Kenny Seymour and Tim Kashani explain the sitzprobe, the first rehearsal where actors sing with the full orchestra instead of just piano. The shift from minimal accompaniment to horns, drums, and guitars can surprise performers and force them to refocus. Having the band onstage creates eye contact and a sense of family between musicians and cast.
Chapters
For those that don't know what, what the sits probe is, can you— let's define it. Okay, in the rehearsal room, uh, depending on the production, it's usually just a piano. Sometimes they'll have a rhythm accompanist, um, like a drummer or a djembe player that would just give you to keep pulse and keep time.
And that can go on through the entire rehearsal, so you're whatever, 2 weeks to 2 months or however long it is.
Absolutely. And once you get to, you know, where there is some kind of an operational version of the show. I mean, sometimes it happens a little earlier. It gets passed off to the orchestrator and they start their work, and once that's done and more changes are done and it's brought back and forth, you go to the sitzprobe where the cast first hears their orchestra or their band play the show and they sing it down for the first time, and everybody is all excited and they hear the opening number and it's like Yes!
So it's a great time. It's one of my favorites, and what throws a lot of actors for the first time is they're used to Kenny on the piano playing the melody the whole time.
All of a sudden there's horns coming from here, and there's a big drum fill here, and there's a guitar doing— and you're going, wow, refocus.
Yeah, and that's where, as a performer, it's really important for them to be so concrete by the time they get to that point.
And Memphis was unique. Well, unique in a sense that the band was on stage. Yeah. So we had that kind of connection. I mean, there are some times when, you know, we would make eye contact with one of the actors and, you know, playing with them. Yeah. So it's like, it's a group effort, especially when the band is on stage. You become a family.
