

[41:15] Charlie Rosen: You know, that's fascinating. But the player is the orchestrator of video game music. It's like, how many enemies are they fighting? What's their health level? That influences the orchestrating, you know, like that's fascinating. That's a whole other way of thinking. How is that tracked on the back end? So are you given storyboards? Is that when you start working or are you finished? Like for video games specifically, and I'm nerding out here, like because I just spent hours playing Destiny 2. Yes, I still play that game.

[41:40] Alan Seales: Oh yeah.

[41:41] Charlie Rosen: Don't judge me. But yeah, when you're getting the work, when you're like, all right, we're trying to bring you in, you're going to do the orchestrations for Destiny 2. Are you getting finished cinematics? Are you getting finished storyboards?

[41:57] Charlie Rosen: Admittedly, I have like somewhat limited experience doing video games as I do compared to doing film and TV and especially Broadway, of course. But the limited stuff I've done, they have like sort of really rough looking, you know, animations of the scenes where like they're super blocky and they're polygons. They're not like finessed. The CGI and the 3D is like not finessed. And they just sort of show you this and they're like, okay, we're going to send you this and you can score to it. I haven't done any of the sort of like nuts and bolts like, okay, we need music to underscore this fight. We don't know how long it's going to take. We don't know. I haven't admittedly done a ton of that yet, which is partially the reason why I started doing the 8-Bit Big Band.

A, because I love video game music, but B, I sort of want to break more into that world for sure. So far, the composing for video games I've done has been like set pieces of music that they're like, okay, give us your set piece of music and we'll edit it and deal with it later. I haven't like fully scored a video game as far as the interactive audio of it goes. But if it's anything like the film stuff, yeah, they sort of show you like rough animatics, rough mock-ups of what things are going to look like. And you just have to use your imagination and be like, well, I bet that dragon is going to look super scary.

[43:11] Alan Seales: That's really neat. I'm fascinated by all of this and it's sort of peeling back the layers of the onion in my mind to talk about how many different roles and jobs and responsibilities there are behind video games now. I mean, how much does Fortnite pull in on a monthly basis? The amount of money that games make compared to traditional film and their budgets are just insane. And also musically, what's so cool about film versus video games is for a film, it's like, okay, this is a two and a half hour film. There's about a hundred minutes of music, start to finish, done. Video games, it's non-linear. So they often need like five times as much music to fill all of the content, the different places that the character may or may not even go.

Then there's DLC and there's expansion packs. Those need music. So the amount of the music to project ratio is so much higher in video games than it is film, which is why on one thing they'll employ many different composers because there's just so much music.

[44:18] Charlie Rosen: It's fascinating because you need music that can become iconic. I mean, literally, what I was just playing, the Zelda music, the Mario Brothers music, the Tetris music, all of this, these were made by composers and orchestrators who have then now ingrained their songs into our young brains in the same way that the Back to the Future theme song was. This is why I started doing the 8-Bit Big Band because when you look at music in the past, you have these canons, you have these collections of song that generations grow up with through various experiences. So like Broadway shows, you see a Broadway show, you love the cast album. Film, you see the film, you love the score. And then you grow up with that music.

Those are iconic themes. The Great American Songbook, these are collections of songs and those scores have been now, because they're so ingrained in our culture, they can be reimagined and rearranged and expanded upon and redone and remixed and remastered. And I noticed that because we're a generation that's grown up with video games, another new media, we grew up with this whole world of scores and songs and themes that are iconic to our upbringing. And so now we have what I'm calling the Great Video Game Songbook of these iconic themes. So we can give the video game music the same treatment as the legendary arrangers and musicians of the mid-century were doing with the Great American Songbook, like Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald and Quincy Jones and people who are rearranging iconic melodies from the pop music canon, we can do with the video game music canon because that body of work exists and it stands alone now.

[45:50] Alan Seales: That is brilliant. And I think you actually need to make a real book or a real digital book anyway.

[45:54] Charlie Rosen: I know, I've talked about it a lot. I've talked about it a lot.

[45:59] Alan Seales: Yeah, that's brilliant. And got Nintendo, Sega, like some of these original, original games, you could just, like they're the sitcom theme songs, right? Like you play three notes and you know exactly what it is. And the really amazing thing about video game music in the past is like the technical limitations that they were working with in the 80s and 90s on these consoles was like the smallest framework. I mean, they had two sounds that they could play two notes at the same time, three notes at the same time, and that's it. And they had to program them with numbers. It wasn't even like playing a keyboard. They're typing in hexadecimal to like put these melodies. It's unbelievable. And they came up with these iconic melodies.

And so now, it's sort of like orchestrating a Broadway show or like, okay, those are the raw building blocks that you've given me. You've given me the melody and the groove and the harmony. And now I can go, I can, and with the 8-Bit Big Band, I'm like the dance arranger and the orchestrator and the music, like I do everything. And so you can really explode it and like, go, okay, I see what you're going for. Now I'm going to take that and run with it as far as humanly possible. And because it's not for any other function besides being like an explosion of music, I can do anything. It's not for a show. It's not for any function or reason, doesn't underscore anything. It's just like, blah, it's everything. It's the whole thing.

