Steve Cuden: On today’s StoryBeat…

Doug Besterman: It’s The Producers. We’re in Chicago and the orchestra plays the first song and they get to the end and everybody applauds, and then they all look at Mel Brooks. And Mel turns to me and he says, “Doug, surprisingly good.”

Announcer: This is StoryBeat with Steve Cuden, a podcast for the creative mind. StoryBeat explores how masters of creativity develop and produce brilliant works that people everywhere love and admire.

So join us as we discover how talented creators find success in the worlds of imagination and entertainment. Here now is your host, Steve Cuden.

Steve Cuden: Thanks for joining us on StoryBeat. We’re coming to you from the Steel City, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Well, my guest today, Doug Besterman, is a much in demand orchestrator, arranger and composer whose works span Broadway film, television, and concert stages. Doug’s been nominated for the Tony Award six times, winning for the Producers, Thoroughly Modern Millie and Fosse with a career that includes numerous other iconic productions such as Young Frankenstein, Sister Act, and Anastasia. Doug has helped shape the sound of modern musical theater.

Recent Broadway credits include Death Becomes Her. Smash and boop. Internationally, his work has been heard in London, Berlin, and Hamburg in productions such as Rocky Sister Act, Charlie and The Chocolate Factory and Guys and Dolls. Doug’s film and TV orchestration credits include Mary Poppins Returns, the live action films of Aladdin Beauty and the Beast, and The Little Mermaid, Chicago, Frozen, Smash, and Schmigadoon. He’s contributed to countless live broadcasts and award shows, including the Oscars, Tony’s, Emmy’s, and Kennedy Center Honors. As a composer, Doug has written scores for Breathe, Little did I know, The big one-oh, and the new musical, Crumbs. His arrangements have been performed by extraordinary artists, ranging from Barbara Streisand to Beyonce, and by ensembles, including the Boston Pops and the US Military Academy Band.

Doug continues to champion musical storytelling across all media, including through the Arrival Arts Initiative. For more, please be sure to check out Doug Besterman.com. So for all those reasons and many more, I’m deeply privileged to welcome to StoryBeat, the exceptionally multi-talented orchestrator, arranger and composer, Doug Besterman.

Doug, welcome to the show. 

Doug Besterman: Thank you, Steve. Very happy to be here. 

Steve Cuden: Well, it is a great pleasure to have you here, trust me. So let’s go back in history just a little bit. When did you first start paying attention to music and to how orchestrations and arrangements affect what we hear? 

Doug Besterman: Um, I have a memory. Of being in first grade.

And we used to have music class in the, uh, cafeteria. And I remember, um, going into the cafeteria and the music teacher had a record player, remember those kids? And, um, she put the needle down and it was the instruments of the orchestra. This is a violin, this is a flute. And I remember thinking to myself, pay attention.

You need to know this. Wow. So I was, I guess I was five or six years old. 

Steve Cuden: Wow. You knew back then that that was really gonna be something in your life. 

Doug Besterman: I have no idea how I knew that, but I, for some reason I have of that very specific memory. So yeah, I begged for piano lessons at age five and, and I was, you know, I, I started identifying myself as a musician when I was.

In around eighth grade, 

Steve Cuden: were you a natural at it? Did you just write, take like a duck of water? Was it first class for you? 

Doug Besterman: I just loved it. I, I was never a great player. I’m a, I’m a decent pianist. I played the French horn also. I was good on the French horn. I mean, good enough to play at a really advanced college level, but not good enough to be a professional on either instrument.

But what they always said about me was that I played very musically. And so I think, yes, I mean, I think music was my language from the very beginning. 

Steve Cuden: So, explain for the listeners, when you say you played musically, what does that mean? 

Doug Besterman: Uh, when I played, you could hear me interpreting the music as I played.

So I would phrase the music. I would, I would give it personality in life while I played it because I could hear how I wanted the music to sound, how I, how I wanted. The listener to feel when I was playing, even though I didn’t have a great deal of technical facility using what I had, that was how I, how I would play.

Steve Cuden: You gave it your voice. 

Doug Besterman: Yes, exactly. Right. 

Steve Cuden: And I think that’s a super important thing. Many musicians play technically correctly, but there’s no, there’s no life to it. It’s not that interesting to listen to. You’re saying that even though you weren’t playing technically perfectly, it had a life. 

Doug Besterman: Yes, and I think that is what separates, at least initially, an amateur musician from a professional one in the sense that.

Look, so many people love music and they, they’ll pick up an instrument and they’ll play it and, and that’s wonderful. But what then makes people look at that musician and say, you could be a professional is that connection to the interpretation through that instrument. It’s, there’s a, another level that professionals get to.

And I, I’m not saying that to sound immodest, but I mean that, that is kind of the defining characteristic of what makes somebody a musician as opposed to a person who likes to play music. So 

Steve Cuden: you’ve had a heck of a career, not being a musician per se, but making music sound a certain way. 

Doug Besterman: Not, not a performing musician.

Yes, for sure. 

Steve Cuden: Right. Yeah. Well, obviously you’re, you’re a musician, you’ve gotta understand all that. Right? But not someone that goes on stage. You’ve never done a concert, uh, of your own work with you playing it, 

Doug Besterman: I assume. No, no. Heaven forbid. 

Steve Cuden: So I tell the listeners then, what orchestrating and arranging is, what are those things and what are the differences, right?

Is the difference between one and the other? Orchestrating and arranging? 

Doug Besterman: Yeah. Well let’s talk about those things ’cause there’s a technical difference and then there’s, you know, the sort of practical differences. So orchestration by definition is taking music, let’s say written for piano and adapting it, expanding it for an ensemble of instruments larger than just piano.

So that could be anything from piano, bass, and drums, or a string quartet. Or a small jazz ensemble to a symphony orchestra. And so I translate what’s in the piano music into the notes and the textures and the colors that an orchestra would play. So that’s orchestration, meaning that I’m starting with, if I’m starting with a piano part.

That piano part is a complete composition. It has all the melody, harmony parts fully fleshed out. If somebody played it on piano, it would sound like a finished piece of music. And then when I orchestrate it, I adapt that piece of music for an ensemble of some kind. Arranging is the addition of. Some of those elements that I just mentioned.

So you might be adding or changing harmonies, you might be writing an intro and ending counter lines, transitions, um, changing the feel of something, adapting it. Maybe it started as a waltz and now they want it as a bossanova. So that would be arranging. And so in years past when arranging was a skill that you saw regularly in commercial music, let’s say there was a, a title called a commercial arranger.

There was, that was a job description. And so, but that was kind of interchangeable with orchestrator in the sense that arrangers also then would orchestrate their arrangements. And so they might be referred to as an arranger, but really what they were doing was orchestrating in musical theater where I generally work, um, we call it orchestration, but it involves arranging.

So it’s actually kind of the reverse of that. I will, it’s very rare that I will get a composition that is. Utterly complete where I don’t need to write anything additional. And in fact, I’m generally hard because they want me to do whatever I think is right to make that music the best it can be. 

Steve Cuden: It, it’s the, it’s the taking the music and actually adding the various flourishes and changes within it that elevate it to another level.

That’s what I always think of it as a Is that accurate? 

