A couple of week into rehearsals for the Off Broadway premiere of David Adjmi’s newest play, “Stereophonic,” Will Butler despatched an electronic mail to the solid. Butler, a former member of Arcade Hearth, had a brand new band, Will Butler + Sister Squares, and a brand new self-titled album. A membership in Brooklyn would quickly host the report launch celebration. Butler, the composer of “Stereophonic,” had a proposition: The actors ought to open for him.
Sarah Pidgeon, a solid member, remembered studying the message final August throughout a rehearsal break. “I instantly mentioned no,” she recalled. “As a result of what if it’s a failure?”
She had taken piano classes as a baby, however Pidgeon didn’t contemplate herself a musician. Neither did any of the opposite actors. “Stereophonic,” which opened final week at Broadway’s Golden Theater, is about in recording studios within the mid-Seventies, and conjures an unnamed band as dynamic, dazzling and horny as peak Fleetwood Mac or Led Zeppelin. It might be daunting sufficient to impersonate a band of that caliber onstage after a full rehearsal interval. However to play an actual present in an actual membership after just some weeks. This was an invite to public humiliation.
Juliana Canfield (“Succession”), one other solid member, was additionally a no. “I used to be like, Geez, we will’t get via one tune with out falling aside,” she mentioned. “This might be actually, actually embarrassing.”
However the males within the fictional band insisted. (“We suffered from peer strain,” Pidgeon joked.) Which explains how on Sept. 23, the 5 actors — Will Brill on bass, Canfield on keyboards, Tom Pecinka on guitar, Pidgeon on tambourine, Chris Stack on drums — stood onstage on the Williamsburg membership Elsewhere, in entrance of a whole bunch of ticket holders who didn’t know the group was solely pretending to be a band. There have been no scripted traces for them that night time, no characters to cover behind.
Brill described it as “a very excessive piece of publicity remedy” and “simply horror.” However the remedy labored. At Elsewhere, for the primary time, the actors — panicked, exhilarated — felt like a band.
Adjmi (“Beautiful,” “Marie Antoinette”) had begun dreaming of “Stereophonic” a few decade in the past. He introduced on Butler, whom he knew via associates, quickly after. Butler was cautious of writing Seventies pastiche. So as an alternative he requested himself what sort of music a quintet would make if they’d grown up on the Beatles’ White Album a decade earlier than, and what would Kurt Cobain have listened to within the ’80s. The compositions, he mentioned, needed to really feel each of the period and timeless.
“I used to be attempting to consider it on a continuum,” he mentioned. “It wasn’t like, let’s make one thing in 1976.”
Butler, Adjmi and the director, Daniel Aukin, weren’t essentially on the lookout for musicians to play these songs. When auditions started final spring, the emphasis was on discovering actors who felt proper.
“I used to be like, so long as somebody is musical, any fool may be in a band,” Butler mentioned. “I can write to no matter degree.” Later Butler realized that this was maybe naïve.
Auditions and callbacks went on for months. Some who auditioned had been devoted amateurs. Some couldn’t play in any respect. “That was actually tough,” Adjmi mentioned.
Pecinka had taught himself some guitar through the years, however he was certainly not an professional. Requested to be taught a riff for one of many play’s music, “Masquerade,” an eerie bayou stomp, for a callback, he took the music to a trainer at a guitar store. The guitar trainer instructed him that he would by no means be capable of do it. However one thing within the high quality of his efficiency was sufficient.
So Pecinka was solid, as had been the opposite actors, who diverse extensively in musicianship. Brill had by no means held a bass earlier than. Stack had performed in loads of bands. (An skilled drummer was wanted for his position as a result of the coordination required for drumming takes longer to be taught.) Pidgeon is probably a greater pianist than her character, Diana, however she had performed little singing. Although Canfield had taken piano classes in elementary college, she had by no means performed in entrance of an viewers. Even taking part in for her fellow actors was daunting.
“I might go right into a flop sweat,” she mentioned. “My palms had been sweaty. I felt like I used to be taking part in on puddles on the keys.”
Brill, who performs her husband, discovered a type of advantage within the terror. “It was very, very susceptible,” he mentioned. “We didn’t have the identical type of protections that we usually have as actors, which was actually refreshing and actually beautiful.”
