“Broadway Pit Shrinks; Drummer Is Sent to Room”

In the cutthroat world of Broadway, profit margins and fanciful set designers increasingly are taking precedence over lowly harpists and percussionists. Hilarity ensues:

On the seventh floor of the St. James Theater, two musicians in the orchestra for “The Producers” give new meaning to the phrase “phoning it in.”

The theater’s pit is too small to fit a harpist and a percussionist, so every night (and at matinees) Anna Reinersman and Benjamin Herman cram themselves into a 10-by-20-foot room draped in crimson velvet curtains, with water pipes running above.

As an air conditioner hums, they watch a little man – the conductor – on a television monitor. Headphones pipe in the music from colleagues in the pit downstairs, and close-range microphones transmit Ms. Reinersman’s and Mr. Herman’s own playing to a sound board. Their parts are mixed with the other players’ and broadcast through loudspeakers to listeners in the audience, who cannot tell the difference.

“I could play there in my underwear, and they would have no idea what’s going on,” Mr. Herman, the percussionist, said.

A satellite facility such as the one at the St. James Theater is known as the “sky pit.” And hijinks abound:

Life in the sky pit is an extreme example of what goes on, nonmusically speaking, in the pit. Reading and doing crossword puzzles are major activities, naturally. Look at the oboists and bassoonists, and you may see them whittling obsessively on reeds. One musician in “Cats” was known to watch a mini-television, using headphones.

“It sort of depends on what you can get away with,” said Matthew Dine, an oboist with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, the American Ballet Theater and now “Fiddler on the Roof,” in which he plays onstage but hidden from the audience by a scrim. “I get a lot of work done there,” he said, referring to the paperwork he fills out as a contractor for other ensembles.

The segregation of out-of-pit musicians also creates the conditions for shenanigans.

“It doesn’t get much crazier than dart guns,” Mr. Dine said. “We’ve had some small plastic flying chickens in ‘Fiddler,’ only because in our little area it’s possible.”

The string room at “Will Rogers Follies,” which ran from 1991 to 1993, lives on in legend. The musicians set up a basket and shot a Nerf ball, and laid down a putting green. Richard Sher, a cellist in the show, recalls lox and bagel spreads on Sundays, spiced with Bloody Marys. By the end of the show’s run, he said, players were improvising away.

Movie Stars Crying

Add Sam Taylor-Wood’s “Sorrow, Acsension, Suspension” gallery exhibit to your to-do list and see pictures of Ed Harris, Jude Law and Benicio del Toro crying. How fortunate are we.

Fortunate we are!

Are we fortunate?

MoMA QNS

The Museum of Modern Art is finally leaving Queens and Queens says “don’t go!”

MoMA QNS was a point of pride for Queens boosters like ourselves, but as Jen points out, now that it’s $20 to visit MoMA, it’s unlikely we’ll go more than perhaps once to see the new place (and then probably only on a free Friday evening . . .). Relevant quote:

As Melissa Dale, a first-year student at the Parsons School of Design who was visiting the museum’s Queens outpost last week, said: “If it cost us $20, we probably wouldn’t come. It’s, like, food for three days for us.”

Exactly!

Masayuki Sono’s “Postcards” Memorial

Last week I got a chance to see Masayuki Sono’s “Postcards” memorial. Postcards is Staten Island’s memorial to the 252 Islanders who died on Sept. 11. The memorial is located on the waterfront in St. George. It consists of two concrete postcards (I think they evoke a bird’s wings, too) that frame the Lower Manhattan skyline. Granite is embedded in the wings, into which is carved a profile of each of the Staten Island victims.

I’m pretty sure Postcards is the first Sept. 11 memorial in the immediate area. The city has taken a slow approach to the process of making a memorial at the World Trade Center site — obviously it is still many years away.

It’s not a bad memorial — elegant, really, in the site-specific way it frames where the towers stood. Out of curiosity, I’d like to see more artistic criticism of it.

Here’s a Staten Island Advance story about the memorial’s dedication:

“We wanted to make it as personal as possible,” said Borough President James Molinaro, who stayed at the site for almost three hours after the dedication ceremony had ended. “It’s very comforting to everyone I’ve spoken with.”

The design of the monument, the brainchild of Japanese architect Masayuki Sono, is supposed to be two 40-foot postcards, stretching out into the sky. But almost everyone had their own take on what it represents — from wings carrying their loved ones to heaven, to the pages of a book turning to a new chapter.

“I spoke with someone who lost his brother, and he said it reminded him of sails,” said Molinaro, “because his brother loved to sail.”

For Diane Boland, an emergency room registrar at Staten Island University Hospital in Ocean Breeze, “Postcards” gave her the chance to put names — and faces and occupations and birthdays — on some 9/11 victims she only wishes she had gotten to know.

“We were waiting in the halls — doctors, nurses, environmental people with stretchers and wheelchairs — desperately wanting to help,” said Mrs. Boland, crying as she reflected on the sheer frustration of being so powerless. “We waited and waited and nobody came. It still hurts. But this helps with the healing.

“I’m so impressed with what Staten Island has done to honor all of these people. But as I stand in the middle and look out across the bay … this kills me. It still just devastates me,” said Mrs. Boland, looking past the monument out to the Manhattan skyline, highlighted by the two beams of blue light that rose from the vicinity of the World Trade Center, a picture that invited professional and amateur photographers alike by the dozens.