Doug Besterman: Yeah. It gives it a particular polish, which is I think what you mean, but also, and we can talk specifically about musical theater, but it’s really true in any genre. When you hear music on piano, it’s piano music. Now, you might recognize a certain type of music, like if someone is playing ragtime or something like that, you think, oh, that’s kind of old timey.

But if somebody’s playing a a, a standard, what makes that standard sound like the 1930s or the 1940s, or the 1950s? Or the 1990s? Well, that will involve the orchestration, the choice of instrumentation, the choice of figures, the kinds of harmonies, that sort of thing. And that is. A lot of the time, what I’m asked to do is to put music in a period, 

Steve Cuden: to give it some kind of sense of where it belongs.

It’s not just a piece of music. It has time specificity to it. I, I think that that’s really a unique skill and obviously you’re very, very good at it. Where did you get your training? 

Doug Besterman: Um, I studied at the Eastman School of Music, and I studied good school. It wa it was, it’s, I I had an incredible four years there.

Um, and I studied under a professor named Rayburn Wright. Ray Wright, who started the Jazz and Contemporary Media program at Eastman. He’s no longer with us. He passed away in the eighties and he trained, you know, an incredible roster of musicians. And, um, I went there because I had heard of him. And while there was no undergraduate program in arranging per se, I knew that I could put something together.

And I ended up studying seven out of my eight semesters with Ray. And, um, you know, it was, it was that education really prepared me for a career as a commercial arranger. That’s really what he taught. And then of course, you get out into the world and you learn everything else you need to know kind of on the streets.

Steve Cuden: Well, isn’t that true for all of the arts where you learn a certain amount of foundational stuff in the, in a school and then you really learn it by doing it? 

Doug Besterman: Yeah, of 

Steve Cuden: course, of course. And there is no substitute for going out and actually doing it. That’s for certain. Um, when you talk about the piano, do you, do you do your work on a piano or a keyboard of some kind or do you do it on other instruments?

Doug Besterman: Yeah, I’ll work at the keyboard. Um, I use a computer notation program for my orchestrations and so I can hear a kind of a very simplified playback if I want to. And, um, for the first. 10 or 15 years of my career, I didn’t have that. So I was just writing with pencil onto paper. So I never got any feedback from my score other than what I heard in my head.

But it’s nice to hear things, to hear a playback because it helps you proofread it. So I could tell if there’s a wrong note, if I, if I entered something incorrectly, I can hear it right away. So I, I became a lot more accurate as an orchestrator when I could hear the playback. 

Steve Cuden: So your, your playback includes, um, you’re playing the various different instrumentation within the keyboard.

You’re playing, uh, violins and horns and so on, is that correct? Yeah, 

Doug Besterman: I can choose to listen to it that way, or if I wanted to, I could hear it just playback as all piano or something like that. But, but, um, yeah, generally speaking I try to make it sound as nice as I can, but it, it wouldn’t fool anybody. You wouldn’t think you were hearing an orchestra.

Steve Cuden: Mm-hmm. 

Doug Besterman: When I’m working in the notation song. 

Steve Cuden: Mm-hmm. And the piano itself, whether on the keyboard or however you’re doing it with a real piano, the piano has. As I understand it, and please correct me if I’m wrong, most of the orchestra within its keys that you can hear the orchestra in a piano as opposed to, let’s say you were going to work on with a clarinet, it doesn’t have the whole orchestra in it.

Am I correct by saying that? 

Doug Besterman: Yeah. Well, keyboards, if we’re talking about that sort of general category of keyboards, and yes, it has a piano keyboard, so we could refer to it as a piano, but so if we’re talking about a synthesizer or a sampler or uh, a digital, some sort of a digital instrument, um, that lives in a computer, which is really nowadays what we’re talking about, you can emulate the sounds of the orchestra, any sound really, um, at a very, very high level.

And so yes, if I spent the time, and sometimes I am asked to do that, and that’s a different process from orchestration. It’s not just orchestration. There’s a process of making what we call a mockup of an orchestration. So it’s literally just what it sounds like. It’s mocking up the sound of an orchestra for the purpose of, oftentimes it’s for the purpose of approvals.

If you’re working on a film and the director or directors want to hear what this song will sound like when it’s fully orchestrated, you’ll do a mockup. So then you really spend time to get it to sound good. 

Steve Cuden: Do, do you do the same thing in the theater? Do you mock it up? Sometimes 

Doug Besterman: there isn’t time.

Generally. Um, I have rarely been asked to make mockups in the theater just because there, the workflow is so different in theater than it is in the kinds of films that I do now. Film deadlines can be very, very intense, and there is a system now in the business in place for. Under those really intense deadlines for, for there being mockups generated in the film world.

But that usually involves a team of people. And I tend to work as a solo individual without a team, so it would be too much for one person to do 

Steve Cuden: it. You don’t hand your work off to others to help you like some, uh, arrangers do. 

Doug Besterman: No. I, I had a, I had a friend who once said to me, Doug, you worked too hard. You should be on the golf course and have an assistant who you say, orchestrate that in my happy style.

Orchestrated in your happy 

Steve Cuden: style. 

Doug Besterman: Yeah. Yeah. He, he, he couldn’t understand why I worked so hard, but you know, that’s the thing. When I get hired, they get hired because they want me to do my thing. So yeah. Sometimes orchestrators will get. Behind or things will be coming in at the last minute and we can’t make our deadlines.

So then you’ll ask someone to come in and help you, but then they’ll get that person’s style and you try to cast the right person in that role if they’re coming in to do a, a show with you. And I have many colleagues that have done that for me, and I’ve done that for other colleagues as well. But generally speaking, when I get hired or when any of my colleagues get hired, we’re hired because they want our individual taste.

Steve Cuden: Sure. Well, I I certainly personally know a number of people who are, for lack of a better word, ghosts. Yeah. They, uh, they will actually come in and they will do part of the orchestration because there’s just too much material under, too tight of a deadline. And, but they ha But the, somebody else gets the credit.

Doug Besterman: Yes. Yeah, there’s a certain amount of that. We’ll, sometimes we’ll ghost for each other in theater. There’s, you know, there’s kind of a, a way of crediting people even when they’ve just helped out a little bit. You can do that too. It just depends on the situation. Mm-hmm. But yes, we have, it’s the, the concept is the same.

There’ll be a somebody who’s getting the main credit and then there’ll be helpers who either have a less significant credit or no credit. 

Steve Cuden: Alright, so let’s go, go to the beginning of your process. When you, someone contacts you, a producer I assume, or someone like that, um, in the chain of command contacts you and says, we’d like to hire you to do this show, whatever this show is.

What is the first thing that happens? Do they present you with the music? Do they, how does it work? What, what’s the first thing that happens? 

Doug Besterman: Yeah. Generally they’ll contact me and they’ll say, we’d like to know if you’re interested. Can we send you some material and give it a listen and see if you think it’s in your wheelhouse?

That’ll sometimes happen. That’s, I think, a smart way of doing it because you know, somebody might come to me with something and I might listen to it and say, ah, that’s just not for me. I’m not gonna be able to do it justice. That hasn’t happened yet, but I, I think, I think it’s, you know, if somebody came to me and said, Doug, could you do this hip hop musical?

