"No Greasepaint, Just the Roar of the Cast"

by Jesse Green

ABOUT 50 people associated with the new musical "Dessa Rose" - among them the authors, the orchestrators, the music director, the stage managers, the sound designer, the music copyist and, of course, the performers - were crammed into what's usually the ballet studio beneath Lincoln Center Theater on Feb. 11, a week before the show's first preview, for a sitzprobe.

It may sound like a colonoscopy, and it is long and exploratory. But the sitzprobe - the German word originally came into musical theater from the world of opera and literally means "sitting trial" - is actually the rehearsal at which cast and musicians assemble to play through a score for the first time and hear the combined results of their separate endeavors. Sometimes those results are disastrous: the singers can't find their pitches in the unfamiliar orchestral fog, or a misguided instrumental concept turns a song that sounded bright when accompanied by a piano into a gloppy, turgid mess. But more often, as was the case with "Dessa Rose" that Friday afternoon, the sitzprobe is thrilling: the first glimpse of a newborn, beautiful almost by definition and screaming at the top of its lungs.

"This is my favorite day of the whole process," said David Holcenberg, the music director, welcoming the actors. "You will be shocked and amazed by the amount of color our orchestrators have put in."

And they were. The opening song, called "We Are Descended," began simply enough with the actresses LaChanze and Rachel York, as a black woman who escaped slavery and the white woman who reluctantly helped her reflecting in old age on the struggles of their youth. But as the number built into a choral anthem, with all 12 cast members (and five understudies) belting the gospel-inflected tune while the eight-piece orchestra played fortissimo, it became, in the small room, almost overpoweringly moving. When the song ended, the singers, who had been working with only a piano and drums since rehearsals started on Jan. 6, roared their approval; some were crying.

The musicians seemed differently astonished. They had been learning their parts for several days but until the sitzprobe most had no idea what they were accompanying. The vocal lines, the lyrics, the actors' personalities, even the story itself were as new to them as the plucky sound of the mandolin and the synthesized samples of rattling chains were to the cast. The two groups eyed each other with shy smiles.

"It's like an arranged marriage," said William David Brohn, one of the orchestrators. "Time to take a good look at who you're hitched to."

As Mr. Holcenberg led the rehearsal from number to number, the intensity, uninterrupted by dialogue scenes, didn't let up, like an opera recording with only arias. Each song brought new surprises for the cast (who would sometimes look up, startled, to locate the source of some new sound) and for the musicians (who laughed at the occasional joke in the very serious script). At the back of the room, the authors, Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, were listening for something else entirely. "To go from piano to orchestra is a big change," said Mr. Flaherty, the composer. "Not just different sound but more sound. So while I'm listening for mistakes and things to improve" - he used up three pads of Post-it notes in three hours - "I'm also listening to see what we can take away. Now that there's a cello, for instance, maybe we don't need some piece of vocal underscoring in the piano. What's the least we really need to tell the story?"

It's an often forgotten principle of musical theater that the musicians are telling the story too. As orchestras get nailed further and further into pits almost entirely covered by the stage (or even get exiled to rooms elsewhere in the theater), as the balancing of voices and instruments becomes more and more the job of a technician operating a console, the sitzprobe is sometimes not just the first but also the last opportunity for all the participants to agree on what story they're telling. Luckily, the orchestra for "Dessa Rose" (which is now in previews at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater and opens on March 21) sits onstage behind the action, invisible to the audience but quite present to the actors. Even so, the sitzprobe, by its nature, is almost unbeatable for musical excitement: it's like swimming inside the rushing current of the songs. It's also the last chance for the cast and orchestra to share the joy of their combined creation; they may now be married, but once their first child is born, they sleep in separate beds.