High above the stage at Riverside Theatre’s last musical, “Chicago,” audiences got to witness music director Anne Shuttlesworth in action.
And action there was, there on the elevated platform where the orchestra played. Shuttlesworth was that hyperkinetic conductor with the bobbing blonde mane, leading the group through that fabulous music.
When “Mame” opens March 7, she won’t be quite so obvious. But just as she has in dozens of Riverside plays, her presence will be felt just the same. From the actors’ vocals to her own piano and the rest of the pit orchestra, Shuttlesworth puts the music in musicals.
She also puts the music on the page – literally. Before every show, from the first rehearsals, she is tapping away at her laptop using special software to reduce and transcribe the score for the limited instruments that will play.
Just like the theater’s on-staff music director Ken Clifton, Shuttlesworth isn’t often visible to audiences. She is in the pit, sunken below floor level between the stage’s apron and the front row. Even when it’s Clifton who is music directing, Shuttlesworth is often there during performances playing the second keyboard.
In most rehearsals, she’s working under the director – in the case of “Mame,” it’s James Brennan. Accompanying the cast on the piano, she plunges into a phrase then stops abruptly as Brennan breaks for a pointer. Other rehearsals involve just her and the actors. Her coaching ranges from giving word-specific tips to helping them learn not just notes but the “cut-offs” – the agreed-upon points to take a breath.
Two weeks before the show opens, the orchestra arrives in town; it is Shuttlesworth who will run their rehearsals, too. That’s when the bobbing begins in earnest and with purpose as she exuberantly plays piano while marking time with the rest of her body.
“My accompanist professor took a video of me once, and said, ‘Watch this. You move too much.’ But something’s got to move if you’re playing the piano and conducting.”
Along with conducting, accompaniment is its own musical specialty and she has loved it since she first played piano for her high school chorus. Growing up in a town of 750 in western Pennsylvania, Shuttlesworth spent her childhood and adolescence studying piano and singing at school.
At the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, she studied performance as an undergrad and accompaniment in graduate school. Her interest was in opera and art songs. It wasn’t until she was almost through her master’s program that she suddenly got hooked on Broadway, when she was hired to go on the road as associate conductor with the pre-Broadway tour of “Annie.” It was 1996; Nell Carter starred.
After the tour settled in on Broadway, Shuttlesworth stayed in New York. She moved to Vero Beach 12 years ago and, soon after, began playing at Riverside.
After two decades in the business, her fingers fly over a laptop loaded with software that types not letters but musical notation. During an early rehearsal of a dance sequence in “Mame,” as she paused her piano playing at director Brennan’s cue, she seamlessly turned to her laptop on a table next to her, and sneaked in a transcription of the passage she had just played.
There are times she must reduce the notes scored for an entire section of the orchestra into a single treble and bass line for piano. “A second keyboardist will be replacing a 30-piece string section,” she says. “I’ll take the violin book and I’m putting every one of the notes into the laptop.”
And for the next show, “Saturday Night Fever,” for which she will act as associate music director to Clifton, she’ll program sounds into the computer and run that through the keyboard. “It’s great because I can do it on a plane,” she says.
That’s important. While Shuttlesworth works essentially full-time at Riverside, there are times with other gigs overlap, like a recent mad dash to Orlando to fill in for the associate music director of “Wicked” when his wife went into labor.
Along with “Chicago” and now “Mame,” recent shows at Riverside for which Shuttlesworth has directed the music include “Hello, Dolly,” “Swingin’ On a Star,” “I Love a Piano” and “How to Succeed in Business (Without Really Trying).”
It’s a grueling schedule, fun though it seems. “The sheer amount of work that goes into putting something up – it’s kind of huge,” she says. “Reducing (the score) and creating the band parts, that’s a lot when it’s a show as big as ‘Mame.’ None of that pre-exists the show.”
And then there are the unlucky breaks. One came before rehearsals even started.
“We lost a day of rehearsal when half the cast was snowed in in New York and physically couldn’t get here. Losing a day is huge. We’ll make it up and no one will know, but losing an eight-hour day is no small thing.”
And there are times when pushing through the pressure finally takes its toll. “I had walking pneumonia the last 10 days of ‘Chicago,’” she says. She “ate a zillion cough drops” for fear of having a coughing jag with the orchestra aloft on the stage.
The night the show closed, she did not put herself on bedrest. On the contrary. “I did close to an all-nighter writing charts for a Valerie Lemon concert of Marvin Hamlisch music in Naples,” she says. It wasn’t until Hamlisch’s widow Terre Blair Hamlisch texted her “You need amoxicillin” that she finally went to a doctor.
And even that didn’t stop her from an emergency fill-in days later for the national tour of “Wicked” in Orlando, when the music director’s wife went into labor. At least she wasn’t winging it – she herself had toured with the show as associate music director last summer.
In “Mame,” the cast of 28 includes a child actor on stage, 10-year-old Bergman Freedman, a New Yorker who is making his regional theater debut. He plays the orphan Patrick who comes to live with his Auntie Mame. The music Shuttlesworth is working on with him includes some of Jerry Herman’s best-known songs: “We Need a Little Christmas,” “My Best Girl” and “Open a New Window.”
Bergman may not realize it, but he’ll won’t be the only kid around on opening night. In the pit, next to Shuttlesworth, will be her daughter Elexia. Mad about theater, she tags along to every show she can; she was even up on that platform in Chicago. This time, she’s got her own child-size armchair to lounge in – black, so it doesn’t stand out in the pit.
Just like her mother, Elexia has put in some hours of preparation for the show – at Riverside Children’s Theatre.
“She’s ready,” says Shuttlesworth. “She’s been taking the ‘Mame’ class next door.”