Yeah, I could probably fake it, but you might wanna get somebody that’s really an expert in that style, so. Mm-hmm. Um, so then I will listen to the material and more often than not, I will say, yes, I think there’s something I can add to this. And then we’ll have a conversation, meaning myself and the producer, or myself and the composer, lyricist or composers or whatever it happens to be on that project.

We’ll have a get to know you kind of meeting and talk about orchestration in general. It’s very hard, you know, if somebody says to me, well, how would you orchestrate this number? I wouldn’t know how to answer that question. It’s like that old quote about dancing, about architecture. You know, I don’t know how to talk about orchestration.

I have to show you. But oftentimes just in having a conversation will arrive at a sense of whether or not we would work well together. 

Steve Cuden: So they’re not looking for you to dictate to them what the ultimate sound is. They’re looking for you to interpret what their, what their vision is, and then your vision comes in on top of it.

Is that a good way to say it? 

Doug Besterman: Yeah, by the time somebody gets to me, just because I, you know, I tend to work at a particular level, a lot of those questions have already been answered. They’re not just starting out writing musicals and they haven’t learned how to ask themselves these kind of questions yet.

So they will know what era the show is set in. They will have musical references. Possibly, uh, if they’ve used those to write the score or they will say, you know, this is a in the style of, and we’ll name a band, or we’ll name a another score, or a composer or something to clue me into the kind of. Music that they’re hearing in their head when they’re thinking about the, the sound of their score.

And um, 99% of the time they’re able to communicate that to me really, really clearly. 

Steve Cuden: So like when you’re, when you get hired to do a Mary Poppins Returns being written by Mark Shaman and Scott Whitman, I’m assuming that the, there was a conversation about it feeling like the way the Sherman Brothers might have done it.

Doug Besterman: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Mark loved the original movie. I mean, I did too. And that was one of the things that we really bonded over, uh, when we started working on that project, is how, how well we knew the orchestrations of the original movie. And so we, he knew exactly what he wanted it to sound like. And so then all the orchestrators that came in on that film.

We had a great reference, we could go back and listen to those original orchestrations and, you know, that was Irwin Costell and, and you know, that’s trying to live up to that level is, but it was fun. It was so much fun. That was just, that film was a particular joy, the combination of that era and style of music, and then shaman score, which was just phenomenal.

Well, 

Steve Cuden: I’m, I’m pleased to say that the director of that movie, Rob Marshall, has also been on this sh on this podcast, so 

Doug Besterman: yeah, Rob’s wonderful. Yeah, 

Steve Cuden: he’s, he’s a very wonderful human being. All right, so now you’ve got the music, you’ve had this conversation. How do you go from there? How do you decide which instruments to add and not add?

Doug Besterman: Well, one of the first things we’ll do is they’ll, the producers will let me know how many musicians they’ll be employing, and that generally has to do with the size of the show. And without getting into a lot of inside baseball about musicals and musical theater, they’re different size theaters which hold different size audiences have different size orchestras associated with them.

So, and, and it really has to do with ticket sales. If you have a bigger theater, you can sell more tickets and make more money and afford to hire a bigger orchestra. So they’ve kind of standardized that in New York. And if they’re going out of town first, let’s say the show’s gonna premiere in Chicago and then they’re gonna bring it to New York.

They’ll try to coordinate it so that the orchestrations that they’ll ultimately end up with in New York will try to write those orchestrations for that number of musicians in the out of town city. So they’ll have an idea of what that number is. Let’s say it’s 14. And so then I get to decide in concert with the composers, composer composers, the musical team.

There might be a musical supervisor, a musical director, maybe a dancer ranger. We’ll start talking about what the demands of the score will be and what instrumentation will best serve that score. And I really ultimately have the final say, but it’s, it’s a collaborative conversation. Mm-hmm. So we’ll arrive at, and, and that’s a very important step.

If you get that wrong, then you suffer for the whole rest of the project with the wrong orchestra. You have to spend some time thinking about that and get that right. So that’s the next thing that happens is we choose the orchestra and then, um, usually. The orchestrator doesn’t start writing until the show goes into rehearsal because there are questions that they haven’t, that they won’t be able to answer until the show is in rehearsal.

Maybe the routines of the score, you know, of each song aren’t set yet. They don’t know exactly how long the intro will be, or the ending will be. It hasn’t been staged. They don’t know what they’re gonna need. They don’t know how long the dialogue in the middle will be. They don’t know what key the singer sings in that sort of thing.

If there’s dance music that has to be written, it has to be staged. They have to look at it, they have to make decisions about it. They might make certain sections shorter, certain sections longer, so there’s a process that they have to go through in rehearsal, but. Often there are a few numbers that over the course of the history of the development of the show have not changed significantly.

And if I can, I will start with those as early as possible in the process. But usually we have six, four to six weeks as an orchestrator to orchestrate a show. And we’re talking about anywhere from 2,500 to 4,000 measures of music. So it’s a very, wow. It’s a very big task. Four thousand’s at the outside.

That’s Les Mis. Uh, but I’ve done shows that were more, um, but they were. A particular, I did a show that was like a cantata, you know, it was all, all music for two and a half hours and that was 5,000 measures. But, um, 

Steve Cuden: and you did that one in six weeks as well? 

Doug Besterman: Yes, but not by myself. There were five of us. I did act one and the other four people did act two or something like that.

Wow. And I did half the show and the other four did the other half. So that was 

Steve Cuden: crazy. Well, so that, that must be very intense. 

Doug Besterman: It was very intense. Yeah. But usually one orchestrator, if things are moving along regularly schedule-wise, if they’re, they don’t get behind in rehearsal or there’s not something that they’re stuck on that they can’t figure out, one person can do it if you’re working quickly and efficiently.

Steve Cuden: Okay. So now the producers have said you have budgetarily, size-wise of the theater. You now have 14 instruments. It’s up to you to decide which 14:00 AM I correct? 

Doug Besterman: That’s right, yes. 

Steve Cuden: How do you make that decision? Is it based on that era of the show and that sort of thing? What kind of instruments you use?

Doug Besterman: All of those things. Yeah. What are we, what is, what does the show sound like? If it’s 1920s, then that’ll determine, you know, I’m gonna wanna have an orchestra of the kind that you would’ve had in the 1920s to play that kind of music. If it’s contemporary, it might be more of a rock band, let’s say, with other instruments, maybe a, you know, on a show like Sister Act or Bronx Tale, it was a, it was a rhythm section with a percussionist, keyboards, guitar, bass, drums, you know, and then horns, it was rock and roll horns, you know?

So it’s really determined by the, what the demands of the score are, that period and the style of music. 

Steve Cuden: Can the keyboards then supplement and add instrumentation throughout the show? 

Doug Besterman: They can, yeah. But remember, a keyboardist has two hands and 10 fingers, so there’s only so much that they can do. And keyboard, synthesizers, samplers, digital representations of live instruments are good at some things and not good at other things.

Um, especially when they’re played live. When you’re doing it bit by bit in your studio and building up a mockup, you can get away with more. But in a live setting, it’s gotta be playable and, and, you know, achievable. And we push it like we really push the bounds of that as much as we can in live theater.

And now in the last decade or so, maybe a little more, we can do pre-records as well. So there’s that element that’s now come into play. 

Steve Cuden: Do the musicians, does that bother them? Things are prerecorded. 

