In what feels like it could have been a scene from the movie itself, a piano-playing audience member at an orchestral showing of the 2016 musical La La Land has just stepped in for the on-stage keyboard player after they fell ill during the interval.
The Hollywood-worthy incident took place in Sydney, Australia on Saturday at the ICC’s Darling Harbour theatre. The first half of the show had proceeded without incident, but as the scheduled interval stretched out to 40 minutes, audience members started to wonder what was going on.
It was at this point that Justin Hurwitz, the La La Land score composer who was conducting on the night, stepped out onto the stage and asked if there happened to be a pianist in the audience who was also a top-notch sight-reader. It turns out that no one else in the orchestra was capable of filling in, and attempts to recruit a replacement player who could get to the theatre quick enough had failed.
“I figured nobody’s as close as they say they are … so I just thought, well, we have 2,500 people in here,” Hurwitz told Guardian Australia. “Yes, it was a gamble.”
Enter the suitably heroically named Sterling Nasa, a 21-year-old politics and international studies student at the University of Sydney, who was attending the show with his friend.
Knowing his skills on the piano and organ – and indeed the bagpipes, it turns out – she encouraged Nasa to boldly go where no audience member had gone before and put his hand up.
After Hurwitz had asked a few follow-up questions – “Are you sure? Can you really sight-read? Can you play key signatures you’ve never played before?” – Nasa took his place on the stage. However, having seen La La Land before, he must have known that he was soon to be faced with one of the toughest challenges in the score – the synth solo that Ryan Gosling’s character plays (on a ROLI Seaboard, funnily enough) when he’s on stage with John Legend during the song Start A Fire.
“The synth solo is really technical, and I thought, even a really high-level professional sight-reader would probably not be able to do it,” says Hurwitz. “As it was coming up, I was thinking, ‘Oh no, how’s he going to be able to handle the solo?’”
Nasa was equally concerned – “I saw it on the score and I thought, ‘Oh, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to sight-read that in one go,’” – so decided to do what most musicians have done from time to time during a performance: wing it.
“I took a little bit of a creative liberty and just decided to improvise, which I think ended up being a good choice,” said Nasa.
Hurwitz agrees: “To be able to play a really cool solo in the right key, in the right scale, on the fly with no rehearsal – it was remarkable,” he said.
Cue Nasa’s 15 minutes of well-deserved fame – he’s been doing the media rounds since his performance. However, having lived his La La Land dream, he will now return to his university studies.
To quote Mia, Emma Stone’s character from the film, though: "Here's to the fools who dream, crazy as they may seem."
