Interview With Dan Lipton on 'The Coast of Utopia'

Have you noticed that music has been recently been playing a larger role as background in straight plays.  This trend seems to be growing. You may recall Jason Robert Brown's music for off-Broadway's, "Kimberly Akimbo" and "Fuddy Mears". Julius Fleisher did "State of Maine." "Rabbit Hole" had music by John Gromada.

Mark Bennett is also recognized as one of the best at this task. And for those lucky to have been able to attend the trio of plays by Tom Stoppard at Lincoln Center, "The Coast of Utopia", you know the beautiful theme used in all three and the other music which added to the enjoyment of the play. (The show continues at Lincoln Center until May 13 and if you are attending the three play marathon on April 28, you may see both the playwright and director there as well). You will also have the opportunity to hear the score on a soon-to-be released CD. This very well could be the first cast-recording derived from a "play". You can also get a sneak preview of the music and Parts I and II of "Utopia" by visiting www.lct.org.

When reading the Playbill, I noticed that only two musicians were listed. Aaron Krohn on guitar and Dan Lipton on piano.  I thought it may be interesting to hear about how this music became such an integral part of the production. And what a story it is. Here is my interview with the very talented Dan Lipton.

CS – When did this new trend of music being added to plays begin and who are your favorites?

DL -  Maybe it seems like a trend because more people you've heard of are dabbling in it... but I think there have always been straight plays that use music. I guess maybe it's rare for composers associated with musicals or films to write incidental music for plays... so some have, and some probably have no interest at all! There are many composers who also do sound design, and they bundle those talents and credits together. Producers nowadays certainly like to group it in with sound design, so they can save money. 
 
I would say Mark Bennett is easily one of the best, deservedly a trusted pro in this niche. I loved his work before I knew him personally, especially his music for "Henry IV" at Lincoln Center. Another one that sticks in my head  also was done at Lincoln Center, Jeanine Tesori's music for "Twelfth Night." Jeanine has had such success in musicals that people overlook her work for plays, but she continues to score major plays like "Mother Courage" in Central Park. My friend Michael Friedman is also a leading name in this field of music for plays; the NY Times recently did a nice piece on him and one on Mark Bennett as well. 

CS – What is your musical background?

DL - I've worked a lot as a piano player on musicals, but I've always considered it a temporary "day job" until my career as a composer and songwriter can pay my rent. I have a degree in music composition from Northwestern, and my career ambitions involve scoring films and producing/arranging pop music for recording artists. 
 
Last year, I decided to concentrate on getting more of the work that doesn't require me to be at the same show every night. Orchestration, arranging, and more concert work are what I started branching into. Then I ended up music directing a reading for Michael Friedman, who has an "Alice in Wonderland" musical in development with La Jolla Playhouse. Michael has a ton of plays under his belt and is now kind of moving away from that, into writing musicals... but in my head, a light bulb went off for the reverse. Scoring plays! Why didn't I think of that?? 

CS – How did you get involved with "The Coast of Utopia" and who was involved in recording the music?

The last time I scored a play was over 10 years ago, in college. So before throwing my name out for this kind of work, I decided to "apprentice" under someone to learn the ropes. I'd worked with Jack O'Brien on two musicals, "The Full Monty" and "Scoundrels," so I contacted his assistant Ben Klein to express interest in essentially interning for Mark Bennett on "Utopia" back in August, when they had just announced the cast. 
 
I had met Mark just once, but through Jack he knew that I was a credible career musician who was clearly stooping to volunteer as an intern. I mean come on, I'm 31. Naturally, Mark took full advantage of the situation! 

CS – When did you start work on the show and what was your involvement?

DL - I started work in mid-September as Mark's musical assistant. I basically became the de facto music director for anything that involved actors singing, playing instruments, or miming the playing of instruments. I worked in the second rehearsal room with people on very specific things, a few hours a week. 
 
