The Libretto

Musical Theatre DNA

2011-03-21T22:50:00.003Z

The subject of British versus American musicals seems to have come up a lot recently. David Cote thinks the Americans win hands down when it comes to having the right cultural DNA. As a librettist and workshop facilitator myself, I often hear writers bemoan the difference between the two musical theatre worlds.

Although there’s never enough teaching of craft, there are several UK courses on musical theatre writing. There are companies who specifically support new musicals, and two new “British musicals” have recently hit London: Stephen Clark and Howard Goodall’s Love Story and the Cowen, Lipman, Stiles and Drewe show Betty Blue Eyes.

Do they fit the “British musical” tag? The Theatre Royal Stratford East are soon to stage what they’re calling a “British Chinese musical”: Takeaway, a story set in London, written by New York-based writer Robert Lee and Hong Kong-based composer Leon Ko. (This definition would make Evita an Argentinean musical. Argentinean British?)

Director Kerry Michael, a big supporter of musical theatre writers and writing, says the tag is not just about the British experience in the story, but also about the British money that’s financing the project. It is undeniably brilliant that there’s money and support for new writing, but stories don’t emerge from the money. They emerge from the writer.

This will be a story about a British experience, told by American Chinese writers. All of those things will influence the show... and more.

David Cote is correct: American writers have American Musical Theatre written into their cultural DNA. Any creative writer can only tell stories filtered through their own unique make-up. That’s not about American people, but about people who are American amongst other things.

Take me, for example. I was born in America but predominantly raised in England. I am also Danish by descent, and have had a lot of Scandinavian influence in my life.

Anything I write must filter through all of these things in order to get to the page. There is no helping that. I expect if you look closely, you’ll find both panto and Tom Lehrer in my humour. My characters certainly chase the Danish concept of hygge in their lives, but mostly try to do so in a New York Minute. None of those things would be true if it were not for everything that I am, and everything that I am is the only thing that I can be.

So the upcoming “British Chinese musical” is a British American Chinese musical, if you like, but it is so much more than that. Let’s celebrate Robert Lee and Leon Ko as writers, and Kerry Michael as director. The show, and this production of it, will emerge from the complexity of everything they are, including but not limited to their nationalities or cultural identities (which are even more complex than I have mentioned here).

Writers of new musicals need to know that there is no perfect model of ‘British’ or even ‘American’ musical theatre against which to compare our own work. Writing is hard enough as it is, without a fantastical goal of what we should be creating or, frankly, a fantastical idea of what might be inhibiting our creativity.

The most successful writers are true to themselves as people, and therefore true to the writing. It’s not easy. Writing can be terrifying, but if we are the only ones inhibiting ourselves then we have the power to change, and that is the crucial difference.

Other factors certainly open or close doors for writers in terms of productions, but once you’re in the theatre and connecting with an audience, only the truth will do. So I say to writers: ignore any notion of what British musical theatre ought to be, and just write truthfully. It will filter through some ‘Britishness’ anyway, as it emerges from you. Don’t get in its way.

The Copenhagen Interpretation

2011-02-20T18:57:00.003Z

More philosophy! If blocking consists of finding paths through a map of the territory - combined physical space, objects, character physicality - depending, of course, on the weather that day...

- and it's lovely to think of a map drawn in sand -

... then does X mark the spot?

If X is where the treasure of the drama lies, then I think X is a movable feast.

A better analogy for me is The Copenhagen Interpretation. (Which seems to be the name of my new theatre company, if everyone involved agrees. Catchy, ain't it?)

It's a theory in Quantum Mechanics which states that a quantum particle normally exists in all possible states of existence, all in one go, but when someone tries to observe it, it's forced to choose one state in which to present itself.

(For the most famous theoretical proof of this theory, see Schrödinger's cat, in which the cat is both alive and dead whilst no-one can see it in the box. If you opened the box, one state of existence would be forced to be the observed state of existence.)

In my view, at any given moment in drama, emotion is presented in such a way that anyone - or at least, anyone collaboratively willing - sees it in a specific form of existence and connects with it in their own personal way.

The drama itself doesn't make a decision about that final presentation: someone observes the drama, and experiences it in their own personal choice of existence in order to serve their own personal connection with the drama.

So I don't think there is one specific X for everyone. I think the map is littered with X's, but every audience member only sees their own X, which is exactly how it should be: their own Copenhagen Interpretation.

Spinning Direction

2011-02-20T15:13:00.002Z

I had to take this out of Tweetsville because sometimes, 140 characters just aren't enough.

In a discussion about what directing is, or maybe about what a director does, or maybe all of that, I linked to this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ctaA2mERzI

When I first Stumbled Upon it, I just thought it was amazingly clever. During our discussion, the spinning water presented itself as the perfect metaphor for the collaborative process: held together by its own force.

If that's true, then I think the director is neither handler, nor glass, nor air, nor even force, but rather the simple belief that it works.

I go into a process knowing that the process will work. I don't know HOW it will work, but I know it will work. And the reason I know it will work is this: collaborative creativity isn't a manufactured process. It's just the way things are.

Same with open space: Harrison Owen didn't INVENT it. He didn't even discover it. He just observed it to be true, and pointed it out to the rest of us.

For me, directing is the same sort of thing, which is why that term feels misleading to me. If I'm in the position of doing that thing, I'm not choosing the direction in which we should go. Well, I am, but only in so much as we ALL are.

That's the brilliant thing about open space. For example, when Phelim opens space, I can look across the room and see him deep in discussion in a session, just like everyone else in the room, but he is still holding the space open for all of us simply by knowing that it works. He believes open space completely, because it is absolutely true.

Same thing with directing: if I am holding space for a creative collaborative process, I can still be engaged in it - I can be part of the water - because what I am doing to hold the space is knowing that it works.

- which isn't to say that it's an easy thing to do, necessarily. It takes work, energy, a certain kind of focus.

Although I'm not at all religious, in a way it is about being a spiritual core: I know it's true, so if someone else wavers, my knowing it to be true can re-inflate their confidence in the process.

I don't think I am the only person in the group who does this. I actually think we all do some 'directing' at some point. We empower each other. Maybe I'm just uber-confident that no matter what happens, I will always know that the process works, so if it ever comes to it, I will absolutely be the last one standing.

No, actually, I don't think I know it more powerfully than anyone else. Maybe it's just my job to have the awareness that it needs to be known.

Lyric Craft and Incan Lords - 9

2010-10-13T19:53:00.002Z

(Here's the beginning of all this)

In response to this whole thread, we're joined by Cameron Smith who has posted a response on his Middlebrow Musicals blog.

I particularly like this part:

"If I were designing a new chair I could consider all kinds of exciting colours and shapes and materials. But primarily I’d make sure I could sit on it."

<3

Lyric Craft and Incan Lords - 8

2010-09-26T23:12:00.008Z

(Here's the beginning of all this)

Tim replied to this post:

But the atoms of linguistic molecules are morphemes, not scansion or prosody. Semantic information is more fundamental than scansion or prosody, isn't it? There aren't many working songs that *only* have scansion and prosody without meaning... (altho "Prisencolinensinaincuisol" is an example, actually - worth googling if you don't know it).

So when in a lyric you need to put words in a specific order to achieve the semantic effect you want, but those perfect words don't scan in a regular pattern which is easily transferrable to musical structures, then you have a tension between three sets of 'rules' (or, if you prefer, things that happen in human understanding) - the ones about phrasing stuff in the most comprehensible way versus the ones about it scanning correctly versus the ones about it sounding musical.

Every lyricist wants to harmonise all three of those and more, like it sounding beautiful and true and rhyming and being memorable and hooky etc. etc.... but invariably there's a need to sacrifice adherence to some of those things in order to achieve some of the others.

And in a lot of cases, it's totally the right choice for the semantic to win out over other craft aspects. So, the HH writers made a choice to optimise their lyric by sacrificing the scansion rules sometimes. You might disagree with that choice, but I totally see how it might be optimal (given the other constraints like writing deadlines). The song isn't perfect, or as good as it could be. But nor is any song.

You said at first that sacrificing scansion is "one more step down the slippery slope of people not caring about craft", but I can't see it that way. It's just that not everything needs to be the Sistine Chapel.

And my reply:

Tim said: But the atoms of linguistic molecules are morphemes, not scansion or prosody.

See, I knew it was a mistake to go down the molecule route. Why do I get into these discussions with you? It always drives me nuts. I should know better by now! Fine, so my metaphor was shit. The chemical bonds within molecules, then, if you like.

Of course, semantic information is fundamental, and that is precisely the thing we're discussing. It's not more fundamental than scansion or prosody, no, absolutely not. Just so we are clear, when you say:

Tim said: There aren't many working songs that *only* have scansion and prosody without meaning…

… I'd like to point out that scansion and prosody provide the meaning. Without scansion, a word is a bunch of letters. It becomes recognisable as the word it is precisely because of scansion. Even with the written word, scansion appears in our head as we read. And without prosody, even a simple "hello" is completely meaningless.

"… (altho "Prisencolinensinaincuisol" is an example, actually - worth googling if you don't know it)"

It has meaning. That's the whole point of it: when sung, that lyric has an apparent meaning which is entirely invisible on the page. (If you ask me, it's a song about spelling more than anything else. It's like that game where you try to spell your name with as many letters as possible, whilst keeping the same pronunciation. So… Djgaenniphfurre… would be the best I can do with mine at short notice: 15 letters.)

Tim said: So when in a lyric you need to put words in a specific order to achieve the semantic effect you want…

There is never one "perfect" order of "perfect" words to achieve a "perfect" semantic effect when it comes to any given dramatic moment. The differences might be very subtle, but there are always choices because the final interpretation of any given moment in a story is done by the audience. They make it land, not collectively but individually, so we cannot do all the work, which allows us great flexibility in that regard.

Tim said: … but those perfect words don't scan in a regular pattern which is easily transferrable to musical structures…

Again, always great flexibility in that. There is never just one musical option because of the collaborative nature of art between the work of art and the specific viewer.

Tim said: … then you have a tension between three sets of 'rules' (or, if you prefer, things that happen in human understanding)…

I do prefer. Because human understanding is a collaborative process between the Thing Being Understood and the Individual Doing The Understanding.

Scansion is not an individual thing. It is a global thing. Everyone - every single person who speaks that language - experiences it in the same way. Prosody is slightly less global, but nonetheless, much more globally received than, say, the order or choice of words. (But since prosody is the order and choice of notes, the marriage of words and music is precisely what I'm talking about.)

Tim said: - the ones about phrasing stuff in the most comprehensible way versus the ones about it scanning correctly versus the ones about it sounding musical.

I do not see those as being comparable at all, though. That's the problem. You can phrase something in a less accurate way than you, as the writer, intended for the character… but your intended meaning may still reach some audience. On the other hand, you can feel that you have phrased something so perfectly for the character that no-one could possibly receive it any other way… and some of the audience will receive something that you did not intend.

That's collaboration with the individual. (It's another thing we must take into account, of course.)

The same is true with prosody, yes, although to a much lesser extent, I think, since the total complexity of linguistic expression far exceeds the complexity of the base emotions which motivate those expressions: there are so many elements informing what we say, such as the person to whom we are saying it, and the situation within which we are saying it, and so on, but there is usually only one emotion propelling our words at any given moment, even though other emotions will rise and fall before and after.

As I said: anger and sorrow and joy and such have a global understanding that is much to do with physical expression, but also to do with prosody. So prosody, for me, is a more powerful lyric-writing tool to wield because it has the potential to reach more people in a more accurate way. I may not get across to everyone precisely why my character is accusing another character of something, but most people will get that he is making an accusation. Even if they don't speak English!

As for scansion: it is always there. Everyone always feels it, even if not consciously. It is an undeniable truth, it is a constant presence, and therefore it gives writers the opportunity to use a tool that is so global as to be guaranteed to affect every single audience member.

I don't understand why you would be fighting for a writer's right to dismiss that power.

For me, scansion is not actually a storytelling tool, really. It doesn't belong with the other things you've mentioned, and it sort of doesn't even belong with prosody. It's just a fact of the way language reaches audience, and if I don't pay it the attention it demands, I am not doing my best to reach the audience.

