After graduating from Dartmouth College Coughlin moved to New York City and worked as a composer for several years, primarily writing incidental music for plays and dance. Theaters he composed scores for include The Hartford Stage (Antony and Cleopatra),[1] BAM Theater Company (A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Winter’s Tale),[2] Denver Center Theater and many others.
He has said that composing did not suit his personality as well as orchestrating[3] and with the 1981 musical Is There Life After High School? (by Craig Carnelia and Jeffrey Kindley) he got the opportunity to move into writing orchestrations for the theater. He had been hired as musical director of the show, but was asked to also do orchestrations on the side. The show had a regional run at Hartford Stage in CT and a year later arrived on Broadway. It had a lengthy preview period at the Ethyl Barrymore Theatre but a short run of only 12 performances.[4] Despite what must have been a disappointing start to orchestrating for the theater the "side job" eventually became his primary focus.[3] Since that time he has orchestrated over 100 works for Broadway and other theater, opera, recordings and concert hall.[5]
After a period of working in the commercial world as a composer and arranger (for jingles and industrials), Coughlin came back to orchestrating for the theater with William Finn’s Romance In Hard Times at the Public Theater in 1989.[6] He continued to orchestrate various shows off-Broadway and in regional theaters (including William Bolcom’s Casino Paradise).[7]
His first big theater success was as orchestrator for Adam Guettel’s Floyd Collins in 1994, directed by Tina Landau. The show later played at Playwrights Horizons in New York (where he won an Obie award[8] for his work on that show). It had a short run but made a big impact on contemporary musical theater.[9][10][11]
Broadway and West End
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]
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.
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]
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]
International
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 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]
Metallica and S&M2
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.
Awards and nominations
Wins
1995 Obie Award, Orchestrations Floyd Collins
2005 Tony Award, Best Orchestrations The Light in the Piazza
2005 Drama Desk Award, Outstanding Orchestrations The Light in the Piazza
Nominations
1996 Drama Desk Award, Outstanding Orchestrations Floyd Collins
1998 Drama Desk Award, Outstanding Orchestrations The Sound of Music
2001 Drama Desk Award, Outstanding Orchestrations Urinetown
2002 Tony Award, Best Orchestrations Urinetown
2006 Drama Desk Award, Outstanding Orchestrations Grey Gardens
2006 Drama Desk Award, Outstanding Orchestrations See What I Wanna See
2007 Tony Award, Best Orchestrations Grey Gardens
2009 Drama Desk Award, Outstanding Orchestrations 9 to 5
2011 Drama Desk Award, Outstanding Orchestrations The Burnt Part Boys
2013 Drama Desk Award, Outstanding Orchestrations Giant
2016 Drama Desk Award, Outstanding Orchestrations First Daughter Suite
2017 Drama Desk Award, Outstanding Orchestrations War Paint
