Theatre Score - Cues & Dialogue

Ones like this I’ve done with shift-X attached to whichever I need in a horrible looking score, then used a duplicate file at the end to make the score look nice. There’s no doubt a better way…

…No doubt - it’s just that with the speed and frequency of changes in the rehearsal period I literally need to write/edit something and hit print so we can have new scores ready within seconds to hand out & rehearse.

Producers might get upset about sitting around while I have to work away making my score look nice before we can move on.

Was there legs in the lyrics attached to cue idea? IME there’s always a trade-off between nicely laid out and speed of changes. For speed, I’d do these in shift-alt-X text and parts that don’t need can ignore it. I always have a ‘pencil’ cut-off point after which changes get made on paper (unless it really is better to redo).

I think we’re slightly drifting off topic here.

I think conclusively we agree there’s not a useful solution to this at the moment and returning to my OP, having a System Text that can be ‘switched off’ in certain parts would solve this problem and hopefully still be a useful tool in other situations (i.e. not so niche it will never be introduced)

I would use that all the time. Have you tried tubagooba’s idea to have a player for dialog and use cues? That would only appear where you want and would be easily updatable.

I did have a quick try - but couldn’t get text to show up without any notation. I didn’t exhaust this so that might be down to something I was doing wrong.

UPDATE: Managed to create a cue which shows the text from a ‘cues’ instrument however can’t get rid of the bars rest which shows up as well.I guess I’d have to make that 0% opacity, etc. etc. etc - you see where this is going again…

I have been experimenting with video markers for this lately. Of course, the only way to move them is by changing their time-code, but they don’t split multirests and can be excluded from any layout. They also must be preferably short as there is no word-wrap. So… still not perfect, but I thought I’d throw it out there.

That’s an interesting approach - I’ll experiment with that later on. Thanks

I’d really love to see an update on this. Even if it’s only the possibility to hide a system text manually (like we can hide a Chord Symbol - which is the only thing we can hide til now if I’m not wrong).

Yes, I’d concur about all of this. Dialogue and dialogue cues for Musical Theater do not quite have a great solution in Dorico yet.

In Finale this can be done with “Score Lists” and customized expression categories if you know how to set that up correctly. Although even doing it that way this is about a 95% solution as there are always oddities about doing it this way.

I was discussing this on a Facebook thread earlier today and thought I came up with something of an idea. I’ll just copy and paste that below…


The challenge with dialogue is that it kind of HAS to be attached to specific bars of music so text frames may not be the best way to do dialogue for that reason. When music gets cut, added, changed etc. that dialogue needs to stay with the music not its place on the page. The other thing that would be handy for dialogue is that it generally has an end point too. Sometimes you have to fit a bunch of dialogue over a four bar vamp, other times you have to fit several words in a single bar. Or a bunch of dialogue in a G.P. Bar or something. Often times when doing piano/vocal scores with lots of dialogue, formatting bars to fit on certain systems or making some bars wider than normal has to happen just to accommodate dialogue.

I have no idea if there is a catch-all solution to this for Dorico, but I might imagine some sort of new tool like a “Dialogue Frame” where it could attach to certain bars with both beginning and end points. As you type in (or paste) your dialogue it would format to the width of that dialogue frame. And of course as music changed those beginning and end points would lock that dialogue in its correct place (until you need to change it). Of course system breaks would be an interesting problem to solve for something like this. Perhaps the option to allow a dialogue frame to flow across systems OR force the music under a dialogue frame to exist on one system could be possible.
And of course these dialogue frames might have to be system texts of sorts where you have the ability to place them in certain scores and parts like Full Score and P/V and P/C. I have occasionally put dialogue in drum parts too so some flexibility in that regard would be helpful too.

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This idea of a dialogue frame with fixed start/end points that the music layout takes account of would be useful for quite a few things including theatre dialogue.

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This does not solve the OP question about hiding or showing cues or dialogs for specific parts but at least it can help to create dialogs.

  1. it is possible to add lyrics with or without any note
  2. lyrics are bounded to a rhythmic position within a bar, it means that you can move each lyric at any place you need without to be bounded to a note
  3. you can write multi-syllabic lyrics
  4. using lyric line numbers you can use several lines for a multi syllabic text
  5. Lyrics can easily be made italic with the properties menu

I have to engrave musical theatre scores therefore I have to write a lot of dialogs within the songs.
Of course I would appreciate some dedicated functions for dialogs but I must say that at the moment I find it quite easy to add dialogs in a score with these 5 functions only.

A question for theater arrangers: do you put your vocal lines at the top of the score of follow the concert practice of putting vocalists above the string section? If at the top of the score, writing cues/dialog there should be a helpful start, although a more customized solution would certainly be welcome.

Usually at the top, often more than one vocal part to each line if placed on an ‘orchestral’ score. The vocal work is usually done with a vocal/piano score.
IME the vocal/piano score is often annotated with instrumental cues so it can be used to conduct from even with orchestra.

Derek to answer your question, usually at the top. But I’ve worked on theater scores where the vocals (and dialogue) are all in the middle in “proper” score order. Honestly it depends on the show, and/or the preferences of the composer, the orchestrator or the conductor.

teacue, I agree with the problem of not having flexibility to create a definable system text that appears in specific places in specific parts and/or scores. Finale achieves this (fairly well) with “Score Lists” in the expressions tool. Something akin to that in Dorico would be helpful for sure, particularly for this specific case of putting dialogue where it needs to go.

For theatre scores, my singers are in the middle, just above the piano. BTW, I’m dealing with this issue of dialogue/direction cues as well. In my current project I chose to use system text for general stage cues - direction/movement/action – and plain text for dialogue, placed directly in the staff of the character whom is speaking. Additionally, I have set up a “custom score” layout, which contains just the speaking/singing characters, chorus, and piano. In this mini score; the system text appears once at that the top of the system, and dialogue appears as it comes up, at the appropriate time on the appropriate character’s staff. This particular layout is set up to “hide empty staves” so if a character does not speak or sing in the flow, their staff is not included for that flow. Dorico has made this way of working really quite elegant and I’m finding this to be the best solution for me for now. I’m new to Dorico too, so I’m sure there are better solutions.

What an interesting idea. I could see this technique being useful in many different scenarios. (Difficult text-dense Psalm settings for instance.)

Just want to +1 the request for a good way of inserting cues in a score (for instance vocal score) and not on parts.

One more thing about this necessity of a System Text that would be ignored in parts: we can hide the text in parts with the 0% opacity trick, but what I find the worst is that multi-bar rests are split where a system text has been entered. I’m not aware of any workaround.

In the next update, system text that is at the same rhythmic position as the start of the bar will not prevent the following bar from being consolidated into a multi-bar rest, though it will still be split at that barline.