As for prosody… well, it's a little more flexible, yes. But to ignore it seems a strange choice, because of the power it has to describe emotion, to give meaning, to be that semantic effect, and with such wide-spread confidence.

Tim said: And in a lot of cases, it's totally the right choice for the semantic to win out over other craft aspects. So, the HH writers made a choice to optimise their lyric by sacrificing the scansion rules sometimes. You might disagree with that choice, but I totally see how it might be optimal (given the other constraints like writing deadlines).

It took me two minutes to fix the scansion. The meaning of the song comes across despite the bad scansion. They didn't sacrifice any rules of writing, they just ignored something about language that is a hindrance to communication if used in an un-usual way.

Do you actually think they made the choice to sacrifice scansion in order to optimise their lyric?

How did it optimise the lyric?

Tim said: You said at first that sacrificing scansion is "one more step down the slippery slope of people not caring about craft", but I can't see it that way. It's just that not everything needs to be the Sistine Chapel.

It is my great wish that I should write even one lyric in my life that I feel does the thing I hoped it would do: reach the audience. I want to make that journey as easy as I can for it. I guess that might be the same sort of aspiration Michelangelo had, although apparently he didn't enjoy the job. He had to learn incredibly complex perspective techniques in order to make the figures on the curved ceiling appear correct from far below. Because perspective is inherently present in our experience of vision. If you try to ignore it, it can be a hindrance to communicating with your audience.

So yes, if we're talking about bothering with those sorts of details, I want everything I write to be the Sistine Chapel.

(It certainly fucking feels like everything I write takes four years and has to be done bending over backwards on some rickety scaffolding.)

And there's a latecomer to the discussion here

Lyric Craft and Incan Lords - 7

2010-09-26T18:50:00.005Z

(Here's the beginning of all this)

In response to this post, Tim said:

Re post 5 (and this is ironically an instance of the importance of prosody), the problem comes not when someone says "these are the RULES of language", it comes when someone says "these are THE rules of language"... Like I said, all lyrics ...are the outcome of a subtle interplay of lots of different and potentially contradictory rules. You're saying "it's fine to break THE rules, but you have to know you're breaking THE rules", to which I say, there are many rules, all of which have some sort of objective basis, and you'll always be breaking or bending some of them, and you'll always be working in ignorance of others, no matter what sort of craft practises you use. In fact, the combination of rules they know and apply and the degree of strictness is arguably the whole of what defines a writer's voice!

I say "degree of strictness" because all setting of words in songs compromises natural scansion to some degree, unless it is literally a transcription of the exact scansion of a natural speaking voice.

So I don't think you can take one or two rules, like the ones about scansion and prosody and say that anything that doesn't observe those specific rules to the degree which you find acceptable and then claim as a result that the work isn't communicating. You can say it isn't communicating to you, but of course, you *did* understand what they were trying to say in the Patchacouli song.

If you want to make a more general claim, that it isn't communicating to the audience at large, then you need good evidence, like demonstrating a significant proportion of the audience didn't understand the song, for instance.

My reply:

Tim said: … these are the RULES of language … these are THE rules of language...

As I said in my last post to Michael: it might help if we get off the idea of rules. I think you just have a bad reaction to anything involving the word 'rules'.

Let's forget that all lyric-writing exists. Then, let us have the idea that we could put words and music together. Now let us find ways to help us do that within storytelling and more efficiently and smoothly get the story across to the audience.

To do that, we would look at how the audience listens.

Prosody and scansion are not rules. They are things that happen in the use of language. They're not THE rules, or the RULES, or any other thing that has been implanted into language. They ARE language. They are the atoms of linguistic molecules.

Tim said: Like I said, all lyrics ...are the outcome of a subtle interplay of lots of different and potentially contradictory rules… there are many rules, all of which have some sort of objective basis…

And as I keep saying, scansion and prosody are global. If you are using language, you cannot do without them because they ARE language, just as water cannot do without the O or an H.

(I absolutely know I am going to regret choosing that metaphor, because you are so much smarter than me that I will find myself poisoned by my own chemical metaphoria.)

Jokes, you can write without. Rhyme can go, too. You can lose any of the other things that you might call 'rules' and still write something that will clearly communicate story to audience. You can make choices about whether to include them or not, and how to include them.

What you cannot do is leave out scansion and prosody. If you ignore them, they're still there, only they might work against you because you've ignored them.

If you know they're there and they're working against you, and you decide to leave it anyway just because why should you bother with stupid rules? - then you're not making a creative choice, you're making a point. To other writers? Or maybe to the people you think the rules have come from? I don't know to whom, but certainly not to the audience, and it's the audience with whom you're trying to communicate.

Tim said: In fact, the combination of rules they know and apply and the degree of strictness is arguably the whole of what defines a writer's voice!

Not the only thing, but certainly a large part of it, yes. However, the more you know and understand about the way an audience receives a story in this storytelling form, the more power you have to make use of those things in communicating with the audience. And since prosody and scansion are the atoms of linguistic molecules (Quick, nurse, the antidote!) if you are aware of them, it seems an odd creative choice to ignore them and let them get in the way of communication.

Even if the way in which they get is a small one. I never said the song wasn't communicating. It's just not communicating as well as it could. Which is fine if there is a creative and intentional purpose in there somewhere. I don't see a creative sort of purpose in that instance.

Do you?

Tim said: I say "degree of strictness" because all setting of words in songs compromises natural scansion to some degree, unless it is literally a transcription of the exact scansion of a natural speaking voice.

True. But at least it has attention paid to it. Since it is always there anyway, I think paying it creative attention is better than trying to ignore it.

Tim said: So I don't think you can take one or two rules, like the ones about scansion and prosody and say that anything that doesn't observe those specific rules to the degree which you find acceptable and then claim as a result that the work isn't communicating.

Any observance is acceptable. Ignoring is also acceptable, clearly, since it's the writer's choice what to do, and how to do it. I never said anything about there being an official Rulebook or a Judge. I think ignoring something that is always there is a shame, because the writing could reach the audience more efficiently if scansion and prosody were used.

I try to make writers aware of them, so the writers can choose to use them. Or not. I still don't understand why a writer would choose to ignore something just for the sake of… ignoring it.

Tim said: If you want to make a more general claim, that it isn't communicating to the audience at large, then you need good evidence, like demonstrating a significant proportion of the audience didn't understand the song, for instance.

My general claim is that you cannot get rid of prosody or scansion. You can't choose to have them suddenly not be a part of language. You can with humour, and rhyme, and all manner of other things in lyric writing, but not scansion or prosody. I don't think I need to offer you proof in order for you to agree with that. I'm not sure why I would need to offer you proof that making deliberate creative choices is better than not making them. As you say, our creative choices make our creative voices.

So what is the intentional creative purpose behind the unnatural scansion and prosody in that song?

Next section here

Lyric Craft and Incan Lords - 6

2010-09-26T15:08:00.005Z

(Here's the beginning of all this)

Michael Gyngell replied to this post:

Ok. I know you write for kids but do you write for TV where the attention span is brief? These kids are not sat in a theatre watching in the dark. They are texting, eating, facebooking... and some of them are at home too.

I think the HH writers aren't bothered with finely honed lyrics, they want to say it loud and be heard. (Who are the writers BTW?)

As for Jack Black. I think him and his friend write only to amuse themselves. Much as I love them, that's why the film flopped. x

My reply:

I say that scansion and prosody help things fall on the ear and be understood more quickly, so yes, they should be used in TV even more so than in theatre if the attention span there is shorter!

Saying it loud and being heard, and being heard faster, and saying it more clearly: that's what scansion and prosody are there for.

I love that writers write to please themselves :-)

Quite right, too. A clear creative voice can only come from honestly and truth. Trouble is, that doesn't always match up with the current commercial trends, but I wouldn't recommend that anyone should ever be anything other than truthful. In fact, I'm not sure it's possible to be anything but truthful in writing, if you really let go to it.

When I am really, honestly writing something and properly focused on that (instead of Facebook, or fretting about other things in my life, or just plain fretting about writing) then it's like this:

- I open up.

- The writing comes out of the ether and through me, onto the page.

- Only things that are Me-shaped can get through me.

- They pick up a little residue of Me as they pass through.

They end up on the page, the Me-shaped things, with Me-dust on them, but they didn't come from inside me. They are something separate to me. I just let them through so they could get to a page.

I'm lucky to have been chosen, and I'm only chosen if I'm willing to open up.

I hate writing. It's scary as fuck. But it is a privilege. I owe it to the Things to use as many tools as I can to give them clear passage.

Next section here

Lyric Craft and Incan Lords - 5

2010-09-26T13:53:00.004Z

(Here's the beginning of all this)

The lovely Michael Gyngell joins us in response to this post: Great debate Jen but much as I hate bad prosody and scansion, I think it's got to be that basic and obvious to make it work for the 'kids'. Also I'm not sure Tenacious D write like a 14 year old on purpose, I think that's just what they do. I fully expect you to prove me wrong and look forward to it. x

Well, I've done a lot of writing for young people to perform, and from the age of about seven upwards, I've always written for them exactly as I would for adults. In my experience, there is no need for the craft to change, and although the choice of content will obviously vary because human beings want to explore and consider different things at different stages of their experience of life, the actual difference between a child and an adult is just that: less life experience. We have the same emotions, and the same sort of fundamental drives. They just get more complex the more experience we have.

So I don't use long words - but then, I don't often use complex language with adults either, especially in song. I want everything to fall pretty easily and immediately on the ear.

I think "basic and obvious" is exactly what I've been talking about with prosody and scansion: it helps everything reach the human ear and filter into understanding much quicker, no matter what stage of life experience the human being is at. That's the point of it.

Tenacious D may not have made a conscious and overt decision to write like teenagers, but they are certainly aware of the fact that their material relates to the teenage demographic for which we have an inherent nostalgia. Frankly, from a commercial point of view, they would be foolish not to take note of that. I'm quite sure that Jack Black is aware of his own commercial type-casting, even if only to be slightly annoyed by it.

On the other hand, I'm not saying it's just deliberately manipulative. It is about creative choice, and creative choice is about what honestly and truthfully comes out of (or appeals to) Jack Black and co. Which is great, it's a device, and it acknowledges the rules it is busy breaking.

Calling them 'rules' seems to be the problem, here. Tim will correct me if I'm wrong, but as soon as someone says, "These are the RULES of language!" it's very easy to be angry about that kind of imposition.

That's not what I'm referring to in this discussion, though. If we started from scratch, right here and now, in this moment, and looked at ways in which language can be used to communicate stories to the audience of Now, I would observe the way scansion and prosody facilitate clear communication.

That's not me looking backwards and trying to haul some old and heavy rulebook with us, forcing new writing to be dragged down by it. It's me looking at what we've got that can help us, and pushing us towards those things. Making writers go further. Making the craft do as much as it can to reach people.

A friend of mine types the word "shan't" with two apostrophes, to show off that he knows what an apostrophe does: sha'n't. Which I love for its nostalgia and arrogance, and for the sense of being something of an in-crowd in the understanding of the history of grammar, but it is history. I like history, but I'm not teaching it.

I'm not teaching anything, actually. If writers don't want to use scansion or prosody, it's not going to kill them, or their writing, or even the craft of writing lyrics. But it makes me sad. It's like a painter disregarding the existence of perspective, rather than choosing to use it or ignore it as a specific creative choice.

Horrible histories isn't making a specific creative choice. Or, if they are, it's not communicating itself to me very well. (Which may also be the case. But since scansion and prosody are global, one would hope that the communication of a creative choice to go against either one would be globally successful.)

Next section here

Lyric Craft and Incan Lords - 4

2010-09-26T12:42:00.009Z

(Here's the beginning of all this)

Tim said in response to this post: The bit I disagreed with was "But it does contribute to the gradual infiltration of bad craft and sloppy writing" cos it implies that a preponderance of inexactly-crafted material affects people's ability to enjoy and recognise well-crafted material, which it doesn't.

Not the intended implication: I'm more concerned with WRITERS being sloppy. If there is a growing prevalence of disregard for the craft, it's our fault.

Don't get me wrong: deliberately breaking the rules is fine with me if the breakage still acknowledges the rules. But deliberately ignoring scansion and prosody is not about breaking the rules. In fact, it's not even about rules!