Doug Besterman: Yeah. Well, we don’t, you can’t prerecord a live musician, so you can’t, not on Broadway, you can’t hire a string section and prerecord it and say, we don’t need strings.

Thank you very much. But you can augment with samples with digital. In other words, you can sort of have more keyboards in a way. And you, you usually use that for rhythmic elements or things that need to be very, you know, tightly controlled. Um, but sometimes there’ll be other things on there. It just, but as long as we’ve hired the minimum number of flares that we’re required to hire, we’re now allowed to, to supplement with digital versions of, you know, extra sounds that we might want.

Steve Cuden: Can you make a smaller orchestra sound big? 

Doug Besterman: Well, that’s what we, that’s what we’re asked to do. I mean, on one of the shows I did this, well, all the shows really, but, but death becomes her in particular that needed to sound. Genuinely symphonic. And on that show on Broadway, we had 14. So we did all kinds of tricks, you know, in the keyboards with pre-records, with whatever we could come up with to make it sound the way it needed to sound.

Steve Cuden: Well, I’ve seen death becomes her and it is spectacular. Your work is spectacular on it, so congratulations to that. Uh, do you ever conduct the music as well? 

Doug Besterman: I do conduct, I don’t conduct on Broadway. That’s a separate job description. Usually there are cases where there have been music direct. Well, I’m not even, I it, it used to be that you couldn’t be the music director on the orchestrator, but I think you can be the music supervisor now in the orchestrator.

And maybe that’s been relaxed over the years. Um, but I’ve never done that job. I have conducted film sessions and I’ve conducted concerts and that sort of thing, but not on Broadway. No. 

Steve Cuden: Do you, do you enjoy that? 

Doug Besterman: Oh, I love conducting, yeah. There’s nothing better. 

Steve Cuden: I’ve never stood in that center of the orchestra like a conductor does.

But I’ve been told by people who do conduct that there’s virtually no sound like it, that you can reproduce with all the, or, uh, instruments facing you and coming at you at one time. 

Doug Besterman: It’s really true. And, and also strangely, the podium is the worst place to hear an orchestra. Like you wanna hear the orchestra from where the audience is sitting, but in a recording studio, if you’re doing a film or something like that, you know, you may be wearing headphones, but if you take your headphones off and you listen to what’s happening in the room, it’s magical.

It just sounds glorious. 

Steve Cuden: Mm-hmm. Do, do you do anything differently now than when you started? That is sort of a, become your routine, but when you started, you didn’t know what you were doing. Now you do things repeatedly that you never did when you started. 

Doug Besterman: For sure. I, I think you could say that anybody can say that about any job where they sort of learn and grow and improve.

True in that job. True. Any trade, any skill. When you start as an apprentice plumber, you know, you, I’m sure you do all kinds of ridiculous things and then 20 years later, you know, you look back at your 20-year-old plumbing self and say, what was I thinking? You know? Mm-hmm. So I, I think it’s, it’s absolutely the same idea.

Of course, you get better and, and many people in the arts, most people in the arts, I think, you know, we, we hear the ideal thing in our head, and we’re always trying to get closer to that thing that we hear. And part of learning to orchestrate is learning to listen. To what you’ve orchestrated accurately and say, how does that match this image, this perfect image I had in my mind?

Did I achieve that or not? And if not, why? What did I, what could I do better or differently next time? 

Steve Cuden: So you have high standards, then I would imagine that the, the average audience member has no idea what’s missing from, from your perspective. They’re hearing something that’s wonderful and beautiful and that you are hearing something different than them.

Doug Besterman: I have unachievable high standards. It’s be impossible to ever get it as good as I would like it to be. 

Steve Cuden: Well, guess what? You and me both. So let’s, let’s, let’s leave it at that. You, no matter what you do, as you always see the seams in the work, you always see where the stitching didn’t go together, right?

For sure. Pretty much no one else does unless they’re in the room with you and you’re having that conversation. Um, so I’m gonna ask you a question. I ask lots of guests. I’m always fascinated by the answer. What for you, makes. A good piece of music. Good. 

Doug Besterman: Wow. What makes a good piece of Well, I think I, I think if I feel something, I mean, I think that’s really the bottom line.

You know, it’s interesting because lately I’ve been, I’m, I’ve always been fascinated with the, um, science of mixing music in the recording field. And so I, I, with, you know, YouTube, it’s so wonderful and you can listen to interviews with anybody on any subject now. So I, I, over the last five years or so, I’ve been listening to a lot of music mixers talk about what they do and the number one thing, the top, top people, the, what they say is their job is to bring out the emotion in the music.

And when they get their mix to the point where they’re starting to feel something, either they wanna move or they feel a certain emotion. Or it’s their, it is just connecting on that heart level. Then they know that they’ve done their job. And that’s, to me, if a song makes me feel something, I mean, I, I might also, you know, if the song has something that tickles my ear in a particular way that just kind of tickle, tickles my brain, tickles my ears, something fun.

But is a song good? I think it’s about whether it makes me feel something. 

Steve Cuden: It’s, it’s a visceral reaction that you have to it. Yep. And I think that that’s really true. And music, I think more than any other part of the arts without exception, is the one thing that is purely emotional. There’s really, you’re not listening to words unless it’s a song, obviously, but the, but the music part of it is visceral.

Doug Besterman: Is 

Steve Cuden: that same for you? 

Doug Besterman: Yeah, it absolutely is. I mean. I, you know, I remember, um, Leonard Bernstein talked about this. He said, does music have a story? And he said, well, we can impose a story on it. But ultimately it’s just a combination of tones and textures. It’s just sounds. And so it, it’s really an incredible phenomenon if you think about it, because it makes us feel something and there’s no reason you can explain as to why it does.

It just, it make it, we just feel certain things. And some of it is familiarity and some of it is nostalgia. A song might remind you of something, but, but it’s just incredible how it does that, you know, that it does that at all is, is miraculous. 

Steve Cuden: So you go to a, a different level from, I think for most people, people that listen to orchestra music, pure orchestra music aren’t listening for the words.

They’re getting that emotion out of the, the music itself. But you go to another level, there’s this beautiful thing in musical theater or in, you know, songwriting that you have words and the words get added in. Is it different for you to orchestrate a song than a piece of music or, or a bit of underscore for a movie?

Doug Besterman: Oh, yes, absolutely. Yeah. It’s a, it’s a different skill. Yeah. 

Steve Cuden: Tell us what those differences are. 

Doug Besterman: Well. Musical theater, and I’m not the first one to say this musical theater, I believe is a lyricist medium. And when I say that, it it, it’s really about what makes musical theater. Musical theater. So there’s symphonic music or purely instrumental music, no lyrics involved.

Then there’s something like opera. But the music is the most important thing in an opera, really. The libretto of an opera, oftentimes they, it might be very repetitive. It’s, they’re not, the expectation was never that the words were going to be sublime in, in a particular way. It was really about hearing the music.

But that changed when we went from opera to operetta and more popular stories were being told and then into musical theater. And I, I’m not qualified to do a musical theater history class, but, but in from what I have been taught about musicals, what happened was the, the art evolved to where the stories were being told.

Partly in dialogue, and then the, the emotions and the, and the internal information, state of the character, the character’s emotions, internal emotions, would then be revealed oftentimes through the lyrics of the song. And that what, when that happened, that became musical theater. The way we. 