[47:13] Alan Seales: Well, so then combining all your worlds, you need to make orchestrating a Broadway musical, the video game, the documentary. You can do it. Do everything full circle.

[47:25] Charlie Rosen: Totally.

[47:27] Alan Seales: We're going to take a short break. Stay tuned for more of the episode.

[47:32] Alan Seales: So three questions I ask everybody to end every episode. And the very first one is just what motivates you?

[47:51] Charlie Rosen: What really motivates me is the communal aspect of making music. The best part about making music and making music with a lot of people is you build a world of friends around you. So as a result of working on Broadway shows and doing these big bands, doing the jazz orchestra, video game stuff, you built this whole community of people that just enjoy to play your music. You enjoy it when they play your music. You see them at recording sessions. You see them at casual birthday parties. The amount of community that surrounds creating music is half of what makes it worth doing.

[48:25] Alan Seales: That's funny you say that. I'm working with Joe Iconis now. We're recording some behind the scene stuff for his new album. Your name is coming up left and right. It's just like, oh, Charlie Rosen helped me with this and this. So now I finally get to put a face to the name.

[48:45] Charlie Rosen: Which by the way, that recording of Ammonia that's on that album, I arranged that and it came out so insanely good.

[48:52] Alan Seales: Oh my god. Heidi Flick and staff crushed it.

[48:54] Charlie Rosen: Oh my god. She crushed it. The way that the string sounded, it's just like, oh my god, it's unhinged.

[49:00] Alan Seales: It's so good. All right. Next question is, what advice would you give to your younger self and younger people listening now starting out down a similar path?

[49:07] Charlie Rosen: Yeah, definitely. Okay. The thing that I always say when I get this question is what helped me, what cemented me as being a person that people could call upon to help them realize their goals. Because when you first start doing something, when you first move to a place and you want to do something, you're nobody. People don't know you. These things cost a lot of money. It costs a lot of money to make a Broadway show or an album or a concert. So people want proof of concept. So what I say to everybody is, find the thing that you're good at, or at least slightly better at than most other people, and find a way to showcase that. For me, it was starting the Broadway big band. I knew I could write like this.

I knew I could write for big orchestras. Nobody else knew that. And no one's going to ask you unless you show them already. So luckily, I was able to convince the Beachmen, where I did my first show, to be like, can I do a big band show here? And I had enough Broadway contacts from doing the shows that I had done to ask some Broadway performers to sing. And that went really well. And we started doing the show at 54 Below. We did it for a number of years. And I just said, I invited as many people as I could to come to that show. Directors, music supervisors, music directors, other orchestrators, lots of Broadway composers, cold emailing as many people as I could who I thought would want to hear my skill set, and just said, please come, please come, please come. Check this out. And it worked. That was the thing that made people go, oh, this guy can do this. He has the chops. He has the chops.

[50:36] Alan Seales: If you build it, they will come.

[50:37] Charlie Rosen: If you build it, they will come.

[50:38] Alan Seales: All right, final question. If you can only see one show for the rest of your life, but you can see it as many times as you want, what would you see?

[50:45] Charlie Rosen: Ooh, maybe West Side Story. I mean, that score is just so, it's just so good. It's just so good.

[50:54] Alan Seales: I like it.

[50:56] Charlie Rosen: Like down the road, maybe after year five, I would just be like, I'm just going to stand in the pit. You can do it for me. Don't worry about it.

[51:04] Alan Seales: Where can we find you online?

[51:05] Charlie Rosen: Oh, I'm all over the place. So my personal social media is on Instagram at C. Rosen Music, Twitter, C. Rosen Music. And then The 8-Bit Big Band has a very hearty web presence as well. You can search The 8-Bit Big Band on Instagram and YouTube. We have a Discord channel if you want to join our Discord. It's on the website. Yeah. We have tons of YouTube videos at The 8-Bit Big Band, tons and tons. We have three albums out on Spotify and a couple of EPs. We have some shows coming up. We're playing at the Town Hall on December 8th. So in the winter, we'll be playing in Boston. We'll be playing in Miami. So we're all over.

[51:40] Alan Seales: I'm going to come to that. Yeah, I want to see this live. All right.

[51:42] Charlie Rosen: I'll let you know.

[51:43] Alan Seales: All right. You can get more of me at TheTheatrePodcast.com. I'm on Instagram, Twitter at Theatre underscore podcast. Leave a rating and a review wherever you're listening now. This has been edited by Well-Rounded Hoodlum Productions. Jukebox the Ghost gave us our intro and outro music. And Charlie Rosen, thank you so much. This has been an incredible conversation.

[52:01] Charlie Rosen: Yeah, real pleasure. Thank you for having me.