arrangements

Some arrangements I have done are not 'mashups' but just straight-ahead arrangements of songs.

One of the great privileges I had in 2017 was to be part of the annual Kennedy Center Honors. My friend, Damian Woetzel, asked me to help arrange the music for the tribute to dancer Carmen de Lavallade, which he was directing. The KCH is something I have watched since I was a kid, and always represented the very height of live performance. This tribute included a number of pieces Carmen danced in her career, performed by some of the greatest dancers of today. Our big question was how to end the tribute, how to create a finale that was at once a grand spectacle for the audience, but touching and elegant as Carmen. There were a lot of versions that ended up on the cutting room floor, but I'm very proud of this final arrangement of "She's got the Whole World in Her Hands" we created, with the collaboration of all the performers involved.

I was asked to arrange Cyndi Lauper's "True Colors" for the 2017 LOGO Trailblazers Honors. Three young LGBT pop-singers performed this arrangement, with Cyndi Lauper in the audience.  I worked with the three singers on the arrangement, figuring out the keys, harmonies and key-change, and then wrote the orchestration for the string ensemble.

This song, "Believer" by the band American Authors, is originally a kind of 'arena rock' anthem, but the fabulous Michael Lowney wanted to do it in a more fun, upbeat arrangement. So we came up with this swinging arrangement, which became the title song of his solo show.

Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote a phenomenal parody of the opening number of Hamilton, using the story of Sondheim's Sweeney Todd. He asked me to come up with a musical arrangement that combined the show, then Alex Lacamoire and I orchestrated it for the Easter Bonnet orchestra (the biggest Broadway fundraiser of each season).

Sometimes the cast of Hamilton gets invited to sing the "Star-Spangled Banner", and on this occasion I worked with Schuyler Sisters to come up with this arrangement they sang live.

In 2014, I traveled to Havana, Cuba and was the music director of a workshop of a show then-called "Carmen Jones: El Amor Cubano". I conducted a 14-piece Cuban band, and contributed some small arrangements. But the real geniuses behind these musical arrangements and orchestrations are Alex Lacamoire and Edgar Vero.

This is a teaser for a concert entitled "Andrea Burns' Broadway Latin Party." Andrea and I worked to re-arrange classic Broadway songs in Latin musical styles, including this version of "Aquarius" from HAIR as a salsa number.

Every year, Broadway Cares produces a Holiday CD and each Broadway Show contributes an arrangement of a song. The first year of Hamilton on Broadway, I came up with this version of "Joy to the World" that borrows from the 'toast' in "Satisfied" - I wrote the spoken verse with Okieriete Onaodowan, and trusted the masterful Leslie Odom, Jr. to bring home the lead vocal.

Another arrangement for the Broadway Cares 'Carols for a Cure' Holiday album. This was an original song, written and sung by Anthony Ramos, for which I wrote the arrangement and orchestration.

At the Public Theater, the original Hamilton cast paid tribute to A Chorus Line on the 40th anniversary. Alex Lacamoire asked me to write the orchestration for the Hamilton band, and we performed it after the curtain call.

For Christmas 2016, I made this arrangement of the Pentatonix song "That's Christmas to Me." Carlos Gonzalez did the editing of our home movies, all shot by my dad on hand-held video camera. Merry Christmas, dad!

I was asked by my friend Bill Sherman to do the Dance Arrangements for a new play called Somewhere, by Matthew Lopez. It's a play with incidental music, which was incidentally quite fabulous, original compositions by Bill. If you don't know what "dance arrangements" are, I basically took the song into a studio with the choreographer, and we collaborated to get the music to 'score' the dancing, by means of drum hits, melody alterations and different textures. This was orchestrated by Joe Fiedler.

One Christmas, when the movie FROZEN was big in theaters, I received an iPhone memo of my goddaughter singing "Do you wanna build a snowman" acapella. I realized that she stayed completely in tune the whole song, so I put the audio file into LogicProX and orchestrated the track to send back to her. It was a fun project and brought some joy to her and her family.

Another piece I arranged and performed for a friend's wedding was Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue." My dear friends Carolyn Schaeberle and Dan Shafer were married in NH, and Carolyn (a former dancer) asked for a French, gypsy-jazz version of the piece, one that turned romantic and epic as she walked down the aisle. It was fun, and thanks to Ben Lively for playing some great violin.