Steve Cuden: The beauty part about musical theater is when we write a screenplay.

’cause I’ve taught both screenwriting and musical theater writing and I’ve written a book on both. Yes. So, uh, okay. So the, the beauty part of, of musical is in a screenplay you only get two emotions, sight and sound. And the audience can only receive what we’re telling them through dialogue or, or visual action.

Those are the only two things. But a musical we can go inside of a character’s thoughts like a novel can. Yes. And that’s the beauty part of it. Yes. So when you orchestrate a song. Do you treat it? How do you treat it differently than just a pure piece of music? Is there something you need to do to, to not have the music overwhelm or what do you do?

Doug Besterman: Yes, exactly. That you, you have to make sure that you’re supporting the lyrics. Now, the first person whose job it is to do that is the composer. The composer and lyricists have to work together and arrive at consensus that that music is telling the same story, that the lyrics are telling in a sympathetic way, that when the lyrics achieve their peak of emotion, the music is achieving that peak.

Or if that’s not the case, that they’s some device that they’re using either, you know. Pulling back on the emotion of the music to let the lyrics shine through, or, you know, there’s different devices you can use, but the point being that they’ve arrived at consensus. And then my job is to color that. I don’t wanna get in the way of that.

I don’t wanna mess that up. I wanna make sure that I’m supporting it. And so my, the first thing I do is I pay attention to what’s the story that this lyric is telling? How is the music supporting that story? And then what do I need to do to bring the orchestral, I’m using orchestral. It might not be an orchestra, it could be a rockman, but the instrumental colors of that particular piece.

What, how, how can I use those colors to now further support the storytelling that was started by the lyricist and the composer? And the book writer too, 

Steve Cuden: and the book for sure. I, I you, the key there is that you are the support for it, not the show itself. And sometimes I go to shows and sometimes the music overwhelms the singers and that has to do with obviously a technical mix in the theater as well as other things.

But you then go in a motion picture score, you can then have the music swell and soar in ways that would be less palatable in the musical theater. Is that true? 

Doug Besterman: Yeah. I mean, you’re not worrying about a singer. You may be worrying about dialogue. So there’s that to be thinking about too. But you know, then there’s the sound mixer in a film who will duck the music under or, or adjust.

To so it doesn’t compete with sound effects. And a good orchestrator, a good composer, know that those things are coming and they’ll leave room for dialogue. They’ll leave room for sound effects. If it’s an action sequence, you know, you don’t need to hit every explosion with a bass drum. The explosion’s doing that, you know, you can do, do other things, you know, so.

So it’s the same idea. You know, you, you wanna make sure you’re supporting the lyric, but not overwhelming it. And then there’s also, we have other dimensions of storytelling and musical theater such as dance music. And now there’s no lyric. So the orchestra has to have another level that it can reach in terms of its volume and its scope and its completeness to be able to, it, it has a me, the orchestra now has to carry the melody, whereas in a song, the melody is carried by the singer.

You know, we’re, we’re we, we, you might double it occasionally, but if you, if you didn’t, there’d still be a melody there ’cause the singer would be singing it. Whereas in an overture in, um, transition music in dance music, now the orchestra has to have that, has to cover that melody also. 

Steve Cuden: You just said something incredibly important.

Frequently in a song, the singer is carrying the melody and what the orchestration is isn’t the melody at all exactly right. It’s running separate from it so that it harmonizes with the singer. 

Doug Besterman: Yes. Right. Supports. Yeah. And there’s like a painting. There’s the foreground, middle ground and background. We think about that.

The foreground in a song is the singer and the melody and the lyrics. Mm-hmm. And then, so then you have a middle ground and a background and you think about how you’re gonna, and then sometimes the orchestra in between lyrics will peek through and have a foreground for the moment and then step back and just be supporting.

And so you have to think about those things. Focus, you know, where’s your focus. 

Steve Cuden: So in the musical theater, by the time the the work gets to you, it’s already been decided where songs have gone because the songs are already written. Yes. They’re just not orchestrated yet. Yes. In a movie, are you part of the process of then spotting, uh, music cues?

Is that part of your job or not? 

Doug Besterman: Well, not as an orchestrator, no. That’s the composer’s job. And I have composed a little bit for film. And so then you sit with the director. And the director talks to you about the film and, and the kind of music they want. They’ll often be a temp score, which they’ve put together, or the music editor they put together with the music editor or the picture editor.

Often it’s the picture editor, and so there’ll be some, you’ll have some idea of the kind of music that they want, but that’s a composer’s job. Now, an orchestrator might, you might get to hear some of the temp. I guess it’s possible. I can’t think of an instance where I have, but maybe I have. But no, that, that would be above our pay grade, but, but mm-hmm.

Hopefully the composer is communicating that information clearly to the orchestrator. In my experience, that’s usually been the case. 

Steve Cuden: What’s the most unusual instrument you’ve ever used? 

Doug Besterman: Uh, I, I wrote, well, it was a, a, a keyboard version of it, but I wrote for the Thein, you know, that, that whistling sound that you play with your hands.

Yeah, exactly. You know? Mm-hmm. Good vibrations. That sound, uh, I’ve written for Thein, um, and I think actually the guy who. When they made the keyboard sound, he had an actual thein and he sampled it. So that was pretty cool. 

Steve Cuden: Well, that, that certainly makes sense ’cause that’s a truly unique sound. Yes. You know, that sound 

Doug Besterman: Yes.

Above 

Steve Cuden: everything else. 

Doug Besterman: Yes. You’ve 

Steve Cuden: also had this, um, amazing career in which you’ve worked with some just truly outstanding writers and directors. 

Doug Besterman: Yes. 

Steve Cuden: Composers and, and so on, and directors, including people like Mel Brooks and Susan Stroman and Rob Marshall and, and Shaman, and Whitman and Flaherty and Aarons.

And, um, even my former writing partner, Frank Wildhorn. You’ve, you’ve worked with all these folks. Yes. What do you think are one or two great lessons you’ve learned from those types of folks, uh, while working with them at the top of their game? 

Doug Besterman: That’s a great question. Um, I think more and more about what we’ve already been discussing, which is how to support the lyric.

Oftentimes I will learn. If I’ve made, and I’m making air quotes, if I’ve made a mistake in my orchestrating, it’s generally because I’ve either misunderstood something that was happening in a lyric or I’ve, I haven’t colored it the way that the lyricist expected. So really learning to pay more and more attention to the lyrics.

And, and, um, I’ve, I learned a lot about that from Lynn Aarons because Lynn, it is just a great fan of music in general, but when she hears something that doesn’t work for her, she can explain it as a lyricist in a way that an orchestrator can understand. And immediately you go, what was I thinking? How did I not do that, Lynn?

So, so she, yeah, that, that’s definitely something I’ve learned from directors and choreographers. I’ve learned about size and scale. You know, how to where, where you need to put your foot on the gas and where you need to take it off the gas, um, that there’s peaks and valleys in well. Working with choreographers and dance numbers.

There’s peaks and valleys and dance numbers. It’s not just a straight build from the beginning of the dance to the end. There’s peaks and valleys. So you, you have to pay attention 

Steve Cuden: to this. It’s storytelling. It’s storytelling. It’s storytelling. Yeah. You’re telling story with the whole piece, but the music is also telling the story.

