Patrick Tice-Carroll

November 1, 2026

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Music Director Patrick Tice-Carroll on Building the Show’s Tour-to-Broadway Sound with Local Musicians

National tours of musicals typically start out as Broadway shows. Patrick Tice-Carroll, music director for Dirty Dancing: The Musical, says the exact opposite is true with this show. It was conceived and launched as a tour. It will be opening in a Broadway theater early next year, after the tour wraps up in January. And that’s not the only thing that’s unique about it.

Reversing the Broadway Route

“It really doesn’t function as a musical in the way you typically think of one,” says Tice-Carroll, a member of both Locals 47 (Los Angeles, CA) and 802 (New York City). “With most musicals, the songs end up serving the story. With Dirty Dancing, the context of what’s on stage sets the mood for the songs, which take front and center. And audiences are eating it up.”

Tice-Carroll credits a large part of the show’s appeal to masterful orchestrations by Local 802 member and Tony Award winner Charlie Rosen. Tice-Carroll says that Rosen captured the nostalgic feel of the original songs from the smash 1987 movie featuring Patrick Swayze, while also contributing something fresh to the music.

Tice-Carroll does admit somewhat sheepishly that he never actually saw the film until he got the job as the tour’s music director. “When you grow up with that movie, it can define an era of your life,” he says. Obviously, however, he still fell under the spell.

The tour travels with a complement of four in the pit: Tice-Carroll, who also covers keyboard 1; Associate Music Director and Keyboard 2 Player Andy Grobengeiser and Bass Player Jonathan Michel, both of Local 802; and Drummer Paddy Moran of Local 16-248 (Newark/Paterson, NJ). It hires six players in each city, providing solid work for AFM musicians.

Hooked on New Sounds

At the time of writing, Tice-Carroll is enjoying a short break back in Pennsylvania with family. It’s his first break longer than two days since four weeks of rehearsals began at the end of June in New York. “It has been exhausting, but also a great process,” he says. “Getting the opportunity to be part of a national tour that was, and still is, actively being created has been a fascinating experience.”

Growing up in Norristown, Pennsylvania, Tice-Carroll says the interest in playing piano came from his mom. “The story goes that when she was a kid, my mom wanted to learn how to play. My grandmother had bought a piano for the house, but that was back in the days when you’d just have a piano as a piece of furniture. My mom took a marker and wrote the note names on the piano, and then of course, she got scolded for it.”

After she herself became a parent, Tice-Carroll’s mom vowed that all her children would learn to play piano. “My sister and brother and I all grew up taking piano lessons, but I was the only one who stuck it out,” he says. He was also the only one to turn his mom’s grudge into a career choice.

The piano led to a fascination with as many other instruments as Tice-Carroll could get his hands on. “In 4th grade we could learn a band instrument. I signed up for saxophone, and that started this voracious appetite for instruments,” he recalls. “My dad would drive me to a music store down the street where they had all the instruments up on the wall, and I would just point to one and say, for example, ‘I’d like to learn how to play the trombone now.’”

By the end of high school, Tice-Carroll had made his way through the euphonium, French horn, tuba, flute, and cello. He now owns around 80 instruments—and it seems like he still harbors a mild grudge of his own for the trumpet. “I’ve tried to learn trumpet on three separate occasions and have failed every time,” he says. “I have great respect for the trumpet players of the world.”

Choosing the Pit Over the Stage

Interest in theater arose in his high school, which had a strong theater program. “All of my teachers were theater musicians, and one had been a music contractor for Broadway shows in Philadelphia since the 1960s. He would tell me stories about how The Wiz had done an out-of-town tryout in 1974 in Philadelphia,” says Tice-Carroll. It seems fitting that Tice-Carroll would assume the music director role for a national tour of The Wiz some 50 years later.

He auditioned for a musical to be in the onstage cast—but turned it down instead to play in the pit. “Our high school shows always had an entirely student-based ensemble playing in the pit. My freshman year, they plopped the piano on the center of stage. I was 14 and had no idea what I was doing, but I knew I loved it,” he recalls.

Playing for shows led to a love of writing, arranging, and orchestration, which Tice-Carroll was able to start applying while studying conducting in college at Temple University, where he ultimately got three degrees. “I ended up working a lot on new musicals through my MFA program,” he says. In fact, for the Master of Fine Arts, he was part of the inaugural class in Temple’s new Musical Theater Collaboration Program. “I always wonder how things might have gone differently if I was actually ever on stage. But I’ve never gotten to experience that. I’ve always been on the other side of the keyboard.”

Learning (and collecting) all those instruments over the years, he says, has also come in handy. Aside from conducting, Tice-Carroll works as an orchestrator and music copyist for film and TV, having lived in Los Angeles for three years after college. “Writing a mandolin or cello part, I can pick them up and just feel them in my hands and know what they’re supposed to sound like; or I can understand where the awkward ranges of flutes and clarinets are.”

