I promised this some time ago but here it is. We were wondering about the orchestra in NBC's big live telecast of The Sound of Music. A lot of you sent in links to articles about this but one of the most helpful came from Dave Sikula. It's this one.
The orchestra was pre-recorded…and those tracks were used for the cast to record the CD far enough in advance for it to be released when the show aired. Then the cast sang to those tracks for the broadcast…though as the above article notes, they had a keyboard player standing by just in case the tracks failed and the music suddenly had to be played live. It wasn't necessary but boy, would that have been interesting.
None of the articles I read said this but I'm guessing the cast was hearing the playback in concealed earpieces. It would have been very difficult to adjust the volume of the actors and the music if they weren't separated out that way. Some of the press suggests that there was some remixing of them for the rebroadcast. The orchestra was recorded in a Manhattan recording studio — an assemblage of the best musicians working on Broadway. Reportedly, an awful lot of them came from the current production of another Rodgers and Hammerstein show, Cinderella.
Some of the articles about this explain that the orchestra was pre-recorded because it would have been too cumbersome to have them on the premises of the TV studio during a telecast that sprawled over many sets. I don't think that's it. They could have or would have done it the way the Tony Awards usually do it, which is to have the orchestra somewhere else entirely — upstairs, in another building, wherever — and then pipe them in. I think the producers just decided it eliminated one area where things could have gone wrong to have the music locked down and done. Since the cast wasn't playing to a live audience that could laugh and applaud, the music didn't have to be as flexible.
All in all, I thought that aspect of the show worked fine. I watched some of it again the other day and I was even more impressed. I'm also all the more discomforted by some of the nasty reviews that Carrie Underwood received. I didn't think she was Julie Andrews but these days, sadly, even Julie Andrews isn't Julie Andrews. I thought Ms. Underwood was fine in a very difficult role that, as written, is not exactly brimming with personality. But I bought her as the character. Heck, I even bought Audra McDonald as an Austrian nun.