Theatre

Nick Skilbeck in the pit at the Victoria Palace Thea

Nick Skilbeck
musical director and principal conductor, ‘Billy Elliot’
‘My job is to ensure that, musically, the show sounds as good as it can, which extends from the cast through to the orchestra, and might include any extra rehearsals I feel are necessary.

‘I do love theatre, and I love going to the theatre; this is not a job you’d do just to pay the rent. It surprises people that I say this, but I love working with actors; they’re great characters, very different to musicians. Musicians in a pit are technically very highly trained and the standard of pit playing is getting higher and higher as there’s less and less session work going on in film, so musically it’s very rewarding.
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It helps if you’re in a pit where you get to watch a cracking show, which I do with ‘Billy Elliot’, and also if you love the music you’re working with. I did ‘Cats’, where the band was hidden away, and it was primarily a dance show, so the standard of the singing wasn’t always very good. I remember I went on holiday once during the run and as I walked out to the pool, ‘Memory’ started going round and round my head. That was trying.

‘As a conductor, you feel rather like you’re at the helm of a ship, so the thing you don’t want is for something bad to happen to you, because then the show will stop. No one in an orchestra will act on their own initiative. They’re trained not to do that. Once, I was doing “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”, and one of the cast threw their toot sweet at me – by accident, I should add – and it whacked me on the head so hard I was bleeding. There was this moment of sheer panic when the bottom dropped out of my stomach, because for a minute I didn’t know where I was or what I was supposed to be doing.

‘But the worst story I heard, which happened to a friend of mine, was when an actor skipped two verses of a song. The conductor was frantically trying to communicate that to the orchestra, and by the time he had, the actor went back and sang the missing verses. It all fizzled out in a terrible musical fart. But oddly enough, it’s when things go a little bit wrong that the job is most fun. And, do you know, I think the audience quite likes it, too. It’s unrepeatable, and that’s what makes live theatre so exciting.’