Freaky Friday

Freaky Friday: The Musical

Poster by Ti’Andrea Jones

I held the position of Pit Director for ISM’s production of Freaky Friday, and it was a welcome experience to have. I served as piano conductor for this score, and was very thankful to have Shrek as a previous experience to bolster my skills.

The challenge with this pit was splitting the reeds book, which included oboe, clarinet, flute, alto, and tenor sax into two books. I reorchestrated the pit to add another player, both to be inclusive for ISM and because we did not have many proficient reed doublers on campus. I settled on having oboe, clarinet, and flute to be one part, and expanded the sax part to have soprano, alto, tenor, and baritone sax. I worked on a lot of transposition for the sax part to be doubling or playing thirds with the strings parts, while also adding figures to both parts so one person was not tacet and bored for an entire song. I had also worked on an entire auxiliary percussion part, but the player had to drop at the last minute.

While piano conducting, I found that keeping the drummer and the rhythm section close to me proved very helpful in gelling the entire pit together. A tip I had learned from my professor is to just “let the pit play”, which meant that giving correct starting tempos was paramount while trying to force the pit into a specific tempo in the middle of the song was not a good way to lead the instrumentalists.

Cover photo by Mitch Ryba