Bruce Coughlin

Coughlin’s first Broadway orchestrations were for revivals of classic Broadway shows including the 1996 revival of The King and I, The Sound of Music (1998), and Once Upon A Mattress starring Sarah Jessica Parker. Later he also orchestrated revivals of On the Town and Annie Get Your Gun (starring Bernadette Peters).[12]

Original Broadway musicals he has orchestrated include Triumph of Love (starring Betty Buckley), The Wild Party (Michael John LaChiusa), Urinetown (for which he received a Tony Award nomination), Dolly Parton's 9 to 5, Amélie and War Paint (starring Patti LuPone and Christine Ebersole).[13][14]

In 2005, he collaborated with Ted Sperling and Adam Guettel on orchestrations for Guettel’s The Light in the Piazza which became “a surprise popular hit”.[15] The show garnered all three a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award for best orchestrations that year.

Coughlin has also provided additional orchestrations for the Broadway musicals Big Fish, On the Twentieth Century (2015 revival) and Something Rotten!, among others.[16]

In 2014, he orchestrated another revival (of sorts) when he expanded his original 5-piece orchestration of Urinetown for the London premiere of the show thirteen years later. The expanded orchestration only added one additional player (a trumpet) but required rewriting of all the wind instruments in the show. He has written that this 6-piece expanded version is what he had always wanted for the original Broadway version, but the budget didn't allow for the extra player.[17] The London production had a successful run at the St James Theatre (now The Other Palace) and then moved to the West End.[18]

Coughlin has had long-running collaborations with three prominent composers: Michael John LaChiusa, the songwriting team of Scott Frankel (music) and Michael Korie (lyrics), and with opera and theater composer Ricky Ian Gordon. For LaChiusa he orchestrated 6 shows and one opera including Giant (Larry Hochman provided additional orchestrations), The Wild Party, See What I Wanna See, and First Daughter Suite (a co-orchestration with Michael Starobin).

For Frankel and Korie, he orchestrated Grey Gardens (for which he received a Tony Award nomination), Far From Heaven, Happiness (directed by Susan Stroman), Finding Neverland (UK version) and War Paint.

He co-orchestrated (with the composer) three major Gordon operas (The Grapes of Wrath, 27 and Morning Star) and (as sole orchestrator) three musicals.[19]

Coughlin has also worked extensively overseas, providing orchestrations for five new musicals at Søren Møller's Fredericia Teater in Denmark;[20][21][22] for revivals of Candide (in a chamber music orchestration for the National Theatre), Assassins[23] and the aforementioned Urinetown in London; and for 3 musicals (co-orchestrations with Larry Hochman) by María Isabel Murillo MISI in Bogotá, Colombia.[24][25][26]

In the non-theater realm, he has written orchestrations for many singers (for both concert and recording) including Audra McDonald, Kristen Chenoweth, Julian Fleisher, Nadine Sierra, and Darius de Haas.[27]

In the classical world, Coughlin has often worked with conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, notably as orchestrator for Bernstein’s Arias and Barcarolles,[28] The Thomashevsky Project (with co-orchestrator Peter Gordon)[29] and on the 1992 recording of Bernstein's On the Town, where he orchestrated two songs cut from the original 1944 production. Those songs ("Gabey's Comin’" and "The Intermission's Great") had never been orchestrated but were added back for this new recording. "Gabey’s Comin’" is now a part of the currently available live-performance version of the show. In 2016 they collaborated once again on one of Tilson Thomas's own compositions (Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind) with Coughlin supplying orchestration assistance as the score was finalized.[30]

It was Tilson Thomas who suggested Coughlin to Bruce Hornsby who was assembling a concert suite of four songs to be premiered at the New World Symphony in 2015. In his writing Hornsby had become interested in the techniques of modern classical music (Ligeti, Carter, Schoenberg, etc.) and was experimenting with ways to meld those compositional techniques with his own signature pop music style.[31] The concert was a success and the collaboration continued. The suite now consists of eleven songs.[32]

In 2019 he joined forces with Metallica and Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony to create arrangements and orchestrations for S&M2, marking the 20th anniversary of the legendary S&M concert of 1999. Many of the original Michael Kamen orchestrations were used, and the concert updated with Metallica material from the last 20 years. Coughlin arranged and orchestrated "Moth Into Flame", "Halo On Fire", "Confusion", "The Day That Never Comes", "Unforgiven III", and "All Within My Hands". He also wrote a new orchestration for Master of Puppets from the original S&M concert and adapted and reworked Geoff Alexander and Michael Kamen's Enter Sandman chart. S&M2 was the inaugural concert in the new Chase Center arena in San Francisco.[33] Performances took place September 6 and 8 with a world-wide one-night-only movie screening planned for the following month.