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BY JAMES D. WATTS JR.
World Scene Writer
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When an audience spends the evening
laughing at practically everything
an orchestra plays,it usually means
something has gone terribly,
terribly wrong. Unless, that is,
said orchestra is sharing the stage
with the likes of Bugs Bunny, Elmer
J. Fudd, Porky Pig, Wile E. Coyote
and the other characters that sprang
from the minds of the Warner Bros.
animation studios.
Then laughter in the concert hall
isn’t just welcomed — it’s
unavoidable. The Tulsa Symphony
Orchestra this weekend presented
“Bugs Bunny on Broadway,” a show
created by conductor George
Daugherty that featured a baker’s
dozen of classic Warner
Bros. cartoons with live orchestral
accompaniment.
It sounds, when described so
plainly, like some kind of hokum. I
speak from experience: when I
mentioned to my parentshow I was
going to be spending my Saturday
evening, they responded with bemused
interest, but I couldn’t help but
feel the unspoken question, “When is
our son going to get himself a real
job?”
Ah, but that’s the beauty of “Bugs
Bunny on Broadway,” which the
orchestra presented as a special
offering Saturday night and Sunday
afternoon at the Tulsa Performing
Arts Center. It’s a show that makes
you realize the amount of artistry,
of creativity, of mad genius that
went into the creation of these
seven-minute, brightly colored,
action-packed mini-movies.
The visual and comic artistry of
Warner Bros. classic cartoons has
long been championed. This concert
was more a celebration of the
musical artistry that underlies the
frenetic foolishness of Elmer’s
pursuit of that “wascally wabbit,”
or Mr. Coyote’s highly complex and
utterly doomed attempts to lay knife
and fork on the Roadrunner.
Composers Carl Stalling and Milt
Franklyn often gleefully plundered
the orchestral and operatic
repertoire for their inspiration.
Sometimes, they slipped in some
choice pieces as part of their own
original scores, the way a snippet
of Smetana’s “The Bartered Bride”
shows up during the chase scene in
the Roadrunner cartoon “Zoom and
Bored.”
But with most of the cartoons in
“Bugs Bunny on Broadway,” the
classical music used is an integral
part of the comedy. The action in
“The Rabbit of Seville,” for
example, would be funny regardless
of the soundtrack.
The fact that this particular duel
between Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd
takes place to Franklyn’s wonderful
arrangement of Rossini’s overture to
“The Barber of Seville” only makes
the action funnier.
As Daugherty, who conducted the
evening, said, most Americans of a
certain age got their first taste of
classical music from these cartoons.
He opened the concert by leading the
orchestra in a straightforward and
vigorous performance of Wagner’s
“Ride of the Valkyries.” Later in
the evening, he asked, “How many of
you, when you heard that, thought,
‘Ah, Wagner, I so needed to hear
that!’ And how many of you heard in
your minds a voice singing, ‘Kill da
wabbit’?”
It was obvious that most of Saturday
night’s crowd could more easily
imagine Elmer Fudd in a horned
helmet than some operatic warrior
women riding through the clouds.
There’s nothing wrong with that.
Music is memorable for all sorts of
reasons, and “because I heard it in
a cartoon” is as legitimate a reason
as any.
And “legitimate” just begins to
describe the music the Tulsa
Symphony had to play.
These cartoons were scored for a
full orchestra and re-creating these
complex, ever-shifting scores live
required a microscopically precise
synchronization. Miss a cue, and the
whole enterprise falls apart.
Daugherty was effusive in his praise
— from the podium and backstage — of
the Tulsa Symphony, calling it a
“world-class gem of an orchestra.”
And that’s what they sounded like,
playing these pieces with all the
energy and verve one could want,
every note in its perfectly polished
place.
That was true even when the
orchestra was being conducted” by
Maestro Bugs Bunny himself, in
“Baton Bunny,” where Bugs leads a
wild take on Von Suppe’s “Morning,
Noon and Night in Vienna,” and
“Long-Haired Hare,” in which Bugs
dons a disguise (a take-off on
conductor Leopold Stokowski) to
torment an arrogant opera singer.
Not every cartoon featured the
orchestra. Some classics, like “A
Froggy Evening” and “This Is a
Life,” were presented as is, giving
the orchestra a chance to rest and —
if they were sitting close enough to
the edge of the stage — actually see
some of the cartoons being projected
on the screen above them.
Daugherty has been presenting “Bugs
Bunny on Broadway” around the world
for nearly two decades — in large
part because audiences demand its
return. It’s an evening of pure joy,
and one hopes that this weekend’s
performances weren’t
“Ah-deeb-biddahdeeb, ah, that’s all,
folks!”
James D. Watts Jr. 581-8478
james.watts@tulsaworld.com
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