Recording The Immigrant - Part 3

With studio time at a premium -- the maxim "time is money" certainly holds true in the recording studio -- there was a bit of preparation required on our parts in order to maximize efficiency. Aside from technology considerations, this included the making of cuts to the score and whatever dialog would be included.

Nearly every cast recording, including most "complete" cast recording, involves at least some tirmming of the score in order that the recording fit on one CD (or the occasional two -- or in the olden days, one LP, with the occasional two or three). It's extremely rare that you'll find a recording (other than a bootleg) that contains every bar of music, all the reprises and repeats, and all the dance music and underscoring. Our show contained over 100 minutes of music, so if we wanted it to fit on a single, approximately 74 minute CD, some cutting would be necessary.

We took several days deciding what should be cut, what dialog should appear, how to work transitions between cut sections, and what would be absolutely necessary to record in order to give the listener a good taste of the show and a good idea of what's going on. Lots of beloved material was thrown on the floor for reasons of necessity. (We also learned something about what we might be able to cut for the next production.)

In order to make things as linear and straightforward for the actors as possible, we ripped the vocal lines from the piano/conductor book, applied the cuts, and reprinted these. This had the added benefit of cutting down the number of page turns that could potentially ruin a take. We made up packets that contained only the material each actor would be involved in, plus several complete sets for the control booth personnel and engineer. Applying cuts to the instrumental books was more complicated: not only would this involve the printing of a huge number of pages, but over time the players had buried their parts under a mass of fingerings, warnings, annotations, and the like. All of this detail would have to be transferred to the new, pristine printouts -- an exercise that we really didn't have time for. So the decision was made to simply mark the cuts (lightly) in the original parts using a colored pencil. We wanted to make sure that if we needed an intact set of full parts we'd have them, so the colored pencil seemed the best option since if it couldn't be erased it could at least be ignored.

An additional consideration was whether a cut involved resting time that had been give to an instrumentalist to change to another

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