Had a chat with my lovely friend Tim Saward recently, about a ten minute musical he's writing.
The thing is, limitations are good. They're useful. If you're writing something that must be a specific length, that becomes a tool you can use for the creation of the story.
Take, for example, the ten minute format, and I’m looking at this in very traditional musical theatre terms for now.
Any story will probably have three dramatic beats in it, so you’re potentially looking at three lots of three-minute beats, and a three-minute beat is a typical musical theatre song length.
So you could have a maximum of three songs in it (or three more structured song-moments within a sung-through format).
There’s a reason why songs are typically three minutes long. The audience needs time to get into the moment, understand the question and hear about the answer. Again, three beats.
Considering you’ll be stretching out the words because they’re sung - essentially inflating words with emotion – 60 seconds is time enough to understand the situation the character is describing and to connect with them emotionally. Then it’s time enough to journey with them to the mid-point of the song, and then time enough to journey with them through the aftermath of that mid-point.
Yes, information could easily be given in less time. A few words of dialogue might suffice in illustrating that character’s journey, but you have to allow a little more room and time for the audience to connect emotionally with a song.
It is possible that you could make that work in, say, two minutes. Basic AABA is four sections long, so thirty seconds per section may still give you the dramatic format that we know enables the audience to connect emotionally.
Any less than that per song, and you’re looking at finding non-traditional ways for the audience to access the emotion. It’s absolutely possible, but it needs to be considered.
Sticking with the traditional format, some examples of possible structure are therefore:
- 3 songs of 3 mins plus 1 min dialogue
- 3 songs of 2 mins plus 4 min dialogue, in 2 sections of 2 mins (or just totalling 4 mins)
- 1 x 3 min song in the middle, at the moment of dramatic friction, plus dialogue either side at 3.5 mins each (or just totalling 7 mins).
You also have to consider the passage of time. Will this be ten minutes of real time, or will some time pass between scenes? Bearing in mind that accepting the passage of time requires a bit of work on the part of the audience, this might hiccup your story unless you make a deliberate choice to use it as a device that will actively serve the storytelling rather than simply facilitate it.
For example: two characters meet up as children, then as adults, then when they’re elderly. The audience is asked to jump ahead decades each time, and to imagination what those characters might have been through in those decades.
The passage of time could used to facilitate the story. This, then, is a story about two people who have always been perfect for one another, but were destined not to be together until much later in life. Perhaps it just wasn’t their time until then, or maybe it just didn’t work out until then. Whatever the reason, the middle section gives the audience some hope that they will get together, but they don’t until the end. The resolution comes at the end. The passage of time simply allows us to visit their story at three different points in time.
Or the passage of time could be used to serve the storytelling. This, then, is a story about two people who have always been perfect for one another, but were destined not to be together until much later in life because of what happened in the interim periods that they didn’t know about each other and were never able to clearly communicate.
If the ignorance of each others’ lives in those interim periods is specifically the thing causing them not to be together until the end, and we as an audience share that ignorance with them, then we are part of the story. Through internal moments, we might realise something that they don’t realise, and oh! the frustration of seeing the middle meeting, and working out what’s going on, but seeing them part without gaining the knowledge we have!
This also serves the story-as-musical, because the information about those interim periods can be given to the audience as internal moments, and internal monologues maketh for musical theatre songs.
Also, interestingly, internal monologues can make for less strictly-structured musical theatre songs. I know it has a musical structure, but Billy Bigelow’s ‘Soliloquy’ comes close to this possibility.
In the same way that ‘Beautiful’ has no rhymes, which makes it right for a character who would never sing a romantic love song in a musical, a simple internal monologue doesn’t necessarily have to be restructured in order to work as a musical theatre internal moment.
Verse/chorus is the second option to consider when thinking about songs for this kind of format, because what verse/chorus does so brilliantly is expand on a single emotion without having to make a choice or a change.
To make verse/chorus work, it has to happen at least twice, and the chorus preferably three times, but the final time works well as a repeat. Five sections, possibly 20 seconds each – this format can be much shorter and more snappy, because the whole song is available to the audience for connection with the emotion. That’s a little over 2.5 minutes, which means a potential four songs in a ten minute musical – although I think that’s a little much.
But what if a monologue became a verse/chorus song? There will generally be an obvious hook, which will lose nothing from repetition, but it does refine the more rambling thought-process aspect of a monologue. Which is a brilliant aspect of traditional musical theatre lyric-writing, and the simplification is there for a reason: to leave space for the music to do some of the work.
But what if we didn’t refine? That’s certainly what Mort needs in his I Want moment. He’s not a boy who has his thoughts refined into short, sharp lyrics. He’s not poetic, either.
He has a train of thought, and to him, that IS emotion.
So choosing the right kind of character is also a limitation of a ten minute musical, and one that can serve you well. You could pick people who don’t naturally fall into the traditional musical theatre song format world, and use those unique character traits to influence the structure of the writing, which will only serve to support their uniqueness even more.
I’m rambling, because I’ve never written all this stuff down before, but this is what happens at the beginning of the process of crafting a way to explain what I know about these things. This is how Play-Doh began.
So watch this space, or the MMD message board, because I’m cultivating a class on the ten minute musical.
