Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1543098
Spring 2026 – LOCAL695.COM 27 The Live Keyboard: Our Secret Weapon—The Strings of Our Pit The emotional bed, the responsive phrasing, the melodic freedom that let the actors breathe and perform The moment we committed to recording every vocal live, we knew we would often have to replace the rigidity of a conventional playback track with something fluid enough to follow the actors but disciplined enough to hold the shape of a score that Stephen Schwartz had spent years refining. Jon wanted truth. He wanted live breath. He wanted the actors to act their way through the songs rather than deliver a perfect vocal inside a rigid tempo grid. And so, our department had to become, in the truest sense, an orchestra that could follow them. This is where the keyboard became absolutely essential. From Day One, Music Associate Benjamin Holder stood at the centre of this system with a humility and musical sensitivity that still astonishes me. Ben wasn't there to lead. His job was to be the safety net beneath Cynthia and Ari, a responsive accompanist capable of changing tempo, tone, intensity, and harmonic feel at the speed of emotion. When Cynthia inhaled, he was already there. When Ari hesitated, he held space for her. When either of them needed to stretch a phrase or soften a moment, he simply moved with them. The keyboard became the emotional barometer of every take. When Cynthia stepped into a scene with a certain intensity, Ben matched her. When Ari needed space to land a line, he softened the harmonic movement beneath her. When Jeff Goldblum leaned into comedy and theatrical phrasing, Ben pivoted instantly to support the nuance of his delivery. And what made this so remarkable was that the actors never felt the presence of technology. They simply heard what felt like a musical extension of their own intention. Ben's playing fed directly into Josh's Pro Tools session, locked to picture with timecode, and from there into my Sound Devices Scorpio as a dedicated stem. We also captured the MIDI output from Ben's keyboard, a crucial detail because those MIDI files often became the foundation of the tempo maps that Jack Dolman and the music team later built from in post. That MIDI capture allowed Jack's team to see precisely how Ben had followed the actors' moment to moment, creating a truthful map of the emotional tempo before any orchestration was written. The actors trusted their IEM's and their ear mix, courtesy of Josh's rig and my production feed that matched their emotional truth. Sometimes only keyboard, sometimes keyboard with Greg Wells's backing track, and sometimes a full crossfade into the prerecorded playback track. It was seamless. Behind the scenes, there was a complex technical ballet happening between Ben's keyboard and Josh's Pro Tools session in real time. Josh cued tracks, set up crossfades, updated bar counts, dropped markers, built edits, and monitored timecode. Josh had to feel where the take was going, anticipate where Ben might return to tempo, and manage the invisible transitions that allowed the performance to evolve naturally without compromising the later orchestration. Ben often had a personal click of his own buried in his IEM to keep the performance loosely tethered to the underlying architecture that Stephen Schwartz, John Powell, and Jeff Atmajian would later need for orchestration and music adaptation. There were moments when Ben quietly removed his click mid-take, choosing to follow Cynthia or Ari wherever they went emotionally. Those takes were breathtaking. Wild, free, honest. But whenever he could, Ben kept the click in his ears. This ultimately is why the keyboard mattered so much. It allowed us to preserve the truth of performance in a genre that has historically relied on the safety of lip-sync. It allowed Cynthia, Ari, and Jeff to act their way through songs without feeling constrained by tempo grids or technical expectations. Ariana Grande & Cynthia Erivo