This is the second part of my interview with Tim Weil, music director and orchestrator on Jonathan Larson’s groundbreaking and award-winning musical Rent. Weil’s memoir about Rent, is out now and it’s dynamite.
Part I can be found here.
You were talking about that experience of watching Stevie Wonder perform, and the incredible, almost mystical level of performance or creation that you witnessed. Do you think part of getting to that place as a musician ends up being about being vulnerable, i.e. allowing yourself to be open enough for that to happen?
It’s about accessibility and vulnerability and finding a place to open your mind and your heart and your spiritual fully. That’s the only way you can enable it. If you’re blocked up anywhere, it ain’t happening. You have to be fully free and available.
At the book launch, [Rent director] Michael Greif said you have a gift for helping performers find performances they don’t necessarily know they have in themselves. In the book, the way that you come at songs with the cast—like developing the “I’ll Cover You (Reprise)” in a way that would allow Jesse to feel that it was his own—seemed so meaningful as an approach to use with actors.
When you’re working with performers, where do you start?
Number one is obviously you meet them where they are. It’s not ‘where I want them to be.’ You have to start in a place where they’re comfortable, because that’s how they’re going to do their best work.
Actors are always under the gun—they’re putting their ass on the line. I have an unbelievable appreciation for that, especially now that I’ve written a book. I said to my wife Randy [Graff, the actress], You’ve made a career of all this? Why?? What’s wrong with you? I had so much anxiety before the book came out.
Tim Weil and Randy Graff
But in terms of singers, because I’ve been doing it for so long and I study people, a lot of it is really logic. Let’s say someone sings with their head titled up. Well, they’re squeezing their vocal chords. So I try to get them back to neutral. Just kind of basic stuff like that, and the value of consonants, how they help you. Your mouth is a big resonant cave. When you hear people like Adam Pascal and Idina sing, they’re lifting their soft palate up to the stars. That tends to open up all the cavities. Some people, I find, are not consonant-heavy enough.
Once they get the feeling of that—and you do it to a point where it feels goofy but then you go, do you see how everything popped into place? And it’s like anything, when it feels right, you just have to recreate that feeling.
So there’s things I notice and I think Oh, I can help them with this or that.
It’s a combination of that and just patience and my own musicianship. It’s like, let’s see how your and my tastes meet up, and see where this can go. And the great thing is, because I’m the music director, between Michael and I we became the arbiters of how far out are we going to let [their performances] go, and how much are we going to keep them reined in. It’s a very delicate process.
We made a little bit of a deal with the devil for this musical, in that we decided we’re going to kind of custom build the show [for different casts]. I’ve custom-built “I’ll Cover You (Reprise)” for two dozen Collins over the years. But that’s the deal we wanted to make, Michael and I. Because it’s the nature of that kind of music, and you can tune into people’s strengths and gifts. That’s why people want to do the show, because within Jonathan’s beautiful score, they can find a way to operate in collaboration.
Queen Esther, who was part of the original touring company of Rent, with Weil
When you’re dealing with performers and musicians, what is the thing that you think that they most need from you as music director?
Patience and respect. You have to honor what they do, what they’ve done, what they bring to the table. They deserve respect, the work they’ve done deserves respect, and the work we’re about to put in together, too. Because they’re making a leap of faith. They’re trusting in me as the music director that I’m going to put them on the good foot and I’m going to help them be their best. That’s my beginning and ending goal of our work together.
Would you say performers and musicians start from a similar place of vulnerability?
Musicians are built in a different way, I think. Performers, because they work in the theater arts and it’s collaborative by nature, tend to be more outward personalities. You have to be that at least professionally.
If you’re a great musician, you can be a total inward personality, because all that matters is how you sound, how you communicate through your instrument.
Both talking to you and reading the book, you seem to have a very ready sense of empathy and understanding of the band and your performers. Would you say empathy is a key trait for a music director?
I don’t think it’s a necessary quality—there are a lot of not very nice people in all areas of the theater. I think with a director, music director, choreographer, the creative team, empathy is a bonus. It’s not necessarily a given.
It comes to me naturally. It’s the caretaker in me. I’ve just always been that kind of person. If you really want to get psychoanalytic about it, I was the youngest child of ACOA parents. So I was caretaking, making everybody laugh, trying to smooth it all out from as far back as I remember. And God bless my father, he got sober toward the end of his life, when my mom got her cancer diagnosis, and he remained sober of the rest of his life. Which is one reason I write about him so fondly in the book. I finally got to know the father that I always knew was my father, but I never knew as a kid.
