“Broadway Pit Shrinks; Drummer Is Sent to Room”

In the cutthroat world of Broadway, profit margins and fanciful set designers increasingly are taking precedence over lowly harpists and percussionists. Hilarity ensues:

On the seventh floor of the St. James Theater, two musicians in the orchestra for “The Producers” give new meaning to the phrase “phoning it in.”

The theater’s pit is too small to fit a harpist and a percussionist, so every night (and at matinees) Anna Reinersman and Benjamin Herman cram themselves into a 10-by-20-foot room draped in crimson velvet curtains, with water pipes running above.

As an air conditioner hums, they watch a little man – the conductor – on a television monitor. Headphones pipe in the music from colleagues in the pit downstairs, and close-range microphones transmit Ms. Reinersman’s and Mr. Herman’s own playing to a sound board. Their parts are mixed with the other players’ and broadcast through loudspeakers to listeners in the audience, who cannot tell the difference.

“I could play there in my underwear, and they would have no idea what’s going on,” Mr. Herman, the percussionist, said.

A satellite facility such as the one at the St. James Theater is known as the “sky pit.” And hijinks abound:

Life in the sky pit is an extreme example of what goes on, nonmusically speaking, in the pit. Reading and doing crossword puzzles are major activities, naturally. Look at the oboists and bassoonists, and you may see them whittling obsessively on reeds. One musician in “Cats” was known to watch a mini-television, using headphones.

“It sort of depends on what you can get away with,” said Matthew Dine, an oboist with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, the American Ballet Theater and now “Fiddler on the Roof,” in which he plays onstage but hidden from the audience by a scrim. “I get a lot of work done there,” he said, referring to the paperwork he fills out as a contractor for other ensembles.

The segregation of out-of-pit musicians also creates the conditions for shenanigans.

“It doesn’t get much crazier than dart guns,” Mr. Dine said. “We’ve had some small plastic flying chickens in ‘Fiddler,’ only because in our little area it’s possible.”

The string room at “Will Rogers Follies,” which ran from 1991 to 1993, lives on in legend. The musicians set up a basket and shot a Nerf ball, and laid down a putting green. Richard Sher, a cellist in the show, recalls lox and bagel spreads on Sundays, spiced with Bloody Marys. By the end of the show’s run, he said, players were improvising away.