Doug Besterman: Yeah. The first big Broadway show I orchestrated was a revival of Damn Yankees, and this was the fall of 1993 at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego. And Rob Marshall was the choreographer. Wow. And I’d never worked with Rob before and I was brand new. They were just sort of, I had been given a, my break to orchestrate this show out of town and if they liked it, maybe I’d get to be the orchestrator on Broadway.

And it worked out luckily. But I remember Rob saying to me at one point, um. Why didn’t you start this dance arrangement with the brass? And I said, well, we’re, it’s got, we have a long way to go. I wanted to start with the saxes and then, you know, have someplace to go. He said, Uhuh, start with the brass and then take them away.

And I thought, oh my God, that makes so much sense. Announce the beginning of this dance arrangement and then we can go into our, we can start to have our peaks and valleys, but let’s start with an announcement. And he was absolutely right. And, and so that was. One of the very first lessons I learned from a choreographer was that 

Steve Cuden: from Rob.

That’s, that’s huge. 

Doug Besterman: Yeah. 

Steve Cuden: I, I mean, uh, because obviously that’s not something, sometimes it’ll just be utterly counterintuitive and that’s the thing that works. 

Doug Besterman: Yeah. I, I, I mean, what I said made sense, but it didn’t, it it wasn’t right. You know what I mean? Like it made, it was, it wasn’t illogical, but it really, the, the better choice would be to do what Rob said, which is what I learned.

Steve Cuden: So you’ve also then orchestrated for. Very famous people. I’ve already mentioned Barbara Streisand and Beyonce. Were you working with them too or were you sort of separate from that whole circus? 

Doug Besterman: Well, we should clarify Beyonce. It’s on my resume. ’cause how could you not put Beyonce on your resume? Of course, but I orchestrated for Beyonce a long, long time ago.

She was baby Beyonce. She was still Beyonce Knowles and it was the first time she’d ever sung with an orchestra was a a for a, a benefit that Larry Blank, actually we mentioned Larry Blank, he’s a wonderful orchestrator and a, a good friend. But he was music directing a benefit and she was an up and coming singer and she sang something from West Side Story, I think it was somewhere.

And she had never sung with an orchestra before and oh my gosh, she was so, I, I didn’t meet her, but, but I remember Larry saying she was so overwhelmed by, with joy at the, you know, having. Getting to work with an orchestra for the first time. So that was my one time working with Beyonce. I mean, I did work, I worked with Tony Braxton once too.

And, but, um, but Barbara Streisand I worked with directly a number of times and, and really worked with her, like got notes from her and all of that. Yeah, 

Steve Cuden: she’s very involved in that. 

Doug Besterman: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. 

Steve Cuden: I’m, I’m almost finished reading her autobiography. Great. And she’s That’s great. She’s really involved.

Doug Besterman: It’s wonderful. Yeah. And it’s all true. I mean, the way she talks about herself and she’s very frank about the kind of person she is professionally is very true. And it can be, you know, anytime you’re working with somebody who, who you’re having a measure by their yardstick constantly, it can be kind of maddening.

But on the other hand, you, you know exactly what she wants. You just have to try to figure out how to get there. And so in, in another sense, it’s actually very easy to work with her as long as you can figure out, you know, what she’s asking for. 

Steve Cuden: That’s a, that’s a very big yardstick. 

Doug Besterman: Yeah, huge. Yeah. And she has incredible taste.

So we’re talking about somebody who, you know, really just not gonna ask for anything, you know, that doesn’t make sense. It’s, it’s all in, in just huge, huge taste level. 

Steve Cuden: So in a case like, like a Barbara Streisand, when you present the orchestration to her, does she, then she gives you notes and you get it to the point where she’s satisfied.

Is that usually a relatively easy thing to do, or is it really a struggle 

Doug Besterman: You’re talking about with Streisand? 

Steve Cuden: Yes, with her in particular, because we’re talking about her, her, um, level of taste and so on. 

Doug Besterman: Famously with her, it can be a struggle. Th those aren’t my stories to tell my experiences with her.

It was not much of a struggle. There were things to do and thi little things to change, but I was fortunate. I haven’t written, you know, that, that many minutes of orchestration for her. But the, but the stuff that I have written went well, relatively speaking. 

Steve Cuden: Well, I listened to the, those songs that you have on your website, and they’re just beautiful.

Oh, thank you. And the orchestrations. They’re beautiful. Um, so you are also a composer. You’re not just an orchestrator. Yes. When you’re, um, when you decide you’re gonna work on a piece, either a song or a, an entire musical, where do you typically start as a composer? Because now you don’t have something to work with.

You’ve got a blank, literally a blank page. Where do you start? What is your typical way of beginning? 

Doug Besterman: Yeah, I ask myself similar questions as a composer, as I would, as an orchestrator. Um, except, you know, the answer isn’t, isn’t already there. I have to come up with it. So what. What period is this setting?

Are we doing a pastiche of a particular period of music or style of music, or is this, is it, you know, I, the stuff I write has more or less been for musical theater. I’ve written a few sort of standalone pop songs, that sort of thing, and, and usually co-written, you know, but that world is, there’s a lot of co-writing.

So I may have come in as a co-producer and contributor on a song, that sort of thing. But you know, you’re, so then it’s sort of clear you’re writing in a pop style for a particular singer, that sort of thing. But in musical theater, you’re asking yourself, what genre is this? And so that’s really the first question.

And I recently came in on a project and there, there were a couple of writers already writing on it, and they asked me to come in and help. And I said, I said, what? What era are we in? And they said, we’re not quite sure yet. You know, what do you think? I said, I think this is indie rock. And it was so out of Really?

Yeah. And so, so then we started doing it that way. And it kind of made sense because, you know, what is indie rock? There’s a huge, a huge field you can play in huge sandbox. You can play in if you call something indie rock. So, 

Steve Cuden: but, but it’s not rag time. 

Doug Besterman: No, exactly right. Exactly right. And it’s not just sort of generic musical theater, and it’s not seventies, middle of the road pop music.

It’s a very specific genre. We, you know what it sound, most people, when you say indie rock, they know what that sounds like, you know? 

Steve Cuden: Well, you’ve worked with David Foster, obviously. Yes. And he has a certain sound. 

Doug Besterman: Yes, he does. 

Steve Cuden: I mean, you can recognize a David Foster song on the radio. You know, he, he had to have produced it because it has a, a certain sound to it for sure.

Um, and so when you worked on Boop, I’m assuming that you kind of went down that road with him? 

Doug Besterman: Oh yeah. Yeah. And there was a long period of development on that show. And David, as a producer. O over the years would create kind of demo versions and some more than demos, like fully produced tracks of these songs.

So in certain instances, I had a template to work from that was pretty well fleshed out. And I’m a huge David Foster fan. I, I was, before I met him, um, I didn’t need to do any catch up on David Foster when I got hired to do poop. I already knew his entire catalog backwards and forwards. And so, um, which was really fun for me.

And, you know, getting to work with him was, it was a bucket list item for me. It really was. I, I loved working with David. We got along very well, no doubt. 

Steve Cuden: So what, as a composer, what did you learn from him as a, he’s a very specific composer. 

