Bugs on Broadway

You ain't just whistling 'Dixie'

Courtesy The orchestra’s biggest challenge: keeping its music in time with the on-screen tinkerings of Bugs and the other Looney Tunes characters.

By JAMES D. WATTS JR. World Scene Writer
4/27/2007

Bugs Bunny cartoons offer transcendent moments of music

Bugs Bunny is supposed to be 15 feet tall. And he belongs at the front of a crowd.

"That's the way these cartoons were designed to be seen," said George Daugherty, the creator of the multi-media concert called "Bugs on Broadway.

"They were created to fill up a cinema screen," he said. "And they were made to be seen by a lot of people sitting together in a theater. The creators even put in pauses, timing the action to allow for the audience's laughter."

And some of those cartoons -- classics like "What's Opera, Doc?" "A Corny Concerto" and "Long-Haired Hare" -- made use of great music by the likes of Wagner, Rossini, Smetana, Donizetti and Johann Strauss.

That is what gave Daugherty, a conductor who has worked with many of the world's great orchestras and ballet companies, the idea to create a concert in which a live orchestra would accompany these apexes of the animators' art.

"Bugs Bunny on Broadway" made its debut in 1990, and in the nearly two decades since then has sold out theaters around the world.

The show, with Daugherty conducting, will be presented this weekend by the Tulsa Symphony Orchestra. This is a special addition to the orchestra's five-concert season.

"This takes up about two-thirds of my time these days," Daugherty said, speaking by phone from Spokane, Wash., where he had just finished conducting two sold-performances of the show before a combined audience of nearly 6,000 people.

"It's getting to be pretty rare when I get to do what I call a 'normal concert,' " he said, laughing. "Fortunately, I love doing these shows, because I'm working with material that's absolutely brilliant."

The concert features about a dozen Warner Brothers cartoons from the golden age of animation. This was the 1940s and '50s, when the studio's "Looney Tunes" and "Merrie Melodies" were the much-anticipated interludes between showings of feature films at the local movie palace.

And, on occasion, the creative people in the workplace they called the "Termite Terrace" would come up with something transcendent.

Something like the Wagnerian Ring-a-ding-ding that is "What's Opera, Doc?, " a six-minute spoof of operatic excess that gave world the unforgettable sound of Elmer Fudd bellowing "Kill da wabbit!" to the tune of "Ride of the Valkyries."

Even Chuck Jones, the legendary cartoon director responsible for many of Warner Bros.' classic cartoons, thought "What's Opera, Doc?" was something special.

However, as Daugherty found out when he began putting the "Bugs on Broadway" show together, not everyone shared that high opinion of cartoons.

"People always assume that the hard part about this show was getting the permission to use the cartoons," Daugherty said. "In fact, it was just the opposite. Warner Brothers was fantastic from the first meeting. They immediately saw the pluses of this sort of concert, and have been great partners and mentors throughout this process."

The tricky bit came later, when Daugherty and his colleagues started looking for the music to these cartoons.

"We went back to Warner Brothers and said, 'OK, we've got permission, where's the stuff?' " Daugherty said. "We were wanting the (musical) charts, the orchestrations, all that. And the answer was, 'There isn't any.'

"That was, for me, the unbelievable moment," he said. "The scores for all these classic cartoons -- things that are considered icons -- hadn't been saved. They'd been throw away or stolen or something."

Daugherty said the reasons are simple -- these films were meant to be seen in a theater, and then go back into the archives.

"This was before TV, before home video," Daugherty said. "No one had any thought about reusing these cartoons, much less keeping tabs on all the pieces that went into them, like the music."

Only two of the cartoons Daugherty wanted to use had complete scores. The others had to be reconstructed -- a process that made Daugherty even more in awe of the talents of composers Carl Stalling and Milt Franklyn.

"Everyone talks about the classical bits, but there's also a lot of Carl Stalling's own music in this show," he said. "In fact, his own music is some of the most complicated and challenging in the whole show. He was a musical madman in the best sense of the word, a fellow just exploding with ideas."

Daugherty said all the music in the show, while it sounds light and comic to the audience, can be fiendishly difficult for the musicians to play. There are passages, he said, that rival Stravinsky and Bartok in their complexity and technical demands.

What makes this concert different from any other, however, is the fact the orchestra has to keep up with the films being shown above their heads.

There are a number of film-with-orchestra concert programs, such as "Alexander Nevsky," with its score by Prokofiev. But even in those programs, Daugherty said, an orchestra has a bit of leeway that "Bugs Bunny on Broadway" doesn't.

"That's because these scores are full of musical sound effects that have to be absolutely in unison with the images," he said. "And Elmer and Bugs are singing, and unlike flesh-and-blood opera singers, they aren't going to wait for the conductor and the orchestra to start playing.

"So we have to be exact to within something like 1/30th of a second," Daugherty said. "In this music, even the rests are rests. The silences are as much a part of the score as the notes."

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"Bugs Bunny on Broadway"

What:
a multi-media concert by the Tulsa Symphony Orchestra

When:
7:30 p.m. Saturday, 1 p.m. Sunday

Where:
Chapman Music Hall, Tulsa Performing Arts Center, Third Street and Cincinnati Avenue

Tickets:
$20-$65, available at the PAC Ticket office, 596-7111; and www.MyTicketOffice.com

NOTE:
Balcony seats for children 12 and under will be $10 at the Sunday performance only.

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The 'toons from "Bugs on Broadway"

This multi-media concert, with a live orchestra accompanying large-screen showings of Warner Bros. cartoons, includes the following classics.

"Baton Bunny" (1959) – Bugs takes to the podium to conduct Franz von Suppe's "Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna," despite the distractions of a fly and a loose cufflink.

"High Note" (1960) – The notes that make up Strauss' "The Blue Danube" assemble themselves on a page of sheet music – except for one note who spent a little too much time inside the score for "Little Brown Jug," and initiates an inebriated chase around the staffs.

"One Froggy Evening" (1955) – A fellow finds a singing, dancing, top hatwearing, cane-twirling frog. His dreams of show-biz fame croak when the frog will perform for only him.

"Zoom and Bored" (1957) – Wile E. Coyote uses his idea of the "Three Bs" (bees, bricks and boulders) in another of his doomed attempts to lay paws upon the Road Runner.

"The Rabbit of Seville" (1950) – Elmer chases Bugs into a theater that is about to raise the curtain on "The Barber of Seville." Bugs inflicts all manner of hare-raising … I mean, hair-raising, indignities on Elmer, from planting flowers on his scalp to marriage.

"A Corny Concerto" (1943) – An affectionate send-up of "Fantasia," with Elmer Fudd and an unruly shirt-front introducing short cartoons set to "Tales of the Vienna Woods" and "The Blue Danube."

"Long-Haired Hare" (1949) – An opera singer takes exception to Bugs' banjo playing. It climaxes with Bugs conducting the singer in a wild concert.

"What's Opera, Doc?" (1957) – The classic "Be vewy quiet – I am hunting wabbits" scenario gets a Wagnerian twist, with Elmer Fudd in a horned helmet, Bugs impersonating Brunhilde, and the only cartoon in which "Kill the wabbit" doesn't end up as an idle threat. "Well, what did you expect in an opera? A happy ending?"

By JAMES D. WATTS JR. World Scene Writer