When Tony-winning (and Emmy and Grammy-winning) Broadway musical director Alex Lacamoire (Hamilton, Dear Evan Hansen) happened to have a business trip to London scheduled recently, he saw a unique opportunity at hand, and made a call to Abbey Road Studios. Lacamoire had previously made multiple viral videos where he would play through entire albums (Billy Joel’s The Stranger, for one) on piano in under a minute, and the idea of speeding through Abbey Road at Abbey Road was too tempting to resist. Two accomplished friends, Hamilton director Thomas Kail and Mary Queen of Scots director Josie Rourke, happened to be on hand to shoot the video, and after a quick refresher on his favorite Beatles album, Lacamoire was ready to go. “It’s in my head,” says Lacamoire, who is currently musical director for the new off-Broadway show The Wrong Man, with songs by pop songwriter Ross Golan. “I just needed to make sure the way I remember the songs from when I was six years old is the way they are.”
He even got to play the so-called “Mrs. Mills” piano used on some Beatles tracks, which was an intense experience. “That piano has so much vibe on it,” he says. “You can sense when energy is coming out of inanimate inanimate objects. It was kind an otherworldly experience. There’s definitely some kind of, like, magic coming out of there was just hard to express.” It took about two hours to get all the raw footage – but in the end, he had a 50-second performance of Abbey Road ready for its 50th anniversary.
