Word: fishered
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...Hair"). I applaud the whirlwind schedule of each production (first rehearsal to closing night in two weeks flat). I'm won over by the subtle elegance of its productions, with scenic consultant John Lee Beatty merely suggesting the settings in front of the stage-wide bandstand that holds Rob Fisher's Coffee Club Orchestra. I'm awed by the scholarly passion for detail Fisher, Encores!' musical director, brings to the restoring of each score...
...McGlinn's bijou triumphs cued a concerted revival of concert revivals. In London, Ian Marshall Fisher's impressive series, Discover the Lost Musicals, has flourished since 1988. In 1994, the year Encores! began, the York Theatre uptown inaugurated a Musicals in Mufti series (its motto: "Think Encores! on a budget") to spotlight "underappreciated" musicals by such highly appreciated composers as Richard Rodgers, Kurt Weill, Duke Ellington, Jule Styne, Harold Rome, Noel Coward and Alan Menken. Downtown, and way downscale, there's Mel Miller's Musicals Tonight! series, which this week finished a run of the 1926 "The Girl Friend...
...Reassembling an old musical requires a mix of showmanship and scholarship - a paleontologist's digging and Poirot's powers of inference. "Did they use this harmony, or did they mean it to be that harmony?" said Rob Fisher. "I agonize over this, because I want the score to sound exactly as it did originally." No reclamation project was as daunting as that of "St. Louis Woman," the 1946 Arlen-Johnny Mercer musical revived in 1998. "There was no score," Fisher said, "just scraps of material." Ace orchestrators Ralph Burns and Luther Henderson re-created - and, for the overture and dance...
...glance at the 33 shows Encores! has produced shows that the selectors - Daykin, Fisher and artistic directors Walter Bobbie, Kathleen Marshall and Jack Viertel - look for semi-legendary shows that (1) were written by one of the premier composers; (2) boast a lush score, preferably with a few standards; (3) have a libretto that today is either amusingly anachronistic or lingeringly poignant; (4) offer strong roles to either contemporary musical theater stars or star-is-born kids; and (5) haven't received full-dress Broadway revivals in decades. The ideal musical, by these criteria, is Rodgers and Hart...
...Many would say (and I wouldn't disagree) that the real star on stage is Fisher, who at 51 still has the brisk, charming air of every coed's favorite professor. He gets the first applause, as he strides to the podium to lead the musicians in the show's overture, and the last cheers after the performers' curtain calls, as the orchestra plays a few final airs - the capper to a beautiful evening. Fisher is the one who has worked with the arrangers to locate the score (or to reimagine what it might have been), who has rehearsed...