Tim said: Also, it does tend to presuppose that the craft rules you consider important are *the* craft rules that are worth following by everyone. Scansion and prosody have an objective basis (nearly)…

They completely have an objective basis. If I say "emPHAsis" it sounds wrong to anyone who speaks English vaguely fluently. That's not a rule of writing, it's a habit of hearing. As writers, we can make use of that, or we can forget about it. For me, forgetting about it or ignoring it is… a shame. It's a waste of a tool we could use to make our lyrics reach our audience more effectively. Why would you NOT use it?

As for prosody, it is also a habit of hearing, and it's most useful in storytelling because it IS storytelling. Without the music that informs our words, all social connections would break down: everything we say to one another is some form of story. Words communicate the facts, but prosody communicates our intention for communicating those facts.

All the other things you list - humour, aesthetic beauty and so on - depend heavily on the make-up of the individual, much of that being to do with their society: cultural class, economic class, social status, familial systems, and so on. That would be why it's more tricky to land a joke than it is to get scansion right. Scansion works for EVERYONE. Period.

Yes, all lyrics represent a trade-off between all of these things, but I think writers ought to go for the most potent mixture possible, every single time. Scansion and prosody are so globally powerful that ignoring them means alienating everyone in the audience, every single time.

I can't believe I'm doing this, but look at the first section of that Horrible Histories thing:

I'm Pachacuti, the Incan lord
All other tribes dreaded
My name means he who shakes the earth
Not that I'm big-headed

First line, fine. Scansion is good in the name, as far as I know. (If it's not, then that is now how I pronounce that name in my head, so I've been taught something that is incorrect.)

The prosody at the beginning of the second line makes me think it's the beginning of a new sentence, so I'm waiting to hear something else at the end… and there is nothing. So my brain then takes a second to go: "Oh, I see, that was the end of the first line."

And then my brain has to cope with "dreaDED" which, on first hearing, is confusingly similar to the word 'dead' because the bad scansion forces my brain to hear the last syllable first. So I have to unscramble that, too.

These are not things I can avoid doing. This is how my brain works with language. They take a millisecond, and I don't exactly notice they're happening, but even so, they are jarring where there doesn't need to be any jarring.

Third line, fine. Fourth line: "Not THAT" makes no sense unless you're pointing at something on a deli counter. "Not THAT cheese, the one behind it."

So my brain is now going, "Not… what? Huh?" and then almost immediately I get the awful scansion on "big-headed": bad scansion made to rhyme! Rhyme gives additional emphasis to a word, so not only is it bad scansion, it's been emphasised with a rhyme, and on the end of a musical A section!

The craft is not there to get a laugh: the idea that he is saying he's not big-headed is the thing that's funny, but that joke is having to fight its way through all these other things that are naturally there because of the way we hear language.

On the same tune (with one split note in the last line):

I'm Pachacuti, the Incan lord
that other tribes would dread.
My name means he who shakes the earth.
Won't let it go to my head!

Makes use of scansion and prosody. Same joke. Lands better on a one-syllable word. Took me two minutes. (In fact, I think the joke is better for the different telling of the story: "Not that I'm big-headed" is an aside, whereas "Won't let it go to my head" is a statement, and since it falls on the end of a musical A section, I think a statement is stronger there. But that's my personal choice, and one of those things that depends more on the make-up of the individual audience member. I'm not even going to start on the mixture of tenses...)

Tim said: Lynn Truss goes wrong, IMO, when applying the same premises to language…

Oh, is she "Eats Shoots and Leaves"? Yeah, I can appreciate those rules of language at any given time in history, but language is - and ought to be - a fluid thing. Scansion is also fluid in that way, but much, much less so. And I would say that prosody is not really fluid at all, which is why anyone in the world who doesn't speak a word of your language can still make out if you're generally angry, sad or joyful.

Tim said: The rules that musical theatre considers important aren't as important in the culture at large, and, for me at least, that's perfectly OK.

I'm not talking about musical theatre. I'm talking about anyone who wants to get some kind of meaning across to an audience. The whole point of this for me is that writers should make use of whatever tools they have in order to get their intention across to the audience as easily and strongly as possible. Scansion and prosody are tools, but they are not rules. We can't avoid their existence, so why not make use of them?

Next section here

Lyric Craft and Incan Lords - 3

2010-09-26T12:38:00.005Z

(Here's the beginning of all this)

Tim Saward's response to my post:

Jen - you're in danger of becoming the Lynn Truss of musical theatre, and god knows it doesn't need any more of those :)

PS. The bit I disagreed with was "But it does contribute to the gradual infiltration of bad craft and sloppy writing" cos it implies that a preponderance of inexactly-crafted material affects people's ability to enjoy and recognise well-crafted material, which it doesn't.

Also, it does tend to presuppose that the craft rules you consider important are *the* craft rules that are worth following by everyone. Scansion and prosody have an objective basis (nearly), but so do humour, or elusiveness, or aesthetic beauty, or recognisability, or intellectual import, or clarity or abstraction. Any of these can trump the other. All lyrics represent a trade-off between these things and other priorities, not least the ever-present tension between musical phrasing and lyrical phrasing (which musical theatre of the school of Sondheim tends to solve by suborning integrity of musical phrasing).

Lynn Truss goes wrong, IMO, when applying the same premises to language, i.e. that the rules of language she learned at school have objective authority over other rules and that other people's practising of other rulesets is bad because it erodes people's ability to use language "correctly".

In actual fact, what she's complaining about is that her version of the language isn't as privileged as she'd like in the general culture. The rules that musical theatre considers important aren't as important in the culture at large, and, for me at least, that's perfectly OK. 

Next section here

Lyric Craft and Incan Lords - 2

2010-09-26T12:37:00.005Z

My response to the initial thread:

They could have had chirpy music and grisly details, factual historical details AND craft. Which, to be honest, could have been even funnier through the use of craft to intentionally land some comedy on the music.

The things you enjoyed, I also enjoyed, but the truth is that the bad craft lands noticeably on the ear and becomes acceptable through experience.

People such as Mighty Boosh and Jack Black's Tenacious D have used bad craft for humour, presenting songs that deliberately sound like they were written by a fourteen year-old in a home rock band to pastiche that and also, simultaneously, to connect with and appeal to our nostalgia for that demographic. Which is great, as one joke. Or even one device, which is what it is for some specific performers.

What happens then is other people pastiche the pastiche, but don't understand how to make it land, so the pastiche is then experienced over and over again, in all kinds of places, until it becomes expected. Or just unobserved, which is almost worse.

As writers, we are then left with two choices: we can tap into that pastiche/nostalgia, and hopefully do it properly, make the most of it as a comic tool or device.

Or we can revert to lyric-writing craft that acknowledges and uses the "habits of hearing" true to all human beings, such as prosody and scansion: things that are inherently true of natural patterns of speech, and therefore instantly identifiable to the human ear of anyone who speaks the language being used in the lyric.

That craft cannot incorporate that one joke. It has to make it or leave it. If it leaves it, and if this non-craft technique has been widely used without deliberate creative intention, then we risk leaving audiences feeling like there's something missing.

There is: the one joke.

I have nothing against the one joke. I just want writers to care enough, and KNOW enough, to make the joke if they're making the joke, and not make it if they are not making it.

In this example, they haven't landed that one joke anywhere. Nowhere did I laugh because of the bad prosody or scansion. I laughed AT it: different thing.

This is a prime example of the result of what I just described: bad craft that is neither deliberate, nor cared about by the writers. Yes, the song made me smile. No, it did not ruin anyone's enjoyment of the song. But it does contribute to the gradual infiltration of bad craft and sloppy writing, and I think that's a shame.

Next section here

Lyric Craft and Incan Lords

2010-09-26T12:30:00.006Z

To save taking up tons of space on my friend's Facebook wall, here's a conversation that can continue in peace on my blog. It began thus, with a link to this video about Pachacuti:

Ren Kinley: Yesterday they had an episode just of songs, including this one. I learnt a lot.

Jenifer Toksvig: Oh!!! Bad scansion AND prosody!

Ren Kinley: And if it was in a musical theatre show, that might be a problem.

Jenifer Toksvig: Nah, bad writing is bad writing, period. Not quite so bad in pop, where listening to the lyrics isn't the point, but in this, the lyrics are the point. It's one more step down the slippery slope of people not caring about craft, whether they realise that or not.

Ren Kinley: I object to your objection. I understood every lyric. The song made me laugh, and I found the juxtaposition of chirpy music and grisly details witty. It also contained some nice factual historical details. It was about 100 times better than some of the dreadful MT songs I've heard that scan well and rhyme perfectly and all that cal, but are tedious and unimaginative. There has to be more to caring about craft than making sure things scan well.

Next section here

The Stage - Comments Response (part 1)

2010-06-12T22:06:00.002Z

So I don't take up huge space on a blog post in the Stage by the lovely Mark Shenton, here are my responses to comments left on this post of his, which refers to the musical theatre conference I'm doing with LIPA:

http://blogs.thestage.co.uk/shenton/2010/06/the-state-of-british-musicals-and-beacon/

@ Laurence Kupp, who said:

“… who are the people mentoring this next generation? What were they raised on? What are their standards? If the people that teach and guide in these organizations are not smart and knowledgeable enough themselves - how much hope can we have that they will challenge and inspire a new generation to keep the British musical theatre alive?”

I’m one of them. I teach musical theatre writing craft in several places in the UK. You can find out more about me here: www.acompletelossforwords.com

I don’t know what you’re looking for in terms of being smart and knowledgeable enough to teach and guide and be a mentor. You can see my musical theatre writing experience on my website, but that won’t show you the way I guide and mentor other writers, it will only show you the way I write. I don’t want to teach anyone else to write the way I write: I want to help them find the way THEY write. So my guiding skills are – hopefully – not entirely connected to my writing skills.

Laurence also said: “Frankly, the Tisch School, and the BMI Workshops and The ASCAP Workshop in New York are run and taught and mentored by (arguably) the best musical theatre writers in the musical theatre”

I’m a graduate of the Tisch course too, and what the lovely Mr Blackmore did not say in his post here was this: a lot of the amazing people you mention, who have indeed visited Tisch, joined us for one session. Yes, Michael John LaChiusa comes in fairly often, as does William Finn, but the majority of the guidance there is done by writers of whom you have likely never heard.

Sarah Schlesinger, the Chair of the programme, has had shows produced in the UK (“The Ballad of Little Jo” at the Bridewell Theatre, for example) but most Brits will not know her or her work. Yet she has been one of the greatest influences on me as a writer.

I’ve learnt more about writing musicals from being in a room with Fred Carl, Robert Lee, Martin Epstein, Sybille Pearson, Mel Marvin, Mindi Dickstein, Polly Pen than I ever have from being in a room with Sondheim, with Strouse, with Guettel, with Ahrens and Flaherty, and I have been in a room with all of the latter.

It’s not their fault: I only met them once. They talked about their careers, their shows. They didn’t look at my work, or help me try to find my writing voice, because they didn’t have time. And maybe they didn’t have interest. Not everyone gets something out of mentoring. Frankly, not everyone is good at it, and even if they are, just being good at it is not enough.

Mentoring in the creative arts is a creative collaboration like any other: you have to hook up with the right partner in order for it to work for both of you.

I agree with you on many levels, Laurence. You’re right, we have no list of musical theatre writers that can compare with the USA, but let’s bear in mind that traditional book musical theatre as we know it, the one you’re referring to when you mention Sondheim et al, is an American genre. We have yet to discover what British musical theatre could really be.

Even Lionel Bart wrote in the American book musical form, as did Stiles & Drewe in both Mary Poppins and Honk. It’s hardly surprising that we have fewer people who can ‘get’ that genre, any more than it’s surprising that the pub-piano knees-up song I wrote for my thesis at Tisch was the most challenging moment for the American performers.

You said: “Until that high level of guidance and involvement is a standard part of these organizations then my hope for them is, sadly, pessimistic.”

I couldn’t agree more that mentoring is vitally important. However, I think it’s also vitally important that we identify what the mentoring process might be, and how to keep the definitions of it as broad as possible to accommodate all kinds of creative relationships so we have a hope of finding the right person for everyone.

