The TONY AWARD WINNING (Woo!) Pasadena Playhouse, April 25 - May 28, 2023

This show only uses 5 Xylophone Pitches - Middle C, A, Bb, C, and E in the staff, so I made this little racks to save some space. 

It's always a privilege to play the music of Stephen Sondheim, and this show in particular is a joy and a challenge. Adding to the experience is getting to play in the historic Pasadena Playhouse, the state theater of California and in an orchestra with some of the finest musicians in Los Angeles.

Here are some pictures of my setup. The orchestra is seated upstage, partially visible through a scrim.

Some Pictures from Young Frankenstein at La Mirada Theatre, September 16 to October 9, 2022.

My beautiful wife Katie J. Stone and dear friend Lindsay McMurray came to opening night.

This was one of my favorite productions of all time - Great show, great theatre, and a great band!

The other Disney+ project I worked on last year was recording the orchestral score for the new live action Lady and the Tramp movie.

This was a dream come true, as I got to go down to the incredible Barbra Streisand Scoring Stage at the Sony Studios lot and worked with an incredible section of some of the best percussionists in Los Angeles.

Wade Culbreath played Timpani, Brian Kilgore was Principal Percussion and Ken McGrath and Pete Korpela played percussion as well. Take a look at the great set up below. ​

This past year, I was lucky to work on three different projects for Disney's new streaming platform Disney+. Two were episodes of Encore! A reality show hosted by Kristen Bell, in which they reunite the cast of a high school musical 10 - 45 years after a performance, put the performers with broadway professionals and stage a single night performance of the same show they did back in high school. It's a really fun show, and interesting to see how people have changed over the years and how they haven't.

The two episodes I worked on were Episode 11 - Anything Goes and Episode 12 - Ragtime. Below are some pictures!

I just got back from spending three weeks in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia with McCoy-Rigby and Poets Road International's Production of Peter Pan. It was exciting to be in a new place, and challenging to be in a country that has had almost no musical theatre before our arrival.

We arrived and I spent almost the entire first work day hoping that eventually a drum set would arrive, as promised, from our in country producing partners. As you can see above, it did! While a Yamaha Rydeen beginner drum set and Sabian B8 cymbals weren't what I was hoping for, they worked with a little help from the gear I brought from home.

I gotta say, the drum set would have been fine if I could have found professional heads to go with it. That's a whole different saga for another time, though. 

On our days off, we did get to explore Riyadh a bit. This is Deera square, which has been turned into a cultural hotspot, at least during the Riyadh Season Festival, of which our show was also a part. It is directly across from the Masmak, an important fortress in Saudi history. 

While we saw impressive projections on the buildings, food trucks, pop up restaurants, performances from international groups and shopping, Deera square used to be the place where they carried out public executions until 17 years ago. This fact made the mood slightly more somber as we took in the sights.

This is Brent Crayon, our music director. One of the more difficult parts of the trip was a shockingly high rate of hospitalization. Members of our company got the flu, lost their voice, tore their meniscus, and one even got her abaya caught in the wheels of an ATV and rolled over herself.  In all some 11 people went to the hospital.

Brent got maybe the worst of it. He contracted pneumonia and spent the last week of our stay in the hospital. Because we were already on a very tight musician budget of only three, that left us with few options to continue performing shows. 

Thus came my promotion to "Emergency Associate Conductor." A battlefield promotion, if you will.

You can see I also had to continue covering a significant portion of the percussion sound effects as best I was able. I also still played Toms for the two Indian dance sequences. Here's my setup for the final week of shows.

While it was exciting to experience a new country, I'm very glad to be home.