Everything in Abe Sylvia’s Palm Royale is dialed up to eleven, but it never loses sight of grounding the story. The original score is light, frothy, and colorful, and it is filled to the brim with character and verve. Composer Jeff Toyne keeps a winking eye on the goings-on of this notorious and revered world of social climbing. You will want him to write you a theme of your very own.
Palm Royale‘s main title theme informs you of exactly what you’re getting yourself into. It’s nimble and bouncy, and, married with the main title design, it keeps changing. The brass feels like it comes from a glorious time gone by, but the crispness of the drama makes it feel so very alive and current. Toyne brings the d-r-a-m-a from the very first note.
“It seemed pretty typical where the main title is being considered in tandem with the work of scoring the episodes and the season. When we came to find that the themes for Maxine became the main title, and her character is so big that it’s not a single theme. I came up with some names for them like Maxine Yearning and Dreaming and Maxine in Motion, and Abe [Sylvia] asked me for a Maxine Winning theme when things are turning in her favor. And, of course, Maxine Overboard as things progress. When we went through them in the main title, we don’t have to stay too long with one theme. It feels like a mini journey. We used to call them “kitchen sink” themes where if you’re doing the dishes and you come into the living room, you could hear it and know it was about to start. I wanted to grab people’s attention and tell them that they were in for a bumpy ride.”
Toyne dove into some of his inspirations behind his work on Royale, and he explains how familiar songs on the soundtrack complement his score.
“This is a jazz score, and the score becomes so hand-in-glove with the songs,” he says. “The show has great music supervisors in George Drakoulias and Ian Herbert, and they collected an amazing set of needle drops. I love to deep dive when I start a show, and the brief we came away with centered on the women in the social bubble. No one is allowed in this enclave. Our brief was Bernard Hermann meets Henry Mancini but Latin.”
There is so much music in Royale‘s score that is steeped in character, but one of my favorites comes in ‘Evelyn’s Version.’ When Linda and Evelyn each tell their own versions of when someone ends up getting shot, Toyne create different sides of their story depending on their point of view. For Evelyn, there are prancing notes that feel refined filtered through Allison Janney’s watchful eye before heavy motifs come in.
“There is a version from Evelyn and a version from Linda–its a Rashomon effect. They are clinging onto their perspective of an inciting event. For Evelyn’s theme, that was influenced by The Merry Widow by Franz Lehár, and a lot of these women are widows in different ways. I was kind of surprised how Lehár’s harmonic language fits right into a Disney movie from the 1960s. It’s fun how transferrable that is.
I had a nice melody for Evelyn, and what I wanted to do was tell a tale like a flashback. We used the lightness of a harpsichord in that cue, and that was super popular in music in the ’60s. The Beatles were using it and it was in a lot of pop songs–that might be the lightness that you’re hearing. There’s a real sensuality to that instrument, and it has a lot of character to its sound. It doesn’t get used very often.”
When speaking about characters from the same family, Toyne reveals that he related people like Maxine and Norma by using instruments from the same family. With that in mind, Toyne can share tone between instruments to show a sonic relationship between a similar sound. Once you know that, you can hear a bit of other characters in other instruments because our ears associate the sounds together.
“All of the Dellacorte family has sounds from instruments in the same family,” Toyne explains. “For instance, Maxine’s instrument is the sopranino clarinet, which we hear in “Baby Elephant Walk.” For Carol Burnett’s amazing character, we started with the accordion but then, later, it becomes more of the contrabass clarinet. It’s very Hermann. There is a sinister quality that takes shape over the course of the episodes. Douglas is the chromatic harmonica like in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The accordion and the harmonica are very close together, and they make sound in the exact same way. All of these instruments are single-reed instruments and they relate to each other sonically to create sound.”
Ricky Martin’s Robert, however, is more of a loner due to his lack of familial bond and his journey with his self-discovery. It’s interesting to think how his instrument plays with those he cares for at the Palm Royale. Robert’s sound can be played alone or, maybe some day, with an orchestra of its own.
“I hear trumpet,” he says. “Robert doesn’t get a score moment until very late in the show. When there is Robert and music, he is literally playing music himself. He plays it on the screen. His theme is playing when Norma is screaming for Robert from the bedroom and he never comes, and that’s played on nylon guitar. Robert is very melodically tied to Norma’s analog, so I can trace how her themes has a downward push and his goes up. A lot of the songs in the show that Robert plays, I re-recorded. When he is in Korea and he is playing the trumpet on a standard, we did that. We did that so we can make them turn dramatically with the show.”
Palm Royale is streaming now on Apple TV+.