(The right person for mentors too. Because without a mentee present, mentors fall over, and make no sound as they're doing it.)

The Stage - Comments Response (part 2)

2010-06-12T21:49:00.004Z

One more response to this blog post in the Stage by the lovely Mark Shenton, which refers to the musical theatre conference I'm doing with LIPA:

  http://blogs.thestage.co.uk/shenton/2010/06/the-state-of-british-musicals-and-beacon/

@ Richard, who said: “Unfortunately, where would these new musicals go? West End theatre owners (who are also mostly producers) seem to go out of their way to fill their theatres with the old, tired, or wont go aways.”

It depends what you want, Richard. If you just want to know that there’s a place for new musicals, then rest assured: youth and community theatre is alive and well, and brimming with opportunities to put new work on its feet if we can only get away from this idea that work is not successful unless it gets into town.

Youth Music Theatre UK (YMT) produce seven or eight brand new musicals every year. These are full productions, with lights and costumes and sets, with professional directors and choreographer and writers. They happen in proper professional venues, even some in London. In fact, it looks like a show that started out as a YMT commission is about to go into the West End: Loserville, by James Bourne of Busted and Son Of Dork.

The thing is, there’s no keeping a good show down. If the material is really, honestly good enough to keep a lot of people engaged in the narrative, it will succeed. It will because money may open doors, but good stories are what keep audiences in their seats.

There are other places to develop new work: I’m writing a musical that will take the form of a string of short films which collectively tell a narrative whole. If I ever bloody get the time to finish it, there’s nothing to stop me grabbing my little handy-cam and a couple of actor mates and filming a few YouTube tests, is there? If the storytelling is good enough, it might take off, and if it’s not, then clearly I’d want to work on it some more until it is.

There are public spaces all over England where you can get performing licenses for not much money, and perform some new musical theatre. The London Underground is one such place: I see musicians all the time. How about a short Busking Musical with three characters? How about a Busking Soap Opera Musical for the regular business commuter to follow every day for five days?

Someone recently did Romeo & Juliet on Twitter. No matter how successful you think it was, it’s free and it was new writing. What about “Tweet Space!” the musical, featuring plot on Twitter and songs on MySpace?

I don’t know. It took me all of a few minutes to think of these. They are cheap or free. They don’t demand lots of writing. They have the potential to reach new audiences for something one might call music theatre, whatever that is.

If anyone would like to join us for our LIPA conference, we’re running a free session online, this Tuesday evening from 7-9pm. All you need to do is email Lydia Bates on l.bates@lipa.ac.uk and ask for the specific URL link for the session. It requires that you have Flash installed, but that’s it. Come and debate all of this with us live online!

Sandi Toksvig - free tickets!

2010-06-02T17:49:00.006Z

Free tickets for Playhouse Live!

THE TYPIST
by Rebecca Lenkiewicz

Riverside Studios, Hammersmith, London
Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday (June 3rd - 6th)
Curtain up @ 8.15pm, only 45 mins long

Call box office 0208 237 1111 and quote PLAYHOUSE LIVE or say you saw this on Twitter or on my blog, and you can book for free.

If you book for Friday night, there's a Q&A after the show with Sandi and the author, Rebecca Lenkiewicz, who was the first woman to have a play of hers performed in the National Theatre's Olivier.

Staring Gemma Jones as Mary Parks, an artist and photographer who has lost her sight. Wanting to transcribe her writings and thoughts, she employs a young Muslim boy, Fit, to type up her notes.

These short plays are in preview onstage before they go live on Sky Arts from next Wednesday. More info here

The Sharks

2010-05-04T05:54:00.003Z

I'm not a big sports fan, but I went to a San Jose Sharks ice hockey game the other day, and now I'm obsessed.

Which explains the colour scheme and the UK shark logo.

Not sure how long the obsession will last, but for now, it's excellent.

I am only writing one show

2010-03-10T18:44:00.004Z

I am only writing one show.

Not 'at a time'. Just now, and also forever (because forever is just made up of lots of now).

All the years I've been bemoaning the frustration of never getting through the whole process. "The show needs a workshop" I'd say, or a production, or a longer rehearsal time, or another production after a rewrite, or...

Something. The show has always needed a something-else in order for me to learn properly. In order for me to succeed.

But that's not true, see. Recently, instead of wishing and waiting for the something-else, I've been trying writing-in-the-now. So if it's a production for young people, and it has two weeks of rehearsals, and then it has three performances, that is what it is. And that is what we will aim for. And that is what it will be.

If there are suddenly no costumes, then it's a show without costumes. If we've had trouble finding a set, then it's a show set in front of whatever is behind it. Whatever happens is the right thing.

So today, just now, I saw Phelim McDermott's Facebook status, which just said 'ship'. In a comment, he expanded:

"Its all about shipping! There are no drafts.. just learn to ship! (Seth Godin)"

So I looked up Seth Godin, to see what this ship thing means, because I suddenly like the idea of there being no drafts. Because 'draft' implies that another draft is on the way, which implies that this draft is imperfect, which implies failure, which is crap.

Seth Godin has a blog.

On his blog, I read this:

"Genius is actually the eventual public recognition of dozens (or hundreds) of failed attempts at solving a problem. Sometimes we fail in public, often we fail in private, but people who are doing creative work are constantly failing."

It made me think, actually, if I'm writing in the now, no draft is a failure. No draft is a draft. Every step along the writing process, something happens: a friend looks it over, or we have a reading, or a workshop, and those are all valid occurrences in and off themselves.

They are also part of journey.

And with each show I write, I learn more about writing. And more about collaboration. And more about stories. And more, and more, and more.

Every show is the only show I am writing in the now, but every show owes something to every show before it, and I owe something to all the Jens who wrote those previous shows, and altogether we keep moving forwards: a big old ship ploughing through the waves.

So here I am, only writing one show, and it will keep developing and changing and growing, and I will keep sailing it forwards... because frankly, the momentum is such now that it would take many years to make it come to a complete stop, and even longer to turn it around.

The joy of this is: I'm not responsible for summoning up the power to create all that forward motion from nothing. It's there. I can't avoid it. It carries me forwards. I can affect it, I can be an active sailor, even the captain, but also a passenger on occasion.

But it's all one journey, isn't it?

I am only one person, I only exist here and now, and I am only writing one show.

(I still don't know what Seth Godin meant by 'ship'. Maybe Phelim will tell me...)

2010-02-10T23:57:00.001Z

If school had taught me how to

research

and then taught me how to

reason

and then shown me a little bit of many different things and told me I could choose what to explore

then

I would never have been expelled from three schools

and

I would still know the few things I did manage to learn at school

and

I would know an awful lot more besides.

Open Space

2010-02-05T18:33:00.004Z

This year's Devoted and Disgruntled run by Improbable was a slightly different experience for me than last year's. Which is perfect, and exactly how it should be.

In fact, I'm getting used to being surprised, and the gorgeous thing about that is this: it means I'm letting go.

Because, you know, being a control freak is fucking exhausting. It's fucking exhausting, and it doesn't do what I had intended it to do in the first place, which was to keep me safe. It just sort of gets in the way of me, which is pointless. Expending a lot of energy getting in my own way. Nuts.

So I didn't feel like calling a session, which was lovely. Then Phelim said something about sitting in the circle feeling passionately enough about something to take responsibility for that thing and call a session on it.

And I thought, shit, responsibility, that's a fucking awful word. That's about being in control... only it's not. I realised a while ago that in order to take responsibility for my writing, I had to hand it over to a bunch of actors and let go of it.

Really, honestly hand it over instead of just, you know, letting them hold it for a minute.

I had to hand it over in order to be able to respond to it. You can't see the big picture unless you take a step back.

I love knowing that. It takes all the heat off me. I get to choose when and where and how I join in. Suddenly, taking responsibility seems like a wonderful freedom.

So we had this great session on Response Ability, and I met some amazing people who taught me amazing things, but also felt like equals. Felt like they discovered something with me, too.

One of my students wrote in her journal that she had started the unit thinking she would be dealing with another demanding teacher, and instead she found an equal. It's the best thing anyone has ever said about my teaching, and it's the first of three things that happened recently that I will never forget.

In a funny way, it meant that she is my elder. Phelim started a conversation about elders, and I sort of half joined in but felt a bit like I was intruding. I didn't know that until now. Just knew that it felt uncomfortable.

I have so longed for guidance, I think, that I've always found the notion of elders to be a bit overwhelming. Something I want but can never quite have. Maybe something I shouldn't want as much as I do.

Did.

It seems a bit different now. I think I used to feel that wanting guidance was a bad thing: I should know it all by myself already, and if I don't then I'm an idiot.

But that's not true, is it? Not anymore. Now there is Response Ability, and there is freedom of choice to join in when you want, when it's right. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have, and if I'm a person who is there, then I am the right person to be there. The reason will present itself in its own good time, because whatever time anything happens is the right time for it to happen.

Suddenly, I am wildly free, creatively free, and open space reminds me of this. Secures this in me. Grounds me and makes me safe. Makes me valuable.

I realised, as I looked around the circle in the open space, that I was privileged to be in the room with those people, and that I was one of those people and therefore privileged to have myself too.

All of these things make me equal. Make me balanced.

So now I see elders as something else. Something equal, but more. Further ahead than me, maybe, but not higher up. Wiser, but not infallible. In fact, probably wiser for their ability to fail.

Ability to Fail! Look what I just found! That sounds like a skill, doesn't it? I love that. I want to work on my ability to fail. That's brilliant. I want to expand my ability to fail, so I can learn more, so I can try more things, so I can be more willing to fall down because I've done it enough that I know it like a friend.

That's an elder: someone who has fallen and survived one more time than me.

The second thing that happened recently that I will never forget was also something written in the journal of one of my students. She wrote: "It will all be alright in the end. And if it isn't, then it isn't the end."

And the third thing that happened recently that I will never forget is my discovery of the Ability to Fail.

I knew there would be three things. There are always three things.

I just didn't know what the third one was until now.

Trusted that it would appear when it was time.

open space = life

The Law Of Conservation of Matter

2009-07-14T10:37:00.002Z

My Facebook profile said: "Jenifer Toksvig has written that song. Done. Finished. (For now. Draft one. But, you know... done.)"

James Marler replied: "When is a song ever done? (and this is a serious question for Toksvig the kick-ass musical theatre professor type)"

The Law of Conservation of Matter also applies to stories, so:

- just as matter cannot be created or destroyed, but is simply rearranged and redistributed...

- so stories and songs are made through rearrangement and then they are redistributed to audiences...

- and the audiences are made up of people who have the potential to be emotionally rearranged by the stories and songs, which they might then redistribute in some way to others...

So in answer to your question, James:

A song is done when it has mattered.

Women writers

2009-06-25T09:54:00.002Z

This article made me consider a link with something I found when prepping my archetypes sessions. Which I'll write more about later. I just wanted to get this linked so I don't forget it.

D&D sparks

2009-03-05T08:35:00.002Z

Another lovely evening of being Devoted and Disgruntled last night. If you work in, or just enjoy going to, or never really thought about but now you come to mention it, theatre then you should attend at least one of these D&D sessions.

And if you live abroad so you can't make it to London, join the 'ning' by clicking on the link above, and you can participate via message boards, blogs and chatroom online. There's a fast-growing community of UK theatre folk on there already - some incredible people, from performance poets to aerial artists to directors, actors, writers to drama school teachers to critics to photographers and on and on. Brilliant. Come and join us.

We were discussing ways in which the web can play more of a part, actually. At the big D&D events, I'm all for a live twitter feed where people can jot down thoughts and ideas and inspirations as they go, so we get a constantly scrolling screen of creativity, a catherine wheel of sparks coming out of the room, live. And those who can't be with us in the room could follow it and join in.

I want it up on a big screen in the room itself, but some people might find that distracting. I don't know. I think if you don't want to watch it, you don't watch it. But it might be like having a big TV in the room: really tempting to just sit there and watch it scroll by. On the other hand, external contributions could be made to specific topics currently being discussed.

I'm torn between a love of web 2.0 and my techno-geekiness, and the joy of actually being face to face with all these wonderful people in a big room, away from the keyboard. But we could at least have someone on a computer, twittering our thoughts for us and posting other people's responses so they can be added to the main record of the event.

