great and small in scale, art exhibitions and benefit concerts have multiplied. Venues such as Parliament House, The CFE Arena at UCF, Hard
Rock Live, and the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts (DPAC),
have hosted concert events in the months immediately following the shooting. Perhaps the the largest event, the monumental Beautiful Together,
combined the efforts and talents of more than 60 local arts organizations
at DPAC.
Let me introduce the first-tier set of stones in this metaphor: I have the
good fortune, through my participation in The Landmark Forum, of knowing singer Andrea Canny (Music Production Supervisor at PerformerStuff.
com, a locally-based website that sells audition materials for actors and
Rehearsal at The Plaza, July 24, 2016. photo by Jason Fronczek
singers), who, along with Joyce Arbucias of The Imagination House (a local heavy-hitting production company, and parent company of Performer
Stuff), Chris Yakubchik of Forster, Boughman, and Lefkowitz, and Tony
Award winner Kenny Howard (of the Florida Theatrical Association),
formed an LLC called Imagine Orlando, for the initial purpose of putting together an enormous benefit concert, From Broadway with Love: A Benefit
Concert for Orlando, in response to the Pulse shooting. Imagine Orlando
partnered with Seth Rudetsky, James Wesley, and Michael Moritz Jr., who,
themselves, partnered with Van Dean of Broadway Records to produce
From Broadway With Love: A Benefit Concert for Sandy Hook.
I mentioned The Landmark Forum because her experience in their course
encouraged Canny to dream big about what the event could become. She
believes deeply in the power of music to provoke both thought and feeling,
reinforce community, and to heal. She enlisted and enrolled her team, and
got the ball rolling. Once these two parties got together, the next step was
to get the talent on board, namely the Broadway performers, and a who’s
who of Broadway answered the call, including six Tony Award winners
and lead performers in current shows. Once the solo talent was secured,
the team set about getting the infrastructure in place, all of it pretty much
donated or underwritten: flights, hotel rooms, a commitment from DPAC,
materials and incentives for an auction, back line equipment, printing,
sound, video, and stage technicians, and many other countless gestures of
support from coffee and water to security personnel, ushers, transportation
coordinators and Pulse Survivors at the auction table.
An orchestra was put together, primarily comprised of musicians from the
Orlando Philharmonic—a sort of blind date between them and a rhythm
section that flew down from New York. A 100+ voice choir, Orlando Voices United Choir, was formed for the event, comprised of singers from Disney, the Orlando Gay Chorus, and elsewhere. New orchestrations were
created for the event, which also required the services of a copyist/librarian
Orlando’s Art Scene, v. 1.3
to assist with getting individual parts to all the musicians. The list of phone
calls and emails exchanged to make this all happen must be impressive.
I got to witness the rehearsals for the two sessions before the July 25th
performance, first at the Plaza Live, and then at DPAC. The atmosphere
at the Plaza was a mixture of enthusiasm, freneticism, stoicism, or professionalism depending on where I focused my attention. Rehearsals can be
a festival of groans and eye-rolls when things are not going well, and the
Plaza rehearsal was stalling repeatedly. The guitarist was the only member
of the rhythm section present. The Orchestrator, Kim Scharnberg, was giving notes and comments to Music Director Michael Moritz who was doing
heroic double duty as pianist and conductor. “I’m in a bad dream with no
rhythm section,” Moritz said. The copyist/librarian Don Oliver, muttering
and cursing under his breath, with his shaggy dog nearby, struggled as
valiantly as the legendary Little Dutch Boy trying to plug each new leak in
a Haarlem dike with his finger, as musicians seemingly at random declared
that their individual notated parts were nowhere to be found, all while try