The Rent band: Steve Mack (bass), Weil, Jeffrey Potter (percussion), Daniel Weiss (keyboard/guitar), Kenny Brescia (guitar).
Tell me about being an orchestrator. What does it take to do that well?
Let me be clear: I’ve orchestrated. But I know some really great orchestrators, and I’m not on their level.
You have to know all the instruments, all their ranges, what sounds good together. But the real orchestrators, they know the sonorities, they know this thing is better in this key or this thing will resonate better between a flute and a clarinet if it’s played like this. It’s a lot of detail work.
To be a great orchestrator you also have to be a little bit of a composer. There’s a lot of compositional work within that orchestration. And yet what’s so magnificent about it is it is still all in support of what is happening vocally. That’s the real gift.
My orchestrator work is mostly rooted in rhythm sections, horn sections, reed sections. The stuff I know because I did a lot of writing for big bands, jazz bands, funk bands, stuff like that. So I kind of come at it from that world.
Have I done a little bit of it in the theater? Yes. But compared to the Danny Troobs, the Jonathan Tunicks, the Michael Starobins of the world—I’m leaving out a lot of great ones, one of the young guns that’s really great is Charlie Rosen—Yeah, I ain’t them. I occupy my own lane, that’s all. Very pop, funk and jazz.
If you were going to talk to someone who wanted to be an orchestrator, what advice would you give them?
Boy, I’m not sure I’m qualified to do that. I would give them advice not as a fellow orchestrator, because again, if they’re minding their P’s and Q’s and studying the real orchestrators, they’ll be way better at it than I ever could be. I’m not being falsely modest here. I can do it, but I’m limited.
You always want to keep the lyrics and the melodies front and center. The composer needs to hear their songs, the composer needs to hear their melodies, the lyricist needs to hear their lyrics. And if the harmonies are a little bit thicker, if it’s a choral number, just practical stuff, the orchestration is going to be a little bit different because you don’t want to be all climbing all over each other and occupying the same musical territory.
Getting back to our earlier thing, maybe it’s just be empathetic and sympathetic to what’s going on in the room. Orchestrators will be invited in and be told, we’re going to perform this number for you, and they will turn on—in the old days it was just a tape recorder but now maybe a video recorder, because things that are happening visually will also have an effect on their orchestration. What they can glean from the piano accompaniment and from what is happening vocally, these are the guideposts that set the parameters for how they’re going to orchestrate that particular number.
So I would just say to any orchestrator, try to have as much facility, as much in your toolkit, so you can be as open and creative and expressive and empathetic to the needs of the show and the creatives.
Jonathan Larson
I’ve spent most of our conversation asking you about you and Rent. But you spend a lot of time in the book talking about creator Jonathan Larson. You really keep him front and center, even after he passed away.
I’m so glad you said that. That was my intention.
I didn’t realize until I read your book just how deeply La Boheme served as an inspiration for Jonathan. There are songs in Rent you talk about where he turns to songs from Boheme and brought them in almost line by line.
“Take Me or Leave Me” was the top of that chart. But “Life Support”, those lines “Will I lose my dignity, will someone care, will I wake tomorrow from this nightmare,” Jonathan actually heard someone say that at a Friends in Deed meeting.
There were characters in the musical that were based on experiences that he didn’t have. But much of the musical was based on things that had happened in his life and around his life.
It’s interesting, in the ‘94 version, he would even quote stuff that his father would say. I became very close with his father, as I say in the book.
Allan and Nan Larson.
It’s very moving actually, listening to you talk about the Larsons.
I love them. Pop was my second father, my father-in-law was my third. I was lucky, I Had three great dads for a time there.
Pop is very old school, and we talked often. Whenever he called, I picked up the phone and when I knew it was him I would go, “Greetings!” He’d go “Salutations!” He had that very old school way of saying hello.
Collins’ first entrance, in the ’94 version, was “Greetings and salutations!” That’s how personal it got. And Mrs. Cohen is absolutely based on Nan. So Jonathan was writing what he knew.
A lot of people ask me, was Jonathan the character of Mark? And I think he saw himself a little bit in Mark, but he has 3 or 4 very close friends who are all filmmakers. So I think it was the sum total of him and these friends that he was very close to. That was my take on it. We never talked about it specifically. Yeah the show was very, very personal to him.
Thank you so much for taking all this time to talk. It’s been so great.
My pleasure. You can tell how much I love talking about the show and all the wonderful people I got to do it with, Jonathan included, obviously.
My thanks again to Tim Weil both for our conversation and his book, Making Rent. Whether you’re familiar with the show or not, it’s a great window into the creative process and the many gifted artists that are involved in putting together a Broadway show.