We also talked about how things get actioned after a D&D event. Or if they get actioned at all. The thing is, the same principles and law of Open Space Technology apply outside the room, since they're not actually rules that someone made up, they're just observations of natural behaviour that are not only made permissable but actively shape and enable the process.

They are:

1. Whoever comes is the right people
2. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have
3. Whenever it starts is the right time
4. When it's over, it's over

and 5. The Law of Two Feet: if at any time you find yourself neither learning nor contributing, use your two feet, go somewhere else where you might learn and contribute.

I had an explosion of activity after the major D&D event this year, none of which actively involved anyone else from D&D, but hopefully my flurry of activity will affect other people, and they might come to a D&D, and so on. So, after the event, whoever is affected is the right people, and whatever action happens is the only action that could have happened, and however long that action goes on is the right time, and if nothing happens, it's right that nothing happens. People just used The Law of Two Feet, and so they should, because if nothing else at least they were propelled to move on somewhere else.

I'm a big fan of participatory evaluation. It's my new Thing. I wish we could do a little more of that, so we have a record of a sort, like the live twitter feed, that shows how many sparks fly off the creative friction at a D&D event, and how many fires are lit by those sparks...

Spring Flowers

2009-02-20T22:23:00.002Z

These are spring flowers, in the hope that spring she is a-coming in.

But putting them on my website is probably not a good idea, so I'll just keep them here and on Twitter.

Definitely need some spring on my website, though. It's still showing Christmassy colours, and that's done for now.

(These are the ways in which I avoid writing.)

My Birthday

2009-02-17T09:16:00.003Z

Right. It's my birthday soon. People keep asking me, so here are some things I'd like:

I have an amazon wishlist which contains DVDs, books and games.

I also have a favourites list at Etsy, where people sell handmade items. (If you're looking at the copper bracelet, I'm already talking to the person who makes them, about having one made with the alphabet on. So you could just refer to the correspondence she's having with BessieBlue.)

But if you'd rather use your imagination, then here are some helpful guidelines:

Colours: chocolates, vanillas, raspberries, plums, purples, lilacs, blues, turquoises, aquas. Greens are also good if they're muted not bright, and yellow is good in roses.

Flowers: yellow roses are my favourite. Also fond of fruit, and always happy to receive that as a gift.

Fresh fruits: apples (russets, braeburns, cox's are the best), pineapple, mango, bananas, sharon, cherries, blueberries.

Metals: always silver, never gold except in very occasional circumstance, and usually old gold. Certainly never bright gold. Copper bracelets are good - best if engraved, or elaborate, or silver-plated on top.

Materials: pref wood, then glass (if coloured, blue or green is good), then stone, then paper. Rarely metal unless jewellery, see above.

General: If it's paper to write on - blank, not lined. If it's ink - black, not blue. If it's fabric to wear - soft to the touch. If it's a bag of some kind - long shoulder strap so I can wear it over my head and shoulder, where it's least bad for my back. If it's shoes - size 5 (38). If it's clothing that needs a size, please don't buy it, I'm still losing weight.

I also love anything nautical, most folk music, and things that don't take up space like donations to charities that support British wildlife, woodland and waterways. (I'm already a member of the Waterways Trust, but you could still make a donation.)

If you don't like those, I also like the Landmark Trust and, because of Dad, donations to the British Heart Foundation are always welcome. Finally, in Terry Pratchett's name, please make a donation to the Alzheimer's Research Trust.

But best of all, just drop me an email or something, and don't buy me a gift. I don't have room for any more stuff, but I always have room for the good wishes of friends.

Ten Minute Musicals

2009-02-15T16:56:00.002Z

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.

Educating Writers

2009-02-15T16:43:00.003Z

I have to do it. I have to write about the education of writers, because we don't have it in the UK yet.

Don't get me wrong, there are people making a real effort to provide for new musical theatre in the UK. Here's what we have, to my knowledge:

Mercury Musical Developments
Craft Seminars

I teach one-off sessions for them quite a lot, as do other people, but they are one-off sessions. They're often poorly attended because not everyone lives within reach of London, and because a lot of people who want to write new musicals don't know that there are things they need to know. I mean, they don't know why they need to know them. Or they think they already know them. So they don't go.

Besides, a one-off session is easy to miss due to having dinner with a mate, or the footie being on, or the rain. A whole course of sessions, much harder to miss for the same sort of reasons. You have to actively say that you do not want to go on a course of Musical Writing 101, and for that you need much more of a reason if it really is something you want to do.

MMD is not at fault for this. They just don't have the money to do anything else right now. But they listen. They do listen. They let me go to board meetings and they agree that teaching craft is really important, and they thank me for my enthusiasm and they try very, very hard to find the money for a full course.

I love them, but they don't have the answer right now.

Goldsmiths College, London
MA in Musical Theatre

They run a musical theatre course that splits into two strands: producing and writing. The producing side is currently lead by the lovely Chris Grady (who does other things to support new musicals, see below). The writing side is currently lead by the lovely Julian Woolford and his writing partner, Richard John.

As far as I understand it, the course is either one-year full-time or two-year part-time. I'm not sure if writers are lead through any craft 101 classes, but I suspect not much of that goes on because there isn't time, and they don't have the resources.

The whole course is overseen by Robert Gordon, a delightfully warm and enthusiastic supporter of new musicals whom I met for the first time the other day, to talk about this very thing. He would, if he could, set up a whole institute for the study of the writing of new musicals. That's what he's trying to do, in fact, but he's struggling to find the funding even for a summer school, let alone a full-on institute.

Speaking of summer schools;

Theatre Royal Stratford East
Musical theatre writing summer school

Under the guidance of Philip Hedley, a summer school has been run for many years to encourage and facilitate the creation of new musical theatre that features contemporary themes and contemporary music.

Assisted by two of the finest musical theatre writing guides in the world, Robert Lee and Fred Carl from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, this course has resulted in material that has gone on to have a professional future, and substantially enhanced the catalogue of British Musical Theatre, going a long way towards shaping what British Musical Theatre could be.

But not far enough. Because it's a summer school, and there's only so much you can do. And because they have funding that I presume is tied to various hoops through which they must jump. It's certainly my understanding that not everyone with any kind of work would be eligible to join the course.

Chris Grady Dot Org
Month of Sundays

The lovely Chris Grady - he's a friend, can you tell? - runs a course of classes that happen on consecutive Sundays (and one Saturday) across a month. I've lead one of those sessions, twice now, and whilst you can get some stuff done in one day, it's just not enough time to properly address Craft 101. With time limitation, you have to do much more telling than showing, which is just not good guidance for creatives.

Again, Chris would do more if he had more money. He's constantly trying to do more, even as I write. But he needs funding.

And of course, understandably, no-one shares. Everyone has a little tiny pot of funding, and either they won't pool it for fear of losing it entirely, or (more likely) they can't pool it because it's been given to them, and them alone, and they already had to jump through however many hoops to qualify for it in the first place.

To my knowledge, no-one has ever said, "Here's some money that is specifically for guiding writers and composers in the study and development of the craft of writing musical theatre, the discovery and development of their individual own artistic voices, and the exploration and development of British Musical Theatre."

But that's what they've done at NYU, with American Musical Theatre. It's exactly what they've done. And not only has some global commercially successful musical theatre come out of it (the book of 'Wicked', for example) but also - and frankly, more importantly - hundreds of artists have not only developed their artistic voices, but also found out more about who they are as people, and how they fit into their families, their friends, their communities. (Even their countries, if you want to get all American about it.)

They've become more accurate and confident communicators, more generous and willing collaborators, and they are now more open to, and more likely to, and more able to incorporate creativity into everything they do. In and of itself, new musicals aside, that is a great achievement for the NYU program. An amazing achievement.

So British writers can do what I did, and go to NYU, and study the craft. Except they'll be studying in an atmosphere of AMERICAN Musical Theatre. Not British. They'll be studying at the Mecca of American Musical Theatre, in New York, the home of Broadway, and in the company of American writers and American guides.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. I love American musicals, and I loved my time there, but there are British writers - hundreds of them! - who would love to be writing new material for British Musical Theatre.

And it doesn't exist.

I know, Stratford can point to shows it has nurtured, and rightly so. That is British Musical Theatre, but it's localised, and it's not widely publicised, and it's one venue, one show at a time. What we need is a change in attitude towards new musicals - hells, a change in attitude towards musicals generally would help.

Andrew Lloyd-Webber has helped. No, come on, he has. The fact that the musical theatre reality TV shows have been so very popular has really helped the genre.

But new musicals?

There are companies offering opportunities for the staging of new work, in many ways. MMD offers readings and workshop opportunities. Chris Grady runs the George Street festival of musicals in Edinburgh. There are all kinds of smaller companies offering writers the chance to put their work up on its feet. Which is great. It really is.

Except for two things. First, it's almost impossible for those producers to find work that is sufficiently competent in terms of writing craft, because no-one teaches the craft to any degree of usefulness in the UK. And second, the writers have to be left to their own devices in the actual presentation of the work, because said producers can't raise enough money to pay for professional actors, directors and so on, so the writers are given an empty space and a time slot, maybe some lights, and some publicity, and that's it.

That's not it. I mean, that's great. But the writers are busy directing their own work - which they don't know how to do, even though it is possible, but it's a skill, and it can be taught! I can teach it! Except no-one is offering me much opportunity to teach it, other than one-off sessions, which really isn't enough time to guide people to understand the process for themselves so they can put it into practice without a guide being present when they go through the process themselves.

They never have a guide present. So from whom are they learning? How do they know what you can learn from a reading, from a workshop, if they have no writer with more experience to help them? Or give them a director with experience of helping a writer develop their work. Which is a skill, a different skill for a director than directing an existing text. It involves some dramaturgy. And where are the dramaturgs?! Again, a different way to learn, but just as powerful a guide in the writing process as another writer, or a director.

You just need someone who knows more about the process of developing new writing than you do. Someone who knows what the writing process is about. Someone who can bring some objectivity to it for you. Otherwise you can have all the readings and workshops you like, and you'll never grow.

It's not your fault. You just don't know what you're doing.

I didn't know what I was doing when I was given the opportunity to work with a bunch of drama students for an afternoon. But I very much wanted them to get something out of the process, and to know how much I appreciated what they could give me, and then I had to figure out WHAT they could give me, and what I could give them, and the more I thought about the process itself, the more I discovered about my own writing, and about the creative process of actor-and-character, and about collaborative theatre as a whole.

And I could share that. Given writers, given a space, given some time.

We could teach the craft! Lyrics 101 - what is AABA, how does it work, what can it achieve as a dramatic songwriting tool? Book 101 - how do your choices about the revelation of information affect the audience's emotional experience of a story? Music 101 - what is prosody, how does it work, and what can you do with it to tell a story?

We could guide people in the process of collaboration! We could enable people to hear and give constructive critique in order to benefit their own work and the work of other writers! (And to save their souls from the damnation of self-criticism!)

We could help people find and develop their own creative voices! Not voices they copy from America, or from the past, but voices that are truthful, from the town they live in and the people they know. From the fish & chips and the loving of the underdog, to the stone-clad beaches that you can't sit on, and the writing of a stern letter to your MP. From the green and pleasant to the dark satanic.

There are currently several British writers on the NYU course, and one of them told me that she wasn't sure whether to stay in America after graduation, or come back to England. Which would be better, in terms of musical theatre writing? I despaired, because I know what the sensible answer is: stay there. There's more opportunity. More support. More of a foundation.

But I said - come home. Your voice doesn't come from there, it comes from here. It can't echo there, but it will echo here. You speak this language, your heart beats this rhythm, your voice sings to England. Come home.

And I thought, well, everyone else is trying to raise funding, jumping through hoops by talking about broadening the industry by offering more opportunities of exposure for new work, but the new work has no guide and the writers have no guide, and all we're doing is filling the market with work that's too raw and confused and directionless.

They're all working really hard, but no-one is filling in the foundation. No-one who is a writer is helping writers full-time because nowhere is letting us do that.

