As You Like It
La Jolla Playhouse
2022

I served as Music Director and Arranger for this production, as well as performed onstage in the cast. To explore new angles of the play’s focus on gender roles and performance, the production was cast solely with trans, non-binary, and queer performers. Shakespeare’s text features multiple songs that highlight key moments of the characters’ journeys. In our production, we selected classic queer anthems that served a similar function as the originals, which I arranged in a contemporary electro-pop vocabulary. These songs provided a point of recognition and identification for LGBTQ+ audiences. I recorded instrumental tracks and coached the actors—some of whom had never sung onstage before—to perform live vocals. The piece was co-directed by Will Davis (a prominent trans theater maker) and Christopher Ashley (then Artistic Director of La Jolla Playhouse). See the production website for full credits.

My approach to music directing and arranging for this show met at the intersection of my knowledge of vocal technique, queer and POC musical vocabularies, and theory on gender and performance. This work included teaching some performers to sing harmonies for the first time or to create specific moments to highlight lesser used musical skills. For “This Must Be the Place,” for example, I created ensemble vocals with simple harmonies and playful spoken interjections to allow the mixed-level singers to inhabit the song fully. A rap interlude merging lyrics from the Talking Heads original and Shakespeare’s text offered a trans-temporal celebration of community and connection.

This production highlights my longstanding approach to working with performers of wide ranging genders to sing in their authentic voices. Rather than begin by slotting actors into gendered voice parts, I did one-on-one sessions with each cast member to determine their vocal range, comfort with vocalizing, and hopes and dreams for how to sing on stage. Taking this information into account, I arranged the solo and ensemble vocals to support each performer to feel comfortable and empowered to express themselves according to their gender, racial, and cultural identities and character profiles. In some instances, this meant femme characters singing in low voices or masculine characters singing higher — pushing against gendered listener expectations. This notion is exemplified in “Dancing on My Own” (originally by Robyn).

I must stress that vocal perfection and sonic end product were not the focal point of my work. Instead, I sought to create a space for the performers to explore and expand in ways other productions have not allowed. This process was playful, messy, and sometimes painful as actors confronted the ways in which their training and professional experiences had also placed numerous gendered strictures upon them. The cast featured some of the foremost theater, television, and film actors of today yet in some aspects of our work, they were newly—and vulnerably—embarking into lesser-trod terrain.

In “Fast Car” (originally by Tracy Chapman), my goal was to offer a container for the performers to explode out of societal bounds — as roughly and rawly as necessary. This musical moment mirrored the flight of the main characters from the strictures of the court to the forest of Arden, where new possibilities of self become possible.