Interview with Larry Hochman

Posted

’60s musical offers challenge to Tony-nominated orchestrator

by Robert Israel
EDGE Contributor (Cambridge. MA)
Thursday May 19, 2011  – reprint

Class issues and radical politics come to a head in “Silver Spoon”, a new musical having it world premiere at the Central Square Theatre through June 19, 2011.

 

Set in the turbulent late-1960s, the show follows the relationship between Dan, a committed organizer for a national grape boycott, and Polly, who works by day in her family’s Wall Street brokerage firm while editing a radical underground newspaper at night. They fall in love, but will Dan’s political activism drive them apart, especially when he chooses to boycott a supermarket chain owned by Polly’s family?

 

From the sounds of things, it hardly seems the subject of a musical; but the show’s creators – folk singer and labor organizer Si Kahn and playwright Amy Merrill – promise otherwise. The two met in the 1960s and have been friends since. He has carved a successful career as a folk singer, releasing some 16 albums over the past four decades; she’s found success as a playwright and academic. On the faculty of the Berklee School of Music, she recently was dramaturg and producer of the school’s recent production of the B.B. King musical “Why I Sing the Blues.” From their friendship and love of musical theater comes their collaboration, which, they’ve said has its roots in such traditional shows as “Oklahoma!,” “South Pacific” and “The Pajama Game,” the latter also a love story set against a labor conflict. “In ’Silver Spoon,’ the love story comes first. There’s passion and plenty of laugh lines… “Hopefully everyone will be pulling for the young lovers,” Merrill told the Boston Herald recently.

 

And pulling together the show’s musical elements is arranger Larry Hochman, who came to the show through an introduction by a friend. “Bill Hahn, a radio host in Teaneck, New Jersey, and a mutual friend, brought Si and I together,” Hochman explained recently. “And from there, I got to talking with Si about his work, and about his vision for this play.” That Hochman was able to fit the show in his busy schedule was serendipitous for the creative team. The in-demand musical arranger was recently nominated for a pair of Tony Awards for creating the orchestrations for “The Scottsboro Boys” and (with Stephen Oremus) for the mega-hit “The Book of Mormon.” Previously he was nominated three previous times (“Spamalot,” “Fiddler on the Roof” and “A Class Act”), as well as orchestrating such hits as “The Addams Family,” “Shrek” and “The Little Mermaid.” Additionally he’s won four Emmy Awards for his television work on the Nickelodeon series “The Wonder Pets,” has orchestrated some 18 films, and composed an orchestral work, “In Memoriam,” about the Holocaust that has been performed in Berlin and New York. But “Silver Spoon” offers Hochman the opportunity to work on something completely different: an unusual, small-scaled musical with a cast of four and an ensemble of four musicians.

 

Before working on the project, Hochman felt he needed to connect with Polly and Dan, the 1960s couple at the center of the show. “I had to find a context for them in my own experience,” he explained. “Listening to Si’s songs brought me back to summer camp when I was a youngster. Although I learned music initially on the piano, I owned a guitar, too, and I used to sing songs that were popular during the so-called folk renaissance. So I went back to what that felt like for me. That’s when the possibilities began forming in my mind for how these songs could be presented on stage.” “Because this show does not require a large cast or a huge orchestra, I had to hear how the music could be produced and which instruments would best encapsulate the spirit and times the songs depict,” Hochman explained. He scored Si’s songs for piano, woodwinds, violin and guitar; with the guitar, as Hochman put it, forming “the nucleus” of the arrangements. “It would be nice to have a bass, too,” Hochman mused, “but the show works fine without it.”

 

“During the era the play focuses on, it was always the guitar and the singer at the center,” Hochman continued. “That’s the tradition, and it stretches back before the 1960s to songs sung in the 1930s, during the early days of the labor movement.” A song from the show, “We Will Walk the Line,” for example, is introduced on guitar and then the other instruments and singers join in until it builds in intensity. “There is always a compulsion to do more with music, when working as an arranger on a show,” Hochman explained. “But I had to be disciplined and keep it within the theatrical context. I resisted the impulse to make ’We Will Walk the Line’ grander in scope, retaining the original vibes of the song and essentially enhancing it for the stage. “When a song is sung, as in another song from the show, the cast joins in unison to create the feeling of how a rousing protest song is first picked up by one singer and then by a larger group as the ranks swell. The result – a chorus of protesters singing an anthem — is very moving.”

 

The creative team behind “Silver Spoon” is hoping to rekindle memories of an era when music was one of the unifying threads that brought people and their causes together to work for change. Recently, PBS aired “Songs of Freedom,” about the dark days of segregation; in words, music and archival cinematic snippets it told how Negro spirituals, written 300 years before by black slaves, proved to be the catalyst that united protesters to join non-violent marches and sit-ins around the country. The concept worked well for a documentary film. Will it work onstage? Hochman posits that “Silver Spoon,” with its similar populist roots, will be as transformative for theatergoers. “The music and the story come together in ’Silver Spoon,’” Hochman said. “It is as relevant now at it was back in the era it depicts.”