So I don't have a choice now. It has to be me, and it has to be soon, and I don't care who it is or where it is or how it is, I need three things in my life:

- To eat
- To have shelter
- To guide

So I'm going to get a job. In a bookshop. In a library. As a researcher. I don't care. And while I'm doing that job, I'm going to be there for writers of musicals. So come home to me. And to everyone else who is trying to make things happen for you, but since there's no foundation for writing, no home for the craft of writing itself, no safe place prior to the audience getting their emotions into it... I will be that home.

I will make sure that you have a home to come to.

PS: This is not a new idea. I proudly inherit this role of being the British home of musical theatre writing from George Stiles. When I got back to Blighty after NYU, I was desperately alone and lonely, so I managed to get George's number through a friend of a friend, and I called him.

"Hello." I said. "You don't know me, but my name is Jen and I write musicals. I just got back from NY and I'm amazingly lonely. Please would you be my friend?"

And he said yes. But George is a bit busy these days, and although I know he absolutely is the friend of everyone who writes musicals, he also has a career to pursue that is frankly more successful and time-consuming than mine. So drop me an email and I'll send you my phone number and be your friend, in lieu of George Stiles. (I'm not quite as talented or lovely, but I'll do my best.)

The Social Value of Art, in Two Words

2009-02-10T21:43:00.002Z

This is most of a post I wrote on the GMTWP digest, in response to something written by Joel Derfner. (Who is a beautiful writer, and a gorgeous person, and whom I thank for sparking thoughts in me.)

I don't see myself having a responsibility as a writer. Not in those terms. I see myself just BEING a writer. It's sort of hard to explain. I am one. I can't be anything else. Even during long periods of not writing a word, I'm a writer. I never wanted to be one. I mean, I never planned it. I just am.

Mind you, BECAUSE of the fact that I am one, I do have some responsibilities. I'm responsible for the work. No, I'm the caretaker... no, the conduit. I have the opportunity to be responsible for opening up and letting stories flow through me and onto the page. I don't HAVE to do it, but I have the ability to do it, and I can take responsibility for that ability.

If I do, that means letting the story come out as it chooses to, not as I think it should. Oddly, in being a writer of fiction, I have a responsibility to reality. If it doesn't have the ring of real to it, it becomes inaccessible, and if I'm choosing to act as conduit to the page, then I'm choosing to act as conduit through which the performers can connect with the audience, and vice versa.

So for me, the key thing is to remain open. I sort of do a class on this, too. Someone asked me to run a session called "The Art of Storytelling", and he actually offered to pay me a little money for those few hours, so I agreed before I'd even THOUGHT about it, and then I had to bloody think about it.

I tried to make it as simple as possible, mostly for my own benefit, so I could figure out what I wanted to say. Also, I tried to make it all factual rather than my own personal interpretation. (I knew I would fail, but it was a helpful simplifying tool because I'm looking for something more universal.) Here it is in brief:

I think stories exist in three forms:

a story told
a story heard
a story known

Actually, that's a circle rather than a list. Any of them can come first: you hear a story, you know it, you tell it. You make up a story in your head which you now know and can tell to someone else, who hears it. And so on. But I'm working in the order of that list for now.

The first one, a story told, is told for a reason. The sharing of a story might be for moral reasons, to try and make the world (or one person's life) a better place. It might be for self-confirmation, like he-said-she-said stories over coffee. Whatever the reason, there's usually an emotional desire driving it: the way the emotion is expressed is in the telling of the story.

I'm choosing to call that confession, for now. An emotion is confessed into a space that is created between story-teller and story-listener by the story itself.

The story then becomes a story heard, by the listener, who must have a reason for listening if they are, in fact, listening. That reason is based on a connection they want to make, with the story-teller, or with the story, which is (I think) usually based on some kind of emotion.

So I'm choosing to call that the connection stage.

Now the listener knows the story. They made an emotional connection with it (and/or with the teller) and they now have some knowledge, a story, a tool that they didn't have before. I call it a tool because the confession was emotionally driven, the story rode out on emotion, the connection was emotionally driven, the story rode in on emotion, and therefore catharsis is taking place.

Regardless of whether we're aware of it or not, even loathing the story is an emotional catharsis of some kind. It's unavoidable if you chose to listen to something.

So here's the journey of storytelling, for me: confession, connection, catharsis.

I should say that I think it is possible to stand there while someone tells you a story, and not actually hear a single word of it. In fact, another thing that appears to be true is that you can best hear yourself. Or rather, you can only hear yourself in any story. It may be that your way in is obscure, but without a connection to yourself, I suggest that you have no way into a story and therefore won't listen.

And it seems to me that in order to be a storyteller, you should be aware of how listening works. (Hence my wish to be aware of how learning works in order to understand teaching.)

So I told the Art Of Storytelling class that it seems to me that, AABA aside, The Rules Of Writing has two misleading words: Rules and Writing. I think it's more like The Rules Of Hearing, or rather, The Habits Of Hearing.

Because, I realise now as I write this, never mind responsibility, I don't think it's my ABILITY to change people. I don't think I can teach anything, but I can open up a space for other people to access if they want.

I can make a confession. It will help me. I'll feel lighter.

It might help others because I went first.

Most of all, though, when someone tells you how THEY feel about something, if you recognise that feeling, you feel... heard.

So I don't think I should have asked what art is. I think I should have asked what art DOES.

It listens.

Language

2009-02-10T21:41:00.003Z

This comes from the idea of freedom and I wrote it while I was watching Obama’s inaugural speech.

Art is compassion
Art is generosity
Art is listening
Art will listen to you
Art is personal - it’s about you (because you are the one connecting with it)
We all need to talk in times of fear
We all need to talk in times of joy
We need to talk and we need to be heard
We need to be understood and made to feel welcome with our emotions, no matter how irrational we fear they may be
We need to feel that we are not alone

Art doesn’t give you choice, it gives you the freedom to choose.
Art doesn’t give you freedom of expression, it gives you the freedom to express.

This, finally, links into something that might be a language to describe the social value of the arts.

Peter Hall’s Diaries: the social value of the arts

2009-02-10T21:29:00.004Z

This section is about the social value of the arts.

In a foreword that was added to his published diaries in 1999, Sir Peter Hall says:

“The eternal question returns like a nightmare: why should we pay for the arts?”

He answers thus:

“Because art can keep our society healthy…”

HOW?

“… what is a minority today becomes the majority position of tomorrow.”

HUH?

“In the seventies… Art was as important as education.”

WHY?

“People without children paid taxes to provide money to educate other people’s children.”

GOOD POINT, BUT NOT AN ANSWER.

“If we don’t subsidise the arts, we shall not have them.”

WE ALL WORK FOR NOTHING, PETER.

“And we shall lack the questioning which nurtures and cherishes the very soul of our country. This is the function of art.”

QUESTIONING?

“A mature democracy should have the courage to pay its artists to criticise it.”

POLITICAL PURPOSE?

I’m not denying that art has that important function – but is it an ability rather than a function?

I’m sure a grassroots movement would rise up in support of such protest if we were in that kind of era, or we thought the freedom to criticise government through art might be being stifled. But that’s about freedom, not about art.

It feels wrong for the ‘now’. We don’t protest through artists now. We rise up and do it ourselves.

And we can all be artists these days. That’s the internet for you.

So I say that art and our connection to it has become more personal. We have the ability, and therefore feel we have the right, to more access.

We can take part.

We can make art.

So we look for – freedom.

Not guidance from artists criticizing government. Freedom to criticise government all by ourselves, using art or not, as we please.

Peter says:

“The market cannot take risks on innovative art. Yet art is not fulfilling its social function unless it is innovative.”

SO WHAT IS THE FUNCTION, PETER?

“Mozart and Van Gogh had limited success in their lifetime. If they had been subsidised, they would perhaps have lived longer, and left more art to guide us.”

TO GUIDE US
ART GUIDES US

(Must read more of The Uses of Enchantment)

Peter says:

“…bland art neither stimulates, nor entertains, nor does it help us understand how to live.”

HELP US UNDERSTAND HOW TO LIVE...

This leads on to the new post about Confession, Connection, Catharsis, which is a sort of conclusion, and a sort of answer to the search for a language to describe the social value of the arts.

There are other sections prompted by the intro to Peter Hall's Diaries:

- a section about ‘high-brow’ and ‘low-brow’.

- a section about the appeal of the ‘old’ arts to the young.

- a section about freedom.

- a section that links into teaching the craft.

Peter Hall’s Diaries: teaching the craft

2009-02-10T21:19:00.002Z

This section links into teaching the craft.

We shouldn’t be teaching the craft. We should be learning it. Critical difference: the second one uses open space technology.

In a foreword that was added to his published diaries in 1999, Sir Peter Hall says:

“All innovative work throughout theatre history has been done by companies. Companies mean cohesion, a shared style, developments that came from failures as well as from successes.”

This links into the talk we had at D&D4 about how to train an actor. Someone said that one of the great benefits of drama school is that you get that rare and wonderful opportunity to be part of an acting troupe within your year, and you stay with them throughout, which offers you unique opportunities for learning.

Should a musical theatre writing course be linked to a performance course? I tend to say no, because one needs experience in order to guide the other. Drama students are guided by the text of the established plays and musical they do. There are reasons why those works were successful, and they can learn from what’s on the page.

Likewise, writers learn from professional actors who have instincts that they may not be able to explain, but that’s why you have a director. Not to come between writer and actor, but to facilitate the process more objectively than either of those can.

Except I think in a company, everyone should be so familiar with what everyone else does that it all merges into one.

So a musical theatre writing course should have access to a company of actors. The same company. The same director? Maybe a small pool of directors, one who prefers trad book musicals, one who likes rock opera, one for comedy. I don’t know. Just three different ones, who can also work together to guide the whole group.

And designers. The same designers too.

And they should all be involved, from day one. A company, period. When you learn about AABA, you do it in the room with your actors, so everyone learns how it works, what it does, how it feels to perform, how it feels to write.

Peter Hall goes on to say:

“But here’s the paradox: in order to justify their resources, both the RSC and the National have had to grow too big. The organisations could only have the necessary facilities by being large – but they are now too large for an intimate theatre company to thrive in.”

This is the perfect argument for the course being at a university, which already has all those facilities at its disposal.

He goes on to say:

“The British support institutions, never individual artists. And institutions are judged on quantity, not quality.”

But in this way, a university could say, “And we’ve also got a musical theatre writing course to add to our list of cool course, and we’re the only people in Europe who have got that!”

It becomes judge-able in that quantity way.

But intimacy within the course itself, within the company, is very important for a shared sense of safety and therefore freedom.

Look, see, Peter says it himself:

“I had that same sense of freedom and support…”

I have a bazillion other thoughts about the teaching of the craft, some of which are in my latest confession, connection, catharsis post.

There are other sections prompted by the intro to Peter Hall's Diaries:

- a section about ‘high-brow’ and ‘low-brow’.

- a section about the appeal of the ‘old’ arts to the young.

- a section about freedom.

- a section about the social value of the arts.

Peter Hall’s Diaries: freedom

2009-02-10T21:17:00.002Z

This section is about freedom.

In a foreword that was added to his published diaries in 1999, Sir Peter Hall says:

“Entertainment should aspire as well as amuse. Art should provoke as well as celebrate, disturb as well as reassure. If it is original, it is likely at first sight to be elitist. Popular art can be vigorous art, and original, but it is less likely to be so if its popularity is contrived by marketing budgets and hype.”

This links into the idea that freedom of choice and freedom of expression are not freedom at all.

Art should allow you to be free to emote. Otherwise it doesn’t satisfy that genuine need in you. But we probably don’t realise this, because we’re so used to the idea that marketing = freedom.

There are other sections prompted by the intro to Peter Hall's Diaries:

- a section about ‘high-brow’ and ‘low-brow’.

- a section about the appeal of the ‘old’ arts to the young.

- a section that links into teaching the craft.

- a section about the social value of the arts.

Peter Hall’s Diaries: the appeal of the 'old' arts

2009-02-10T21:15:00.002Z

This section is about the appeal of the ‘old’ arts to the young.

In a foreword that was added to his published diaries in 1999, Sir Peter Hall says:

“New Labour clearly also hates the old performing arts – theatre classical music, dance. Well, perhaps ‘hate’ is too strong a word: they are frightened of them – which is worse.

