Alumni in Focus: David Loud, NCS 75, CTT 71-74
Finding Community By Suzanna Finley, NCS 01 David Loud is a music director and conductor for Broadway shows in New York City with a unique connection to North Country School and Camp Treetops. David and his family moved to North Country School when he was eight years old and entered Level I (4th grade). His father Roger Loud was a math teacher at the school from 1970 to 1982, then head of school until 1992. For David, North Country School was truly home. David’s love of music and theater began at a young age. He took piano lessons even before arriving at NCS, and his passions grew throughout his time at school. “Don Rand put on the most amazing Thanksgiving productions,” David remembers. “Looking back, I can’t believe how sophisticated the shows were. Don wrote them specifically to our talents. So if we had a good singer who reminded him of Cleopatra, he wrote a musical about Cleopatra.” After graduating from Yale in 1983, David moved straight to New York City. “The key to New York is finding community in this enormous, forbidding environment,” David says. “And, for me, theater provides that.” One of his earliest jobs in musical theater was as musical director for the offBroadway show Paradise! in 1985. That experience launched an accomplished career that includes conducting original Broadway productions of Ragtime, Steel Pier, The Look of Love, and Curtains, as
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well as revivals of She Loves Me, The Boys From Syracuse, and Company. Among David’s most recent work is Sondheim On Sondheim and The Scottsboro Boys, honored with 12 Tony award nominations, as well as concerts in New York featuring the music of Jerome Kern and Burton Lane.
Organic Roots Winter 2012
David currently is the music supervisor for the Broadway revival of Porgy and Bess, which played an extended run in Boston this past summer. He notes that the length of time for a show’s development provides ample opportunity to form supportive, meaningful relationships among musicians, actors, and crew members.