Rising to the Podium

His early musical connections led Tice-Carroll to his first national tour, The Wiz, which he conducted for its final four months on the road. “That came from my high school cello teacher, who was the music contractor for Broadway Philadelphia. I was hired as the local keyboard 2 player in May of 2025,” he says.

Tice-Carroll was then called as a keyboard sub later that year on the show’s national tour—and then they ended up needing a replacement assistant music director at the beginning of 2026. “They reached out and asked if I was available,” he says.

Six weeks into that contract, Tice-Carroll ended up taking over as music director. “Because The Wiz went well while I was at the helm, they gave me Dirty Dancing. So, I went from just the local keyboard sub in Philly all the way up to now being music director of what will soon be an original Broadway musical. I can’t believe that all of this has happened in just the last nine or 10 months.”

Tice-Carroll says the six local players hired in each city to fill out the pit are one of the joys of the tour. “It’s endlessly fascinating and rewarding to see what things they bring to the table. Probably every week I’ve reconsidered something musically that I thought I was sure about, based purely on the ways these different players bring their own experience and musicianship to the parts.”

He adds that when the tour is in cities for longer stays, the traveling component can develop closer camaraderie with local players. “It ends up being something really special and wonderful.”

And again, there’s that advantage of having played all those instruments in his youth. “It’s helpful to be able to talk to players and have at least some experience of their needs. You really don’t know what it is to play a guitar or a brass instrument until you’ve tried to play one. Then you can say oh, right, I get it now,” says Tice Carroll.

Another special aspect of Dirty Dancing, he says, is that they hire a guitar player in each city. “That makes for an even deeper experience, because it’s not just about playing the right notes. The guitar player has to have the right feel and tone so that it emulates some of the music from the movie because that’s what audiences come expecting to hear. It’s about the nostalgia for them.”

Shaping a New Show

Gearing up to shift from national tour to Broadway production has kept things interesting, says Tice-Carroll. “If this was being done the usual way, by the time I came in as the touring music director, the show would have already been created. I’d just be following the form and the decisions that the creative team on Broadway made. But this is literally creating a brand new show, and then figuring out what worked on tour that will work—or not work—in a Broadway theater.”

He feels privileged to have gotten to be part of the show’s development. “That includes creating how to conduct the show, rather than learning how someone else decided to conduct it. It’s not like we have a cast album we can reference to hear how it’s been done,” he says.

As if he didn’t have enough to do, Tice-Carroll conducts the show from the keyboard. “I would love to have a stick in my hands and get to wave the whole time. As it is, I spend plenty of time in the physical therapist’s office, making sure that I don’t throw out my neck and back.” That said, he enthuses that it’s great fun, and a challenge every night. “You’re trying to conduct rubato and play at the same time, and read the music, and watch the stage.”

Moving from The Wiz to Dirty Dancing, says Tice-Carroll, has been an education—both professionally and practically—on surviving a tour schedule. “I sort of felt like I had training wheels on at the beginning of the year, but I’m much better informed on what I can do on tour now,” he says.

A typical weekly schedule involves four hours of rehearsal and a performance on the day the show opens. It makes for an intense experience, he says. “It can be a recipe for burnout. While on The Wiz, I was also continuing to work my day job as a copyist and orchestrator, so I would spend eight hours in my hotel room during the day doing music prep remotely and then conduct the show. For this tour, I went in with greater mindfulness of my mental and physical health, going to the gym or for a run, or going for walks.”

Safety and Strength of Union Support

As the touring production prepares for its big move to New York City, Tice-Carroll has good things to say about the Federation’s role—specifically the benefits of working under a union contract.

“Receiving fair pay is obviously a huge plus,” he says. “I think a lot about a recent situation in Philly, where a local theater fired their entire musician base who had been playing there for 20-plus years all because of their efforts to unionize. But there is another Philly theater that has successfully unionized. Having grown up and worked in both of them, I understand that having union contracts means protection for even the most obvious things, like pay.”

Tice-Carroll has been a member of four AFM locals, so he understands the advantage of this firsthand. “My healthcare comes from all the union-covered copyist work I do in LA, and I still work locally as a musician in Philadelphia. This week, for instance, I’m involved in a concert at a cathedral that’s fully under union contract. And, of course, I can go on tour knowing I’m covered,” he says.

There’s also the level of union professionalism in the cities the tour stops at. “The musicians we get to work with bring a certain level of care to their craft, an attention to detail. We see this every week on tour with new musicians from each AFM local. We know what we’re walking into and we won’t have to worry about them getting up to speed quickly,” says Tice-Carroll.

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