Doug Besterman: Oh yeah. Well, it’s what I said. It’s all heart. I mean, the things that work well in his music are when it just is something that just pulls at the heartstrings in a particular way.

And it’s both in his. Songwriting and then how he kind of arranges his own songs. And I remember at one point we were listening to an orchestration and there was a, this wasn’t in the songwriting per se, but it’s hard to separate ’cause it was a, a string counter line that he had written and that I had not changed.

’cause it was just perfect. And we were listening to it and went, oh, that’s counter line. And he said, yeah, he said things like that. It just tugs at the heartstrings in a particular way. And we don’t know why it does, but it just does. And so that’s with David, it’s just all about the heart and the feeling behind it.

Steve Cuden: How, how much do you consider the audience as you’re working? Are you thinking about the audience and their reaction or not at all? 

Doug Besterman: That’s a really great question. I think about the audience all the time. I think you could still be a good orchestrator and not particularly think about the audience, but I do.

I think about the audience’s experience and one of the reasons why I do, in fact, I told my wife this when we were first meeting and I think she was like, oh, this guy’s kind of interesting. Um, hi honey. I have to say that, um, I. Think about the audience because I enter the theater the same way the audience does as an orchestrator.

I come in through the main doors. I mean, I, I might enter through the stage door, but then I come out into the theater and I, when I’m listening to a show and previews, I’m in the audience with the, with the paid theater goers. I’m not on stage. I’m not in the orchestra pit. And so I see everybody come into the theater and they’re excited.

They’re dressed in nice clothes. They’ve just gone out to dinner. They’ve gotten a babysitter. They’ve paid for transportation and parking in New York, which is like another dinner. And, um, it’s, this is an important. Event for them. And they are doing that. They have, they have put their resources towards this moment because they wanna be taken on a journey.

And I absolutely think about that journey that we’re taking them on as a team. Every person in that theater is, is contributing to that journey. And so, yes. Absolutely. So 

Steve Cuden: that, that informs what you’re writing then? 

Doug Besterman: It does, it does. When we get to something where we’re conspiring to be incredibly exciting, I want it to be the most exciting thing they’ve ever heard.

I, I want them to be so excited when they hear that orchestration that they, that they feel like they’re getting every penny of their ticket dollar, you know? 

Steve Cuden: Do you think the audience has an appreciation that someone has sat down and taken notes from, uh, written on a piano and turned it into this lush thing?

Do you think the audience gets it? 

Doug Besterman: No, not at all. I, I don’t think they do at all. I don’t, I think most audience members aren’t aware of not only the job of orchestration, but you know, the light programmer that made the lighting perfect and all, all the other jobs that are involved in theater, but particularly orchestrators.

I think even people in the business don’t know what an orchestrator does sometimes. Um, it’s a very mysterious job. Yeah. It’s 

Steve Cuden: like an editor in movies if you’re noticing the editing. They didn’t do a good job 

Doug Besterman: usually. Right. 

Steve Cuden: Sometimes you want that, but not most of the time you don’t want to know it’s being edited at all.

Doug Besterman: Right. And, and sometimes they’ll get it wrong. You know, they’ll, they’ll say, oh, I, you know, they’ll love something about the music that’s really the score they’re loving. Or they’ll think that they’re loving the score and they’re loving the orchestration, or they’re loving the style of music or the way the band is, you know, and they’ll say, oh, those orchestrate.

And it’s really, I mean, not that the orchestration, anything wrong with it, but the, what they’re really loving is the band. So it, it doesn’t matter in the end, you know, whatever it takes to get the audience there, that’s what you do. That’s whatever that is. 

Steve Cuden: I think that that’s, uh, absolutely a superb way to put it.

Uh, tell us a little bit about what the Arrival Arts Initiative is. 

Doug Besterman: Yes. I get to talk about my wife now. Um, so my wife, Alida and I, she’s a performer. We’ve been talking about for years. We’ve been talking about wanting to have a home essentially outside of New York, within an hour of New York, but on that property to have a facility where we could.

Develop musicals. Essentially for me, it’s the music and musicals. For her, it’s maybe co choreography, it’s readings of musicals, that sort of thing. So we’ve had this idea of having a facility. Then we got the idea for arrival Arts and Arrival Arts came out of some experiences that I’ve been having in the last few years, and we talked about this earlier, my incredible perfectionism in terms of the music feeling like.

We were in the music and sound world in terms of the process of once you get into a theater and you start putting the music, the orchestrations and the orchestra together with the rest of the production elements, we’re always a day late and a dollar short. And that’s just how it is. And it’s been that way forever.

And I thought, well, maybe there’s a way to do this better. And I started thinking about how can we center the development of music at that stage where you’re thinking about orchestrations and sound design? How can we center the development of music in musicals and create a process in advance to both give ourselves more time and also to.

To be able to delve more deeply into the development. And so that was suddenly Arrival Arts came together when we had that idea. Hmm. And so it’s really two things. It’s a container for the development of music and musicals, um, where you can go and essentially workshop the orchestrations and even potentially with the involvement of the entire music team and potentially the sound designers as well, because they’re, if we’re a day late and a dollar short, they’re, they’re a dollar 50 short.

They just are always behind the eight ball. Right. And then along with that is the notion of a recording studio space, which we call studio origin, which is, um, right now my facility where I’m sitting talking to you, but, but eventually we imagine it would be a residential facility, a place where you could go and visit.

Possibly stay over and have a retreat and work on music for a period of time, like you do when writers go to have a retreat where they work on the book music and lyrics. We could do that there as well. But, but we would have the ability to really dig into the sound of the music, and that’s what Rival Arts is, where we’re in a very early stage.

We’re, um, having a lot of conversations with people. We have a, a sort of baby website and, um, some articles that I’ve written that just talk about some of the issues that I’m talking about here. But we’re, that’s, this is something that we’re in the process of launching and really 

Steve Cuden: excited. So the focus is on the sound in musicals, on how they, how the development of the.

The stuff that comes out sonically is 

Doug Besterman: the audio experience. Yep. Particularly around the music. Yeah. Sound, sound designers have sound effects all taken care of and, and dialogue. But when it, when people start to sing or speak within songs and you have a combination of music, singing, and even potentially sound effects within songs, then we could all use more time and more sync, become more synchronized in, in how we approach it, and that’s what Arrival Arts is going to attempt to address.

Steve Cuden: The technology has changed drastically over time. Yes. For singers and for the way things are micd on stage and so on, and then the speakers and how they surround you, et cetera. Yeah. That’s really evolved over time. That’s very different than 40, 40 years ago. 

Doug Besterman: Yes, we have, in terms of the technology, we have Ferraris that we, we could be driving in terms of the sound system and the musical equipment and the technology and the know-how, and we just don’t have the time to get them above 30 miles an hour.

Most of the time we, we just don’t have the time, so. There’s a way to do this better where everybody’s skills could be, could be really utilized. Yeah. 

Steve Cuden: So they could walk into the, you could walk into the theater with things already developed out that currently are only being developed once you walk into the theater.

Doug Besterman: That would be the idea. And I, I couldn’t tell you exactly what that process is, but I know that there’s a process that we could have. 

