Rats & People: Matt Frederick, Matt Pace, Brien Seyle, Robert Laptad, Emma Tiemann, and Heather Rice. Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts.
If you don’t know the plotline of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night; or, What You Will, it goes a little like this: Girl washes up on beach in seaside town. Girl, nervous for her safety, dons men’s clothing. Girl becomes page for a duke…and, well, it gets a lot more complicated from there. The setting is Illyria, an imaginary seaside town where people drink, flirt, misbehave, and play music.
“Music is used as a muse; it’s used as a storytelling device; there are numerous songs throughout the show,” says Rick Dildine, Shakespeare Festival St. Louis’ executive and artistic director, who’s making his local directorial debut this season. “In fact, the first line of the show is ‘If music be the food of love, play on.’ And then the play ends with a song. So to honor that part of Shakespeare’s play, I knew I wanted to do something different.”
And so Dildine commissioned The Rats & People Motion Picture Orchestra, a local ensemble that composes and performs live scores for silent films, to write music for the play. The band is a sort of loose, modern chamber orchestra with pop, punk, and rock influences; its members include Matt Frederick (brass), Robert Laptad (percussion), Matt Pace (piano, brass), Heather Rice (strings, piano), Brien Seyle (strings), and Emma Tiemann (strings). Though it’s kept mostly true to its moniker (last month, during the Greater St. Louis Humanities Festival, it accompanied Erich von Stroheim’s 1924 film Greed), it also scored a series of Wallace Stevens poems, which it debuted at The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts’ Sound Waves performance series last fall. This is the first time it has written music for theater, and it’s pure composition; the other clever twist here is that the actors will play the music.
“I gave them a list of instruments that I think belong in this world, so we started just with ‘OK, here’s some basics,’ and then they went away and created. And they’d come back, and then I’d respond. So it’s been a call-and-response creation,” Dildine says.
The orchestra also sat in on early production meetings, which included looking at Illyria-esque pictures for inspiration—Mediterranean seaside towns and the like.
“The first day we sat down with Rick,” Seyle says, “He was like, ‘What we’re doing is a nod to classicism. We don’t want to go too far. We don’t want to be all ‘Hey Nonny Nonny’…”
The band’s preparation has included reading and rereading Twelfth Night; once casting was done, and it was clear which instruments each actor could play, writing began in earnest. Both Seyle and Pace were over the moon to discover that Haas Regen, the actor playing the foolish Sir Andrew Aguecheek, is a marvelous flutist, so they could juxtapose his ridiculousness with, as Pace puts it, “a velvety flute line.”
“And Orsino plays accordion, which is so perfect,” Seyle says. “I feel like in Illyria, that’s the royal instrument—like how noble people used to have to play lute, or viola da gamba.”
The huge difference between this and what they usually do, Seyle says, is that rather than conveying what a film director was trying to express, they must understand the actors’ motivations; it’s almost like writing dialogue in music.
“Here, we’re imagining a whole music culture; we’re imagining a scene,” he says. “What are these people doing when they make music? Like in the rock ’n’ roll scene, you’re drinking at the bar. I feel like it’s similar in Illyria. There’s a drinking culture with their music culture, and we tried to make that inform what kind of tunes are playing.”
“That’s one of the exciting things about composing for real theater,” Pace says. “You can’t shorten the scenes for the silent movie, but some of these scenes will be built around the songs. It’s like method musicianship.”
Shakespeare in the Park begins May 24 and runs nightly at 8 p.m. through June 16, except Tuesdays, in Shakespeare Glen in Forest Park; the Green Show begins at 6:30 p.m., and all performances are free. For more information, call 314-531-9800 or go to sfstl.com.
