By Adam Hetrick
07 Feb 2013

	Stephanie J. Block in the title role
	Photo by Joan Marcus

When I spoke with the cast during rehearsals, they said it felt like a new production, with revisions and rewrites happening daily.

RH: This production doesn't feel like a revival. From day one, because of Scott, the incredible cast, and my having re-orchestrated the whole show, it feels new. During rehearsals, like with any new show, I'm watching the cast, I'm hearing their voices, I'm seeing how they're playing things and I will write lines to adjust directly to that.

It was never of a period. It may have been on Broadway in the 1980s but it's not an '80s show. It is its own strange bird. I feel like this is a brand new show, like we are presenting this for the first time to the audience.

RH: When I was a pop songwriter, I heard arrangers taking my song and I would think, "Boy, they really didn't get it." And I thought, "Dear God, I'm going to have to learn to be an arranger to preserve my songs." So, I taught myself orchestration. I went to Manhattan School of Music, but I didn't learn anything specifically about pop-music orchestrating there.

So, when Barbra Streisand asked me to do an album with her as a songwriter, I also was the arranger on that album and conducted the orchestra. And on all of my own albums, people don't realize that I had a pop record called "Him" with a big string section in it. They don't understand that there was a day where I sat and conducted that string part. They think I'm just singing the tune. I always did my own orchestrations.

	Jim Norton as the Chairman
	photo by Andrew Eccles

So when I started to write the score of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, I knew what I thought the orchestra would play. The only question in my mind as I composed it was how big an orchestra Joe Papp was going to give me.

When I was about a third of the way through the orchestrations, someone asked me at the Shakespeare Festival, who was going do to the orchestrations for the show? And I said, "I'm doing them." And they said, "You don't do that." And I said, "I don't? I dont know how not to do that. I know what the string parts are already." And so they said, "Well, good luck."

When I finished the initial Broadway orchestrations, I realized why that's not a good idea. I probably would never try to do it again. But then when I found out that we were going to have a different sized orchestra for this new version, I thought I would have to do them again because I know where everything is buried in the score, and I think I can get a similar sound to that which we had in 1985 out of this different instrumentation. So, it was a lot easier this time. I wasn't having to make every decision about what counter line I wanted to use, the challenge was to get it to sound full. Roundabout gave me, what is for today a more than decent-sized orchestra, 15 pieces — a lot of people consider that to be a luxury today. I think they sound really good. I think it sounds full and very orchestral and not like we're trying to make three synthesizers pass for a full Broadway pit.