Steve Cuden: Mm-hmm. Oh, there’s definitely a pro. No, no doubt. It would be like you could go and tech your entire tech. Although here you’re talking about the music part of it, the audio part of it, 

Doug Besterman: yes.

But there’s a lot of tech involved in it that we, that we never have time to do that we could do. So that would be part of it. Yeah. 

Steve Cuden: Sure. Yeah, of course. Uh, famously when you’re working on a musical locally, ’cause I, I’m on the board of directors of a small, uh, musical theater producing company here in Pittsburgh, and typically the orchestra doesn’t come in till the very last second.

So that has to all get jammed in at the last second. It makes it much more difficult. 

Doug Besterman: Yeah. So you understand exactly. The orchestra comes in, you turn the sound system on and you take what you get, you know? Yeah. Maybe you tinker a little bit as much as you have time for, but we’re talking about a Broadway show with really high ticket prices.

Come on man, we can do better. That’s my feeling. We can do better. 

Steve Cuden: Ticket prices. Well, that’s a whole, that’s for another conversation that’s just completely out of control in my opinion. Um, so I, I’ve been having just one of the most fascinating conversations I’ve had in a long time, uh, for just over an hour now with Doug Beman, who is one of the greatest orchestrators on Broadway ever and in movies too.

And we’re gonna wind the show down a little bit. Doug, I’m wondering, uh, in all of your experiences beyond the stories you’ve already told us, can you share with us a story that’s either weird, quirky, offbeat strange, or just plain funny? 

Doug Besterman: I really struggled with this one because I don’t know, orchestration’s not a particularly funny job.

Um, so, so, but there, there’s a couple of, I, I’ll tell a couple of quick stories. One was obviously working with Mel Brooks. There was a lot of funny in the room between Mel and the cast, and, you know, there was a lot of pitching of ideas, uh, in, in an appropriate way. So. Flash forward now to the Sits probe, which is, it’s a German word, meaning s sing through, or it’s, it’s like a, a, a rehearsal where you’re, you’re just singing with the orchestra, uh, without moving around on stage.

You’re, you’re in a rehearsal room generally, and you’re listening to the orchestra play and singing along with them. And that’s the day where an orchestrator presents the orchestrations to the creative team at large. And it’s an important day for the orchestrator and an exciting day for the cast because now they go from their little piano and maybe drums to the technicolor world of the orchestra, which is really exciting.

So it’s a big day. So it’s the producers. We’re in Chicago and the orchestra plays the first song and they get to the end and everybody applauds. And then they all look at Mel Brooks. And Mel turns to me and he says, Doug. Surprisingly good.

And it turns out that that’s a kind of a Mel Brooks, but it just really, it broke up the room. And I, you know, I wasn’t sure whether to be embarrassed or, but, you know, it was Mel being Mel, but he was, he was obviously very happy. 

Steve Cuden: Well, okay. He, he should have been very happy. 

Doug Besterman: Yes. So that was, that’s one story.

Another fun moment was when I was doing the, the revival of How to Succeed that we did in the 2010s, I forget what year it was. Um, this was with Daniel Radcliffe playing the main character, you know, famously the actor from Harry Potter. And, um, he comes to the first orchestra rehearsal and he’s never, he’s never, this isn’t the sit bro, it was just one of our regular rehearsals, but he was invited to come and somebody gave him a, a, a baton because it looked like a magic wand.

And so we thought that was funny. But, um. He looks at me and I, I’m older than I look. Uh, we, we aren’t on camera for this, right? This is just audio. So, but anyway, I I, I’m 60 years old, but I look younger, so this was 10 more than 10 years ago. So, so Daniel turns to me and he goes, man, I thought you were gonna be some old geezer, but you are just a young punk.

I didn’t know what to make of that, but it just, that was, that was a fun moment. 

Steve Cuden: He wanted a gray haired look like, uh, Stravinsky or something. I don’t 

Doug Besterman: know. Maybe he thought, you know, I was gonna be, I was gonna be look like George Martin in his later years or something. You know, he thinks of an orchestrator.

So that was that one. 

Steve Cuden: I enjoy. No, you’re a young looking guy. That is for sure. All right, so last question for you today. Yes. Uh, Doug, you’ve given us a gigantic amount of advice along the way here, but I’m wondering if you have a single solid piece of advice or a tip that you like to give to those who are starting out in the business, or maybe they’re in a little bit and trying to get to that next level.

Doug Besterman: Yeah, I think I’ll fashion my advice for people who want to orchestrate for musical theater or really any kind of orchestration. And it was advice that was given to me by my teacher, Ray Wright, who we spoke about, but also, um, Don Seki offered kind of similar advice in, in one of his textbooks. He was a fantastic orchestrator, arranger, legendary, and it’s that everything that you write, get it played.

Listen to it with live musicians, however you can, which means say yes to any opportunity you are given to write something for live musicians, then record it, which is now super easy to do. It used to be, you know, you had to have your cassette and maybe it would sound terrible. Now you have, it’s just on your phone.

Record it. Then go home and listen to it over and over again with your score in front of you. And now here’s Don S’s advice with a big red pen. Circle the things that didn’t go the way you thought they would and figure out why. The next time, try to improve those things. That’s my advice. Orchestration is not something you can do in your head, and it’s really not something if you’re planning to orchestrate for real live musicians.

It’s not something you can do on your computer. You gotta hear things played in a room by people, and that would be my advice. Do it, have things played, record it. Listen very anana analytically to your work, make notes, and then have a list of things that you wanna improve every time. That’s the best way to learn.

I still do it. 

Steve Cuden: I think that’s absolutely, uh, spot on advice. That’s really important advice, and it’s holds true for the playwrights as well to listen to it, to get people to say your words as well as singers, to then listen to people singing the songs as well. So all of the above, but I think that that’s really valuable, valuable advice.

Doug Besterman: Yeah, it, it’s important to do it afterwards because in the moment you, you may just be swept away by the fact that people are playing your notes the way a writer might be swept away the, with the fact that people are saying their words. Y you have to get through that moment and, and listen to what’s really happening and that you can do later on listening to a recording.

Steve Cuden: And for some people that’s really hard to do because they’re, they’re afraid that they’re gonna mess with something that they think works and they’re not being critical enough. I think that happens frequently. 

Doug Besterman: It takes a long time to be able to step outside of, to learn to step outside of yourself in those moments.

I still struggle with it. It’s hard for me to, to be critical of something I’m hearing of my own for the first time because I’m still trying to understand what I’ve just heard and compare it to what I heard in my head and was it successful. And so it’s much better if I have time to reflect on it. And that’s really what I’m suggesting.

Steve Cuden: I think that’s fantastic advice. Doug Besterman, this has been one of my favorite shows on StoryBeat. I’m doing this eight years. This is just right at the top of the list. I can’t thank you enough for your time, your energy, and for your wisdom. I, I can’t thank you enough. 

Doug Besterman: You’re very welcome. Thank you for having me.

Steve Cuden: And so we’ve come to the end of today’s StoryBeat. If you like this episode, won’t you please take a moment to give us a comment, rating, or review on whatever app or platform you are listening to. Your support helps us bring more great story beat episodes to you. Story Beat is available on all major podcast apps and platforms, including Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, iHeartRadio, tune in and many others.

Until next time, I’m Steve Cuden and may all your stories be unforgettable.