Home > CANNED MUSIC AT THE THEATER ISN’T A SWEET SOUND
BY CARLTON WILKINSON
The two-week musicians’ strike at Radio City Music Hall in November ended in a deal hammered out with the help of a mediator named by New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg. A job action staged by musicians union Local 802 halted a dress rehearsal, and the resulting dispute left the Rockettes dancing to prerecorded music for shows in the first two weeks of November.
On Nov. 18, the live musicians returned to the "Christmas Spectacular," playing to packed audiences as they have done for the last 73 years.
If you’ve followed the news accounts, that much of the story is familiar. But little has been said about the one thing in this strike that really matters most: the successful, if temporary, replacement of musicians with prerecorded music.
After months of fruitless negotiations, the union’s intention was to stage a job action, a walkout of the dress rehearsal, that would soften up the other side. They then planned to return to work for the first performance without a contract while negotiations resumed.
In retaliation, Cablevision Systems Corp., the owners of Radio City, barred the musicians from returning, staging the first few performances with canned music and announcing to the world that the "Spectacular" would go on as scheduled, just as spectacularly. Musicians? We don’t need no stinkin’ musicians.
This almost happened once before, during a March 2003 walkout by the same musicians’ union in a job action against Broadway’s League of American Theatres and Producers. The theaters planned to replace the players with canned orchestras, but the actors and stagehands refused to cross the picket lines. The strike lasted four days, shut down 18 Broadway musicals and cost producers an estimated $10 million. Again due to the mayor’s intervention - and mediated by the same guy - this earlier job action came to a rather chilling conclusion: The union accepted major concessions about the minimum number of musicians that could be required for a show. This cut in minimums potentially saves investors big bucks on each show. In return, the musicians got a guarantee that those minimums would remain in place for 10 years.
Ten years. At that point, maybe a new agreement will be reached to keep these minimums in place or to raise them.
Don’t bet your bassoon on it, though.
Expense of musicians
Musicians have become an expensive line item in the New York entertainment industry. With the rise of technological alternatives, theater owners have been poised with the red pen for much of the last decade. It is even affecting the culture of Broadway shows, as several inventive creators have handed investors neat "solutions" for the musician problem. For instance, a reportedly very exciting, stripped-down version of "Sweeney Todd" currently on Broadway features the actors playing all the music themselves on a handful of instruments.
In this light, the move by Radio City owners appears a highly significant blow in the continuation of an ongoing dispute. The "Spectacular" musicians got what they wanted. But in the fray they lost something huge: Their live orchestra was replaced by a prerecorded one in a landmark New York performance.
Mind you, the audience didn’t like it - it had spent a lot of money on those tickets and wanted the full effect. The people felt cheated. They wanted the band back.
The Rockettes didn’t like it. Their contract has a no-strike clause, but even so, they walked out of the dress rehearsal in a show of solidarity with the musicians. For practical reasons, the other performers reportedly didn’t like being accompanied by a recording. Radio City’s stagehands were uncomfortable enough with the whole thing that their union publicly called for an end to the impasse.
It didn’t play well with the mayor, either. His message to both sides was that New York doesn’t want this. Find a way to share. Play nice.
But how much is any of that pressure going to matter in the end? Less than nothing. The deed is done. Improvements in technology will yield ever more lifelike canned music. The pressures for huger profits won’t go away. And now a precendent has been set: Recorded music has been used to devalue live musicians. What’s left is just a matter of timing.
The next big battle will be in eight years when the 2003 musicians’ union contract with the League of American Theatres and Producers expires. In all likelihood, those negotiations will strip the musicians of the last remnants of their bargaining power. Whether they go out with a bang or a whimper, the big money will probably win and the musicians will become disposable.
In classical orchestras, there is no pricey "spectacle" to stage - musicians themselves are the main attraction. But it would be foolish for other music organizations to regard this event as irrelevant. The New York theater industry siphons a steady stream of highly talented musicians into this area, a flow that fills many of the part-time seats in the dozens of area ensembles. Hurting the ability of those players to make a living has negative consequences for music-making, and ultimately theater as a whole, over the entire cultural spectrum.