One of the first things we worked on was the opening of the third play, a dream sequence that Jack had wanted to try as a pseudo musical number. Back in September, I was teaching this to the dozen actors earmarked for the sequence, which at that point was completely sung through. Almost all of these actors were sometime singers... these are great stage actors who don't do musicals. Because of the huge cast and rehearsal schedule, we got these people once every few weeks to drill this music into them. Jack and Stoppard didn't hear it until November, when they were staging Shipwreck and running Voyage at night. The decision was made to cut the singing and make it kind of spoken in rhythm, so Mark reworked the whole thing, stripped it down. 
 
CS – Actors are seen playing instruments on stage. Did you have to teach actors how to play?

DL - For "Voyage", I taught Jennifer Ehle and David Harbour how to look like they are playing piano. In "Shipwreck", David Pittu and Felicity LaFortune have a handful of songs that help smooth some scenic transitions. I taught them these folk songs that we had researched, set them in the right keys, rehearsed their understudies... In "Salvage", I sat in on the harmonica lessons for Josh Hamilton and the child actor who plays his mistress' son... and made sure their understudies could also play the "Utopia" melody on harmonica. 
 
CS – What was the process of developing the score?

Along the way I also became the de facto musical coordinator for the whole score, hiring all the musicians for the recording sessions and conducting those sessions with Mark Bennett. There was some score preparation work in there too, in conjunction with David Ganon, another assistant to Mark on this massive project. David researched the source music, these Russian and Italian folk songs used in "Shipwreck" and "Salvage", and he also schooled the actors in the correct pronunciation of their lyrics. 
 
Each play went into previews with a largely synthesized score. A week into previews on each play, we had a recording session at Scott Lehrer's studio to add some real instruments into the mix. I played piano on the whole score, so I thankfully got paid as a union musician, offsetting my "internship." And there is live accordion, violin, viola, guitars, trumpet, oboe, and clarinet. We're lucky to be getting an album of this music, which should be out in the next few months. 
 
CS – I was quite surprised to see you actually on stage playing the piano in the third installment "Salvage". How did this come about?

DL - By the time they got to the third play, Jack's concept for it had evolved into a Brechtian thing that would involve more music than they had originally thought, specifically produced live onstage. In the Brecht style, insides are exposed. You see the actors moving scenery, you see the pianist working to make sound, and actors serve as observers, bearing witness to scenes they maybe shouldn't. All three plays have different lighting designers, but the third play is really stylistically and story-wise a different ballgame than the other two. It's a much starker, minimalist, darker vision. 
 
There are a few actors who play piano, but I would have had to spend a lot of time coaching them to play well, and Mark would have been limited in what he could write. So the wacky idea was floated that I should just be in the show, and then Mark could write whatever music he wanted. I'd be able to hold the singing cast of "non-singers" together each night instead of trusting them to lock into pre-recorded tracks. 
 
Jack simmered on this idea over Christmas, and consulted Stoppard and Lincoln Center, because they had to okay another salary. I found this prospect HIGHLY unlikely, but I was wrong. So on January 2, I reported to work not as an intern but as a new member of the company. I was told not to cut my hair. Gotta blend in with the rest of the Russians. So I grew out the sideburns too. I was now, somehow, making my Broadway debut, in a straight play, without even having to audition! It's also at a theater where I've worked a lot as a musician. LCT was the first place I worked in NY, on William Finn's show "A New Brain". 
 
CS – Was the piano written into Stoppard's script of "Salvage"?

DL- Yes, so I don't know why they waited so long to hire me, but I was immediately onstage with the actors and live music was worked into the fabric of the play. The opening dream sequence continued to change until right before opening night. That musical number is probably one of the weirdest things you've ever seen/heard in a Stoppard play. It's intentionally forward-thinking in sound, like the music in Herzen's dream is from the next century. I brought in my friend Curtis Moore to orchestrate it. His synthesized orchestration is augmented by my live playing, and I have earphones feeding me a click track and the actors' vocals, in order to keep all of this together. 
 