“I suppose they would say that they have no ready appeal to the young (wrong) and that they therefore merit little political attention (wrong again). Certainly, they are under-nourished and under-encouraged, when they could be the cornerstone of an educational renaissance.”

And…

“All television stations are now, as they constantly state, rules by the ratings.”

But that’s change, Peter! That’s the new grassroots future. So what do we do to get the grassroots wanting theatre? Wanting classical plays?

Everyone still wants stories.

(Maybe they just don’t realise that?)

There are other sections prompted by the intro to Peter Hall's Diaries:

- a section about ‘high-brow’ and ‘low-brow’.

- a section about freedom.

- a section that links into teaching the craft.

- a section about the social value of the arts.

Peter Hall’s Diaries: high-brow and low-brow

2009-02-10T21:04:00.004Z

This sort of leads on from everything, but links with life no longer being linear and also with my search for a language to describe the social value of the arts.

This section is about ‘high-brow’ and ‘low-brow’.

In a foreword that was added to his published diaries in 1999, Sir Peter Hall says:

“If I had continued to keep the diaries during the eighties and nineties, the scene would have become darker and darker, as I recorded missed opportunities, philistinism endorsed, or politicians uninterested in the arts because they can see no votes in them. Stupidity has now become confused with egalitarianism, and elitism with proper standards.

“Governments now dare not support the arts for fear of appearing high-brow. England is still the only European country where ‘intellectual’ is a term of abuse.”

This high-brow thing: there is a way to appreciate art without accessing it emotionally. (And it’s called Being British.)

We see low-brow as good because it’s real. But panto is low-brow, and it’s seen as good, and it is real: real storytelling. Proper old fairy tales, good vs evil and all that. I mean, for fuck’s sake, isn’t that what Shakespeare was doing? Adapting old tales for a new audience who wanted to boo the villain and cheer the hero?

This low-brow thing can just mean accessible, but accessible doesn’t get funded.

We must start teaching craft. To make work accessible. But this would happen in a theatre company without the need to fund teaching.

What if we had a company of actors, the same ones, and the same small group of directors, and we chose some writers to write ten minute pieces, and we made that be a company for a season?

Peter: “And the concern [about the arts] seems always to be popularity – not creativity.”

But if you teach craft, creativity becomes accessible, which makes it popular.

There are other sections prompted by the intro to Peter Hall's Diaries:

- a section about the appeal of the ‘old’ arts to the young.

- a section about freedom.

- a section that links into teaching the craft.

- a section about the social value of the arts.

Not a Conclusion

2009-02-10T21:01:00.002Z

This follows on from.… everything, and is also a beginning.

Here’s why I’m blogging this, even though I don’t think I’ve exactly found a language with which to illustrate the social value of theatre. (Because frankly, I don’t really want the responsibility of that.)

But I noticed some stuff. Look! And I’m going to blog it randomly, I think, in sections, because it’s a bumblebee of things I’ve noticed, all jumbled together and making some sort of picture… but I suspect, I hope, that the picture will be different for everyone.

So use the Law of Two Feet and hop around the various bits. If any of it mirrors something for you, that’s brilliant! Please take it away and use it! Make it bigger, make it better, make it turn into something else, grow it.

Because if my only skill is to give freedom to others, then I have done a great thing in life.

After this post, I started reading Peter Hall's Diaries, which prompted more thinking.

Stage Directions

2009-02-10T20:59:00.003Z

This follows on from being unlimited.

Lee Simpson and I had a conversation about stage directions. I fucking love that I can have a conversation with someone about stage directions. Hells, I’ve blogged about stage directions.

We agreed that as writers putting down an initial draft, we have stage directions. We just have them, because they just exist. They are inherent to the action we’re transcribing, and we need them as the threads that hold it all together.

At a later date, we then have to be part of the group that studiously ignores the stage directions, because that’s right. Because that’s the process: it’s our job to put them in and then our job to ignore them. Both.

That’s what collaboration is: the cutting of the threads. It’s freedom.

This isn’t just a way of doing theatre. It’s what theatre is. It just is, inherently. It can’t help itself. Like the guidelines of Open Space Technology, which are just what happens.

And that’s why he had to give it away. All Harrison Owen did was realise what it is, and point to it. He didn’t really discover it so much as notice it and point it out to other people. I mean, you do, don’t you? You notice something, you point it out.

(So look, look! Look at those people on the tube with the headphones on! They’re not going to Bethnal Green, or to Chancery Lane. They’re going to freedom for a while. How cool is that?)

This leads onto something that isn’t a conclusion.

Unlimited

2009-02-10T20:56:00.002Z

This follows on from the mirror thing; the fact that you must have need of a mirror in order to choose to look into it.

So back to finding a language with which to express the social value of the arts: it should be collective, this language. Like storytelling, it should be collective, but in a way that serves everyone, anyone. The pop music way, the Barack Obama way, the open space way.

A way to say that ‘freedom of expression’ isn’t what it seems to be: there is responsibility there too. As we talked about at another D&D4 session, on putting some of the spirit of the 60s back into theatre: you can’t be an anarchist unless you’re prepared to accept the consequences of your anarchy and take on responsibility for your actions.

‘Freedom of choice’ isn’t what it seems, either. It comes with marketing attacks on our time and space, and manipulation…

Manipulated emotions

… where all we really want to be

… is free to feel.

This is what hit Phelim in the heart when I asked him what he gets out of organising D&D. It reminds him, he said, of who he is. Of what he does, and why.

By doing Devoted & Disgruntled, he gets to give people freedom, which unlimits them.

By working with writers and actors, I get to give people freedom, which unlimits them.

By being a storyteller, I get to give people freedom, which unlimits them.

We do this because we have, at some point and in some way, wanted freedom and felt limited. Even felt unentitled to it, like we didn’t have the right.

Me, I mean. I felt – I feel, sometimes, often, like I don’t have the right to be unlimited.

This leads onto stage directions.

Having the Need

2009-02-10T20:52:00.003Z

This is more on the subject of freedom, and follows on from thoughts of sharing…

When I was figuring out how to enable actors to work with new material, how to give them the freedom, trying to understand their process, and vice versa, figuring out how to give writers the freedom, help actors understand their process, I knew that I was the person in the room who had to be responsible for creating the open space, because I was responsible for initially bringing the material to the space.

I knew that I had to maintain some responsibility, because the actors were going to offer me freedom of choice if I gave them freedom of expression. And ‘responsibility’ is a really good way to look at it, because I need to step back from my work and invite other people into it if I want to be able to respond to it. Response-able.

The audience must be response-able.

Freedom.

But the freedom to make an emotional connection can only be applied – or used – when there is a need for an emotional connection.

When an emotion in me sees its mirror image in a story, I engage with that story because it can serve a cathartic need in me. That’s why everyone in the audience watching the same show will connect to it in a slightly different way, and that’s why not everyone is drawn to every story.

That’s also why the same pop song should, if successful, work at a birth, wedding or funeral. (This, from Steven Sater at an MMD seminar, who was told it by someone in the pop industry.) That’s the thing about pop songs: the music must mirror the sine wave that emotion travels, and the lyric must leave enough open space that it can mirror any emotion following that path.

And that’s the thing about traditional musical theatre lyrics: the lyrics illustrate a specific point on the sine wave, in detail more specific than in pop. And folk songs tell a whole story…

We all differ, but our aim is the same: to be a mirror. And the mirror can only do its thing if someone has a need to look in it.

So the language I’m looking for, to illustrate the social value of the arts, must articulate the potential value of a mirror. It must be clear that even if you’ve managed perfectly well so far without it, if you looked in it, you might gain something.

This leads into the notion of being unlimited.

Confession, Connection, Catharsis

2009-02-10T20:01:00.005Z

This follows on from the tube, which was more stuff about freedom.

There’s another interesting thing that clicked in my head because of the Open Space Technology at D&D4.

The four guidelines are effectively stating what will happen anyway. All they do is take away any fear or guilt about the natural progression of things, but that is perhaps the most important thing to do.

When someone connects with a story, in whatever art form, they open themselves up to it: we walk into the theatre, sit down in front of the TV, open the book, listen to the story and allow ourselves to look inside.

… inside the story, and inside ourselves, because a story with which we make an emotional connection acts like a mirror. It creates a safe space within which to see emotions. It’s like having company for your emotions. As I blogged a while back:

For the audience, good writing is all about three things: confession, connection, catharsis.

I wrote a post on this today, for the forum of the Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program at NYU. I'll cross-post it here because I explained it much better in that post than I did in this one.

Basically it goes like this: emotions are 'confessed' into the space by the characters. If they recognise that 'confession', the audience connects with that emotion. By joining the character's journey through that emotion, the audience finds some catharsis for that emotion within themselves.

I think that the “what happened next?” device inside us kicks the door open so we can let the emotions out. However it works, that’s what it does: it shows us a mirror image of us. They say that misery loves company, but so does love, so does anger, so does joy. That’s why it’s better to see something thrilling with someone else. To share a loving moment. To shout at someone who shouts back!

Here's more on Connection, Confession and Catharsis, and it leads into what I think art is, which is what I've been trying to discover all along.

Also, this thing about sharing leads onto having the need for freedom.

Tube to Bethnal Green

2009-02-10T19:58:00.002Z

This follows on from the idea that what makes a grassroots movement form itself together is story.

At D&D4, I said that I would go away and think about a language with which to express the social value of the arts, and story is the key, I think. Which is lucky, really, because that’s what the arts does best: tells stories.

And not just bits of the arts, either. Everything from theatre to TV and film, literature, painting, sculpture, dance, poetry; traditional art forms and new art forms, ‘high-brow art’ and ‘low-brow’ art; accessible and obscure, historical and contemporary, political and pornographic.

We all tell stories, or conjure up stories in the imaginations of our audiences. We all make an emotional connection with the audience member.

Our skill, our great and universal gift, is to give the audience freedom: the freedom to join in, the freedom to feel, to have catharsis, to experience.

That is the social value of the arts, and the social cost of cutting funding for the arts is that we’d be taking away the escape pod.

On my way to Bethnal Green to attend D&D, I wondered at the reason why so many people were heading out that way. Were they all going to D&D? Surely not.

(Then they all got off at Chancery Lane and I thought, shit, right, everything in life is not about where I’m going. And also, the City exists between the West End and the theatre event I was attending, but clearly isn’t important enough to exist for me as a possible final destination. Lee Simpson laughed with me about this, and it was nice to have company when laughing at myself.)

Anyway, while I was on the tube, I was watching people – who were going to work in the City on finance and stuff like that – listening to music. Tons of them, headphones on, lost in music.

Their own choice of music, yes. They did have to go through the process of choosing, but the work of artists was giving them the open space, the freedom to make an emotional connection. Right there in front of me, on the tube!

I’d never seen it that way before, even though I see someone wearing headphones all the time. It reminded me of a moment I had once in Waterloo station, where I just stopped walking and looked at all the people walking past me, people on their way to something, doing something, and for a few seconds I saw them as people feeling something. Not people with purpose or motion in a train station, but people with feelings, living.

This leads onto my initial post about confession, connection and catharsis, with is about sharing, and also about freedom.

Grassroots

2009-02-10T19:51:00.002Z

This follows on from my standing up and being counted when I voted for Obama, and is also connected to the notion that society may not need a figurehead these days.

Although when I stood up and was counted as part of a grassroots movement for Obama, I was standing up for a figurehead. But that’s not so complex, really. I wasn’t actually voting for Obama. I was voting for a message.

There’s a social value right here, in Grassroots City. Any collective – a group, an organisation, a crowd, an audience – has that kind of grassroots power because they go through a grassroots experience together.

And a grassroots experience is anything that gives people a shared story. That’s what brings a collective identity into being:

a story

The story of what it means to Be An American or Change America. Or, in the corporate world, the story of what it means to Work For Starbucks: as a ‘colleague’ not an employee; you get a different character name, and it turns you into someone else.

It’s all about how you self-identify, and that was once about how other people identified you, but now it’s about the potential other people see in you, which gives you the freedom to be those things if you so choose.

Obama found the language of potential and he used it to describe politics (which is the thing we were voting for) but most critically, he used it to describe me (or rather, the person I could be, depending on how I voted).

