The first time Sean Green sat in with a professional pit band, he was discouraged from ever doing it again. He was shadowing, eager to learn what it felt like to drive the show from below. “The person I sat next to was -,” Sean considers his wording, “dismissive. I’d ask him to explain things to me and he’d say: if you don’t know how to do that, there’s no point in even trying.”
The musical’s pit band was made up exclusively of white men who, Sean was pretty sure, were all straight. “The overwhelming feeling I took away from that experience was that this wasn’t for me.”
Years passed before he gained the confidence to try again. At the point when his ambitions seemed most distant, he was back living with his parents, working in a call centre. But music kept tapping away underneath, drawing him back. For the last three years, he has been awarded Best Musical Director at the Black British Theatre Awards.
I always imagine Musical Directors up front with a baton, but Sean is a keys conductor, which means he plays as well as leads. “It has a slightly different feel to it,” he explains. “It means I'm part of creating the music with everyone else.”
When you are performing a show eight times a week, your connection to the music is crucial. When Sean was first asked to MD for Brokeback Mountain, he said no. “I was like, are they going to be singing about having sex in a tent?” But then he met the composer and his answer flipped. “I fell in love with the music.” His other recent shows vary widely, including Get Up, Stand Up!, Sylvia, and Two Strangers (Carry A Cake Across New York).
Sean is currently leading the pit band as Musical Director for the 10-times Tony-nominated show, MJ The Musical. His role is not just one of leadership, but caregiving. “There’s a lot of pastoral care, a lot of guidance and support,” he says. “You have to be passionate and knowledgable about the music, but I see the MD role as a support role. You’re guiding your orchestra to support the actors in telling the story.”
Sean was three when he asked his parents for piano lessons. “Music has always been very important to my family,” he smiles. “There are pictures of me as a baby with a Walkman on.” Alongside classical piano, he did weekend drama and dance classes, but he kept the theatrical side of his interests separate to his piano practice; they didn’t seem to fit into the same world. When asked a few years later to play a song on the piano during a musical theatre rehearsal, he could easily play the right notes, but he knew he wasn’t bringing the right feeling to it.
Keeping the two strands separate, he went to the University of Birmingham to study classical music, as well as directing, choreographing, MDing and performing in musical theatre in his spare time. He wanted to make it professionally, but he didn’t know anyone in the industry. Where are you supposed to start? “So I moved home and worked in jobs that had nothing to do with music.”
A friend came to see a show he MDed for an am dram group, and told him he should be doing it professionally. “I didn’t fully believe I could do it,” Sean says. But it confirmed what he wanted. He applied for Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts to study Musical Direction. Five years after leaving university, he was heading back to school.
During those in-between years, a lot changed. “I left university still under the belief that I was a straight person,” he says, thinking back over his own timeline. “At the very most, if I had same-sex attraction, I was going to push it down. I had friends who were queer, but I wasn’t one of them, you know?”
Cliches are thrown around attaching queerness to musical theatre. “I was heavily bullied throughout school for being gay,” Sean says, “without really even knowing what that meant. On the surface, there’s the campness of musical theatre. There’s costume, there’s sparkle, there’s glitter.” But the whispers and shoves are responding to something buried deeper than that. “There is a vulnerability to storytelling and connection.”
He wonders at the way similarly intense attachment to more typically masculine pursuits is never treated in the same way as musical theatre. “Sport is something people cry and emote about,” Sean says, “but it’s not seen as sensitive.” Men weeping at an Arsenal match are never told to reign it in.
Between the five years of finishing university, finding his way to the work he loved, and starting drama school, Sean had the opportunity to figure out who he was and what he wanted. “Along that path was discovering myself and coming out,” he says. “I think that in going down the route of becoming a creative, and moving away from that [traditional] working world, I discovered the part of myself that was queer and that was able to live openly. They were linked.”
He seems surprised to hear himself say this. “That’s the first time saying it out loud,” he says, “but I can see the correlation now. Being an artist has allowed me access to my queerness. Maybe it’s because you get to explore and play. I'm more visibly queer than I would be if I worked in a different industry.”
I ask how much things have changed in pit bands since his disappointing shadowing experience. The answer is, perhaps, inevitable: not as much as you might hope. “Anyone that isn’t a straight white man falls under the bracket of a minority in pit bands,” he reckons, thinking across the industry. “The number of shows where I have been the only Black member or queer member of the band is very high.” He once toured in a show with no other queer people in the band, cast or crew. “That was a very lonely experience. I remember thinking I don’t want to do this again.”
Although he is now in charge of the pit, he doesn’t have total control of who is in there with him. The selection of the musicians in a pit band is largely down to fixers, the people who sort out the contracts and logistics. Sean talks about a time he tried to encourage a fixer to pick a brilliant female musician, only to be rejected because the fixer figured another member of the band would get on better with a male musician he already knew.
Since then, Sean has grown in confidence in making his voice more forthright and persuading fixers to make a real effort to diversify the talent. He knows from experience that it makes a better, happier band. “My current show is a complete mix of ages, sexualities, genders and races,” he nods. “It can be done.”
When a player is ill or has a holiday, they deputise - or ‘dep’ - their chair in the pit. Sean is always pleased to hear that his show is a musician’s favourite to dep on because of its positive, respectful atmosphere. That is not the case for every show he’s heard about. “I try to keep everyone happy,” Sean says simply. “Having a pit that is a bit more representative of the world really helps.”