CS – What was your role in the dream sequences?

DL -  My role in the dream sequences and internal monologues also became a forward-thinking thing, where Mark took inspiration from Brecht's contemporaries in the next century. The characters in "Salvage" see their once-revolutionary ideas being usurped and rejected by the next generation, so it makes sense that sounds of tomorrow would infiltrate their world. 
 
Mark took a cue from the 20th century composer Henry Cowell, in having me play the inside of the piano strings during these scenes. I have a bunch of nylon strings that I have to rosin up like a violin player rosins his bow. Every night I rosin three strings, for three moments in the play where I bow the inside piano strings with the nylon string, creating a creepy, creaky, haunting tone. When Ethan Hawke's character first appears in "Salvage" as a vision to Herzen, that's what I contribute to the moment. 
 
Mark also created a 12-tone row for Salvage. That's a sequence of the 12 chromatic tones set up as a governing theme for a piece, where every tone is equal and no key can be discerned. We're talking real modernist, 20th century stuff here, practiced by composers like Schoenberg and Berg. I pluck the inside of the piano strings with a quarter right at the top for Salvage, stating the 12-tone row. Then I pick up a percussion mallet and strike the low piano strings with it to get a rumble thunder effect, while the 12-tone row is now stated on the piano's upper register. The row comes back throughout "Salvage". I like how it's used in the scene between Turgenev and the Doctor in the second act. I do the rumble thunder mallet thing again at the end of Act One, during the rainy funeral scene. 
 
CS – Can you discuss the haunting beautiful theme?

DL - What I think is so cool about the piano in "Utopia" is this: the first thing you hear when "Voyage" begins is a tinkly piano melody. The main "Utopia" theme is then stated on piano. Herzen spins around in his chair and drowns in a sea of thought for the first two plays, but in the third play his chair lands. And it turns out he's been dreaming and reminiscing in that chair all this time, and when he finally wakes up and gets out of the chair, there's a pianist tinkling at his house because there are guests over. I love that. It's like I've been there since the first second of the play but you can't connect it until some six hours later. 
 
CS – Did Stoppard and O'Brien have involvement with the music?

DL - Tom Stoppard seemed to be around a lot more during "Salvage". He re-wrote chunks of it, and Jack made some cuts and mashed some scenes together. Musically, Jack and Mark Bennett had a music-spotting meeting for each play. Sometimes Stoppard was involved in those choices, sometimes not. A lot of music cues evolved as needed. Some, you don't realize until you're in tech rehearsals and a scene change needs to happen... whoops, need some music! 
 
The third play was staged very fast so I did participate in a hasty design meeting about how to incorporate the piano onstage so it looked like part of the world they were creating. At that meeting, Stoppard came up with the notion of making the piano look like it's on the raft. The raft is the central image on the "Utopia" poster, so I was kind of flattered that the piano would get to be on it. It's a modern piano encased in a rotting seaweed shell, and it's angled a little lopsided... all the debris onstage are set pieces and symbols from the first two plays, washed up on the other shore. 
 
Stoppard was very kind to me. When things stressed him out, he would wander over to the piano during tech rehearsals and tell me that he was always jealous of musicians, being able to just sit down and play. He really admires the musical gift, and I got a nice note from him on opening night, which I would never ever have expected. 
 
CS -  What was it like to make your Broadway debut and can you describe what it is like backstage with such a huge cast?

DL - It's a crazy experience because it's such a freak accident that I'm there. And the beauty of it is that, with three plays running in repertory, I never have a full 8 show week. Sometimes it's 2, sometimes 4, never more than 5 though. 
 
I'm in the male ensemble dressing room downstairs, 11 guys plus 2 dressers. This is the new experience for me, because musicians in the orchestra pit don't even have a room sometimes. Pit musicians get a locker. No dressing room vanity, no dresser washing my socks, lemme tell ya. So I love to hang with this motley crew of supporting actors, who understudy all the guys upstairs. The backstage vibe in general is very warm and great fun. You get the feeling that this really is a once in a lifetime experience, and the movie stars and veterans are enjoying the community of personalities as much as the young actors and the piano player. 
 
