South Florida Theater Review: "“Is it real or is it Memorex” went the old commercial for recording tape, a reference to whether people could tell the difference between live sound and recorded sound.
The truth was that it was, in fact, pretty easy to tell canned music from live – a decade or more before digital recording.
But the increased quality of sound reproduction, coupled with reduced technical expense and higher personnel expense, have revived the argument over theaters utilizing digitized orchestras instead of the real thing for musicals.
1 comment:
I would be absolutely horrified if "On the Street Where You Live" was turned into a marching song. That being said, I do prefer live orchestra (who doesn't, except some stingy producers?) over canned music. But I did see a community theater production of A Chorus Line where the live orchestra was so awful. When Cassie is dancing her life out in "The Music and the Mirror," it's just awful to hear the trumpets screaming wrong notes every few seconds. On the contrary, when I saw the recent revival of A Chorus Line on Broadway, the orchestra wasn't in the pit. And there definitely was a sterile sound to what was being pumped out of the speakers.
Essentially, I don't really have a problem with community theaters using canned music if they simply don't have the resources. If there's an option between a live piano accompaniment and a lush orchestration from a high-quality pre-recorded tracks, I'd pick the latter.
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