Ghostbusters In Concert

Ghostbusters in Concert screens the complete film on a large cinema screen while an orchestra performs its score live on the stage below. Every joke, every proton stream and every marshmallow catastrophe lands exactly as it always has; what changes is that the music now comes from players in the same room as the audience.

Elmer Bernstein wrote that score, and it is stranger than the film's reputation suggests. A jaunty march built on jazzy piano, hooting woodwinds and oompah brass carries the comedy. Set against it is a genuinely eerie theme for high strings and ondes martenot, an early electronic keyboard whose wavering tone gives the hauntings their chill, along with a soaring romantic melody written for the same unlikely pairing.

Bernstein came to the job as a veteran of decades of film scoring, with an Academy Award and more than a dozen nominations to his name, and he treated a supernatural comedy with the same craft he brought to westerns and dramas. Reconstructed and re-orchestrated for live performance, the score now anchors one of the more durable entries in the film-with-orchestra repertoire.

Hearing it played live rebalances the film. Cues that sit politely under dialogue at home push forward; the ondes martenot cuts through in a way speakers flatten, and the brass hits arrive with physical weight. Laughter from a full house runs up against a live downbeat, and something known by heart turns unpredictable again.

The result works for people who can quote the film start to finish and for anyone meeting it properly for the first time. One group hears a favorite comedy given new muscle; the other discovers that a score they only half-remembered was doing far more than they realized.