In the course of the first month of rehearsal, greater than half the day was given over to band observe. Twice every week Brill and Pecinka had been pulled apart for bass and guitar classes. The Elsewhere gig, a trial by hearth and amplifier, gave the actors a jolt of confidence and the muscle reminiscence of what it’d really feel wish to play in entrance of a crowd.
Even so, rehearsals remained fraught. The script alone, which runs to just about three hours and sometimes dilates on the technical trivia of the recording course of, was daunting. The songs had been maybe more durable. Integrating the 2 — taking part in in character, making the battle invisible — felt almost unattainable. When Adjmi visited rehearsal, the actors would barely acknowledge him. “They had been all in a state of electrified horror,” he mentioned. “They wouldn’t even actually speak to me. They wouldn’t even speak to one another.”
But Butler and Justin Craig, the play’s music director, had been already taking the measure of the solid, reorchestrating the songs for his or her quirks and strengths. Canfield, Pecinka and Pidgeon had voices that blended fantastically collectively. “So we determined to essentially go for it with vocal preparations,” Craig mentioned.
And as Pecinka and Brill grew as musicians, Craig and Butler might add extra licks, extra riffs. Butler slowed down the craving, rootsy “Seven Roads,” as a result of the actors “grooved another way than the demo,” he mentioned. Writing for this quintet, nonetheless novice, wasn’t too completely different from writing for any of Butler’s different bands.
“It was determining what individuals’s strengths are and the place the emotion is coming from, and I’m attempting to intensify that emotion.”
In October, throughout tech rehearsal and preview performances for the Off Broadway run at Playwrights Horizons, one thing ineffable shifted. “There was a second once we began speaking with one another as musicians,” Stack mentioned. Rehearsals had felt rushed, fraught. However now onstage, there was lastly time to pay attention to at least one one other. The actors developed inside jokes, riffs, routines, similar to bandmates would.
A number of precise musicians got here to the Off Broadway run, together with David Byrne. After the present, Brill requested Byrne if he had any notes on turning into a band. Byrne instructed him: You already are a band.
Byrne confirmed this. “Sure, all of it rings true,” he wrote in an electronic mail. “They sound like an actual band, a band nonetheless determining their songs in a studio.”
Whereas there have been nonetheless errors, these errors started to really feel much less essential. Generally they even added texture. In a single scene, Pidgeon’s Diana struggles to hit a notice within the heartbreaker folks ballad “East of Eden.” Pidgeon has that very same battle. So she lent her personal concern to the character. And because the actors got here to know each their characters and the music higher, they realized to play in character, letting the feelings of the scenes drive the songs. “What they wind up recording, nonetheless refracted via a industrial pop lens, inevitably expresses their heartache, betrayal and fury,” Jesse Inexperienced wrote in The New York Instances for his evaluation of the Off Broadway manufacturing.
The actors weren’t rock stars — not but and doubtless not ever — however they started to really feel nearer to their virtuosic characters.
“Rock star charisma began to come back as we began feeling like these had been our songs,” Pidgeon mentioned.
A number of winter days spent in an actual recording studio, in Brooklyn, laying down the tracks for a solid album, which will probably be launched digitally on Could 10, additionally helped. “Being within the studio,” Pecinka mentioned, “allowed me to be extra assured as a result of I used to be like, I’m on an album, I’m an actual musician.”
Within the couple of months between the tip of the Off Broadway run and the beginning of rehearsals for the Broadway switch, a lot of the actors mentioned they put their devices down. After they picked them up once more, they discovered that the music was nonetheless there. None of them really feel completely relaxed in entrance of the microphones, however this time round they’re extra comfy.
“I’m dancing whereas I’m taking part in and I’m making eye contact,” Brill mentioned. Which is a pleasant different to horror.
In the event that they nonetheless haven’t performed Madison Sq. Backyard, because the fictional band has, they’ve now spent about 9 months taking part in collectively. They might not be a band, not likely, however they really feel like one.
“All of us hit flawed notes on a regular basis,” Pidgeon mentioned. “Nevertheless it nonetheless works as a result of it’s actual.”