I'm the only person on this production who has seen it from all angles. I saw the first two plays before I had any idea I'd be in the third one. I thought it was cool just that my piano was heard every night. When I went to a Marathon performance a few weeks ago, I was the only audience member who had a dressing room to hang in at intermission, with the actors. I was also the only audience member who got to hop onstage and be in the thing! 
 
CS – The opening of each show is amazing. Can you describe it?

DL - The turning point for me was the first day we did the opening iconic floating chair/sea image for "Salvage". For the first time, I was underneath the waves with the cast. I never really knew how the effect was achieved, and I'm not going to give it away here, but it was a thrill to be in on it. Each night I do it, it's a very stirring, powerful thing to be under those waves, facing the night's performance with all these amazing actors, and Mark's music whooshes you right into this other time. 
 
But being onstage doesn't feel all that foreign to me, because I used to perform in shows when I was a kid. And I've done a lot of concert work onstage that involves me bantering with pros like Audra Mcdonald or Jason Danieley... so I think I've unwittingly honed a sort of stage presence that's not too far removed from actual acting. 
 
CS – It seems like you're on stage the entire first act of "Salvage", are you?

DL - I'm actually the only person who is onstage for the entire first act. Then I have about an hour and 40 minutes to kill before coming back for the bow. But for the whole first act, I'm very much in 1855, high collar, waistcoat and all. There are little moments when it's just me, Ethan Hawke and Brian O'Byrne onstage. Or Martha Plimpton, Josh Hamilton and my little head is still witnessing everything... one of my favorite moments actually is the end of the first act, when I underscore a pivotal moment between Martha and Brian. 
 
I have a moment with almost every actor in Act One of "Salvage". There are party scenes where the crowd of people is all around the piano, and entire conversations happen under the breath while other people are acting downstage. Like any actor I guess, you check in at certain moments with certain people, every single performance. David Manis always pats my back on a certain exit. Bianca Amato always stands next to me and hums along to one of our underscore cues. Jennifer Ehle and I always exchange glances while I'm playing and she's putting a decoration on the piano. Aaron Krohn plays guitar with me, and we have a bunch of inside jokey moments. 
 
I'd hardly call my role a role. I would have had to join Actors Equity, and they would have had to pay me twice, if I had a line or a character name. I'm paid as a union musician, just like in a Broadway musical but a very different situation. I will miss this gig a lot when the whole "Utopia" saga closes May 13. 
 
CS – You have another show in progress along with "Utopia". This must be difficult.

DL - It is definitely a trip to be juggling two prominent onstage music gigs right now... one being the season's serious epic and the other being its most ridiculous comedy improvisation show. "Don't Quit Your Night Job" began April 26 at the HA! Comedy Club (163 West 46^th Street) with Opening Night set for Thursday, May 17 at 9:30 p.m. My cohorts Steve Rosen ("Spamalot"), David Rossmer ("Nerds"), Sarah Saltzberg ("Spelling Bee") and I conceived this late night happening of music, comedy, and improvisation. The show features a rotating core cast of Broadway's brightest new stars from every show on the block, complete with surprise celebrity guests nightly.
 
And gig-wise, I'm doing a concert at Ars Nova on Sunday, June 3 @ 9:30pm. 
 
Well, there you have it. If you want more information of "Don't Quit Your Night Job" call SmartTix at 212-868-4444 or visit www.dontquit-nyc.com. Performances are Thursdays and Friday nights at 11 p.m., Saturdays at 5:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. and Sundays and Mondays at 7 p.m.

To purchase his CDs or get more information, visit www.danlipton.com.

For comments, cgshubow@Broadwayworld.com.

Photo by Anthony Cochrane - Dan Lipton, circa 1855