On the night of Saturday, October 24, 2026, the Fredericton Playhouse will screen James Whale's 1931 Frankenstein with a live ensemble in front of the screen, playing a new score by New Brunswick composer and contrabassist Andrew Reed Miller alongside core members of Symphony New Brunswick. The event is billed under the banner "IT'S ALIVE!" and is free to attend. It is the second such outing for Resonance New Music, the new-music presenting organization Miller leads, which last year brought a similarly scored Nosferatu to local audiences.
The premise is a familiar one to anyone who has followed the revival of silent cinema with live music, but it comes with a wrinkle worth noting. Frankenstein is not, strictly speaking, a silent film. Released by Universal in November 1931, it arrived in the early sound era, and it has a soundtrack: dialogue, the hiss and crackle of early optical recording, and a title sequence whose music was drawn from the studio's library. What it does not have is a continuous, purpose-written orchestral score of the kind that would become standard in Hollywood within a few years. The film's most famous musical moment, the chiming of the bells as the camera closes on the monster's face, is a small exception in a largely unscored picture. That gap is where a project like this one lives. A new score does not replace something lost, the way a restoration of a silent film's accompaniment might; it adds a layer the film never carried.
Resonance New Music is not new to this territory. The organization's own record lists The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Robert Wiene's 1920 German expressionist landmark, with an original score by Miller, presented by Symphony NB, Resonance New Music and the Capitol Theatre in Moncton on October 31, 2019. That Halloween-night pairing of a foundational horror film with a locally written score set a template the group has returned to since, including the Nosferatu presentation that preceded this year's Frankenstein. The through-line is deliberate: early horror cinema, played in a room with living musicians, on or around Halloween.
Miller's own work as a composer has often been tied to visual art and to the specific rooms and institutions of the region. His music accompanied the launch of Deanna Musgrave's painting Cloud when it was installed in 2015, a collaboration supported by the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, and a related piece of his premiered in 2017 to launch Musgrave's mural Nest. His compositions have been performed by chamber players from across the Maritimes, including violinist Nadia Francavilla, percussionist Joël Cormier, flautist Karin Aurell and clarinettist James Kalyn, and his work has been documented in recordings made at the Centre des arts et de la culture de Dieppe and at Brunton Auditorium in Sackville. He is also an active performer, playing contrabass in configurations that range from early music to works involving oscillators and electronics. A score for a 1931 horror film sits comfortably in that catalogue: part concert work, part accompaniment, written for a specific screening rather than for the concert hall alone.
The choice of venue carries its own history. The Fredericton Playhouse opened in 1964, built with a one-million-dollar donation from Lord and Lady Beaverbrook and originally incorporated as the Beaverbrook Auditorium. Its two-day opening gala on September 26 and 27, 1964, sold out. Lord Beaverbrook did not live to see the building open; Lady Beaverbrook served as both hostess and guest of honour and read a dedication by her late husband stating that the Playhouse was built to "help the people of New Brunswick become artistically receptive and productive." The thousand-seat Georgian-style hall served for a time as a rental roadhouse before Walter Learning arrived as general manager in 1968 and founded Theatre New Brunswick there in 1969, the first touring theatre company of its kind in Canada. TNB made the Playhouse its home for 36 years, adding a Young Company in 1974 and a Theatre School in 1999 before outgrowing the building and moving its production facilities in 2003. The Playhouse still hosts TNB productions each season.
Putting a locally written score in front of that screen, then, is a small continuation of the mandate Lady Beaverbrook read aloud in 1964. The film itself is one of the most durable artifacts of the early sound era, and its imagery, Boris Karloff's flat-headed monster, the laboratory apparatus, the windmill, has long since detached from the picture and entered general circulation. What a live score can restore is scale: the sense of a film as an event that happens in a room, at a particular hour, with an audience and musicians sharing the same air.
The practical details are simple. The screening begins at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, October 24, 2026, at the Fredericton Playhouse, and admission is free and general. For anyone who has only ever met Frankenstein through a television or a laptop screen, the combination of a restored print, a full house and a new score played live is a different proposition entirely.