Back to finding a language to illustrate the social value of the arts.

Could corporate language be used to illustrate the social value of the arts? It already is. Andy Burnham himself did it in a speech that appeared to be very supportive of the arts, but there was no transparency to it. If you look at it in detail, it shows little other than corporate spin. It certainly didn’t make me feel – emotionally feel – that he is my creative leader.

Not in the way that I feel Barack Obama is someone I would follow.

(Transparency? What is that? Isn’t it just another word for freedom? Obama posts all his official proclamations and executive orders on the White House website so The People – that’s me – can read it and have the potential to take action. Have the potential. That’s just freedom.)

This leads onto the tube to Bethnal Green.

Freedom, Choice and Responsibility

2009-02-10T19:48:00.003Z

This follows on from my wish to give freedom to others.

Audience too. That’s the crucial point. I want my work to be accessible enough, to have enough space in it to allow someone else the freedom to collaborate with it emotionally.

Freedom. I think this is the beginning of finding my language to express the social value of the arts.

Freedom is a funny old thing. When corporations started offering people choice, using choice as a marketing tool (“Have whatever colour phone you want!”) it felt like freedom.

Freedom of Expression

… which resulted in lots of companies having to go that way and offer choice, and then lots of people were trying to sell you the idea of ‘freedom of expression’, and with that healthy market competition came

Freedom of Choice

Always with the word ‘freedom’ attached to it, because it sounds so positive. So much like a human right.

But freedom of choice brings with something with it:

Responsibility

Choice is overwhelming because choice makes you choose, and choosing takes effort. You have to take responsibility for the process of choosing, and then for the choice you finally make.

This is, after all, the era of lawsuits, of disclaimers, of putting the responsibility on the customer because we put the choice into the hands of the customer. They wanted it! They asked for it!

Barack Obama put a spin on it. It’s your own personal responsibility, he said, to make your country great again. You can make that change happen. You have you the choice to have the power.

But our power now lies within us as a grassroots movement, because the whole having-the-choice turned us into a collective: the thing that the biggest group of individuals wants is what will be provided, so we all gotta stand up and ask for it.

(… democratic socialism? Social democracy? Soc-racy? Socrates? Not being political. Just playing with words. I don’t really do political.)

But standing up and asking for it gives us a sense of social identity. Doesn’t it? I mean, it makes financial and political sense, but I’m one of the people who voted for Obama (being American by birth) and I feel socially connected with the US for having played my part.

For having mattered.

I stood up and was counted.

This leads onto grassroots.

In the Shower

2009-02-10T19:45:00.003Z

This follows on from how worthless I’ve been feeling as an artist lately, in not having much commercial success, and not feeling valued by British Theatre in general, and how worthy and not alone D&D4 made me feel, and how determined I am to find a language to describe the social value of theatre.

It also follows on from how the experience of theatre gives us the freedom to emotionally engage.

I had a revelation in the shower which can be summarised thus:

If my only skill is to give freedom to others, then I have done a great thing in life.

Here’s where it came from:

Through Mercury Musical Developments, I’ve had some amazing opportunities to work with some brilliant actors: a lot of drama students, and a lot of professionals. We’re either in my kitchen reading an early draft, or we’re in a drama school rehearsal room workshopping some specific moment from a new show.

In the last gods-know how many years, I’ve done a lot of that without having a director present, but having worked with directors, I always had some awareness of what they bring to the process and therefore what the process would be lacking by not having one there.

Although I can’t say I’ve found a way to make up for my lack of director – nor would I want to – I did have to find ways to stop being so possessive of my work that I couldn’t give the process room to breathe.

So I developed some techniques for letting go of my own work that were metaphoric in nature – as are most things I learn for myself, since I feel the need to be able to prove to other people that I do know what I’m talking about. Which is mostly about needing to prove to myself that I do know what I’m talking about.

Being metaphoric in nature, I’m able to share them, and I’ve been extremely lucky to have been allowed to do so with writers and actors, for which I am eternally grateful because it has helped me continue to develop my own craft and discover more about my own process.

(And honestly, it’s just lovely to be able to give something away. It makes me feel like I have some worth.)

Discovering the act of letting go has been, I think, the single most valuable writing tool I’ve ever encountered, although it’s an odd tool because its tangibility lies in the fact that it allows others in, which also allows me in.

It is an open space. A freedom.

It’s the freedom from control-freakery, but oddly, it allows me to have much greater confidence in my own creative existence within the work than I ever feel when I am control-freakishly clutching at the script.

As I said after D&D4: in this space, I feel that I matter. I no longer feel that I have to wave my arms and shout in order to be noticed, at which point everyone turns and stares at me so I am crippled with insecurity. I just feel that I am a part of the process, and as such, I matter.

It’s very important to me to give other writers that sense of freedom and that joy of quiet self-confidence that they matter. Writers, and actors. And directors. Designers. Everyone.

Audience too.

This leads onto society as audience and the notions of freedom, choice and responsibility.

The Rule of Three

2009-02-10T19:40:00.001Z

Here’s an interesting aside that came from talk of Reality TV where songs are repeated more than three times…

When I was writing out Hatch to put on my website, I was basically cutting up one linear story into lots of short stories that can either stand alone or function to create a whole story when taken together.

The key is that they can be read in any order, so you might get the metaphorical storytelling device of seeing the murder and then finding out whodunit, or you might get the device of knowing whodunit and then spending the rest of the story finding out why.

As I was going through, I instinctively went to make sure that I’d done the rule of three for a few important plots points, until it occurred to me that you cannot have a rule of three when you have no idea which stories will be read in which order.

There’s no way to guarantee that the audience member will see it once, see it twice so the repetition makes them remember, and then see it a third time so you can mess with their expectations, or deliver a punchline.

They might just get the punchline. They might just get one, and then the punchline. So I had to put the relevant action into as many of the short stories as I could, in the hope that it would hit the audience at least one time more than the punchline, in whatever order.

Life isn’t linear. Storytelling is changing.

The Experience of Theatre is Changing

2009-02-10T19:33:00.006Z

This comes from life being less than linear, and from trying to find a language to express the social value of the arts.

I think the experience of theatre is changing. (And so it should.)

At its most basic level, theatre is a collaboration between the audience and the stage. Traditionally, when you choose to sit and watch a piece of theatre, you open yourself up to a space in which you can be emotionally vulnerable. Albeit in a controlled manner, you allow yourself some emotional catharsis by connecting with the characters and their emotional journeys.

Andrew Lloyd-Webber has brilliantly captured the audience appeal of reality TV, which now draws audiences in their thousands to see shows like Oliver. During the casting process, audiences connect with the actor in the same way that they traditionally connect with the character. The actor has become the character, and the TV casting process has become the story.

So when they book to go and see the show, they’re going to see the character they connected with, which is the actor… who will play a character they will probably also connect with, but not in the same way they used to because now they cannot separate actor and character.

The excitement is to see (young winning actor) do a live performance. It’s much more like the appeal of a rock gig.

And the experience of being in the audience of a rock gig is a very different one to the experience of being in a theatre auditorium. We make our audiences sit down in rows. We distance them, from each other and from the stage. The mythical fourth wall is a very real thing, and it acts in the same way that a cinema screen does.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Such a separation can help the individual audience member open up emotionally. As I wrote about the audience in Space:

- They each have their own little space in the big space.

- Do they share their little space?

- They try not to.

- Why not?

- Each little space is too little.

- But that’s a big space.

- They share the big space by dividing it into little spaces. See?

At a rock gig, we share one big space. One open space. We are more a Crowd, an audience as one single identity, one animal. The fact that people are around us, moving, singing, yelling, crying, empowers us to join with them.

And we are brought together by the edginess, the risk inherent in watching a live performance where something could go wrong at any moment. The visceral aspect of hearing someone perform live a song that you’ve heard on a recording hundreds of times. Every time they move away from the recorded version, even a tiny bit, you know. It’s stimulating. It’s puts new breath into the song.

And seeing someone on stage, singing a song in a show live, a song that you saw them sing every week on that TV show, that’s stimulating. Not only that, but you’ll get to the song the contestants sang when one of them got booted out. And this time the winner is singing it, and they’re not going to leave at all! This time, the song has the opposite meaning: that they have stayed, they’ve won!

That is classic music theatre storytelling: the use of a song to indicate sorrow, repeating it in the rule of three (or more, on TV) to give the audience an emotional association with the song, and then the twist at the end of the story in which the song is associated with joy. A neat resolution. Classic storytelling.

So in reality TV show castings, we think we’re collaborating with the process, but we’re not. We’re being told a story, and you can’t un-hear a story. Especially if you took part in the telling of it. Which means our live theatre experience is different. Multi-layered. We see more than one story, and we combine all of that, and our own part in the storytelling, into our own unique story.

That is the genius of it: we are free. It gives us the freedom to engage.

This leads onto the shower.

It also made me think more about the Rule Of Three.

What To Write To Andy Burnham?

2009-02-10T19:27:00.004Z

Coming from the thought that life is no longer linear…

At D&D4, I joined a discussion about Andy Burnham, the current Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (although not for much longer). The question was this: since Andy has recently announced that he will be reviewing theatre funding soon, what do we want to say to him while we still have time to influence his decisions on whether or not to make cuts?

Someone observed that back when Peter Hall ran the National Theatre, he acted as a sort of spokesperson for the arts, in a way that Nick Hytner doesn’t really do now. It was suggested that we need such a spokesperson, and that the person holding the office of Artistic Director of the National Theatre seems ideally placed to be such a person.

If Nick is willing. He does clearly care about how he’s spending public funding. We agreed that he seems very willing to assume responsibility for the public, but not one of us felt that he was as willing to represent the theatre community.

Bearing in mind the lack of linear…

The argument arose: do we really want a figurehead? Does society work that way these days? In this time of Web 2.0 and grassroots movements, aren’t we better served by acting together as a community and bring our issues to Andy Burnham en masse?

An action plan was made that a letter should be drafted which we could all send, individually, so he’d see us as a group and we’d have more pressure, more power.

It was further agreed that three main points should be observed: the political, financial and social cost of cutting funding for the arts.

Political, we said, that’s easy: look how many votes you’d be loosing if you piss off the arts community.

(Although even if hundreds, or hundreds of thousands of us write, there are 60 million people in the country. So I don’t think this is the way to a grassroots movement in support of the arts. But I do think there is a way to have a grassroots movement in support of the arts.)

Financial, also easy: look how much money the West End alone brings into the country. I don’t have the figures to hand, but they’re not going to be hard to get hold of. Besides, I suspect Andy Burnham already knows them.

But social? What is the social cost? - I asked, and everyone said well, the social, you know, the social cost. What you lose in the social, you know, value of the arts. Of theatre. Yes, but what is it? Exactly? - I asked. And none of us could really say.

So I determined to think about that, and it’s become a much bigger thing for me than I anticipated. Hence, this web of blog posts that attempts to find a language for describing the social cost of cutting arts funding.

This leads into how the experience of theatre is changing.

The British Musical Theatre Ladder

2009-02-10T18:57:00.004Z

Prior to D&D4, I was starting to feel that I could only exist commercially. Musical theatre in this country has several planes of existence:

- The West End
- Regional Theatres
- Edinburgh Festival
- The Amateur Market
- The Youth Market
- The National Theatre Studio
- Mercury Musical Developments, Perfect Pitch etc

The West End needs an established hook upon which to sell a show, obviously. Elton John, Queen, a big movie… or just an established musical theatre writer like Andrew Lloyd-Webber.

Regional theatres don’t do much developing of new musicals. In the last few years, all I can think of is Birmingham Stage Company’s new adaptation of The Jungle Book (with music by BB Cooper who is, by the way, a staunch supporter of up-and-coming writers in the UK), and the show commissioned to open Leicester’s new venue The Curve: Simply Cinderella, by the lovely Toby Davies and Grant Olding.

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival has always had a sprinkling of new musicals, in particular Chris Grady's annual festival at George Square. I’ve had one at Edinburgh myself with Pandemonium. They do tend to be more light-hearted pieces, low on budget and therefore, sadly, under-developed. Besides, when you can’t afford to pay a theatre professional who is a few career steps ahead of you, it’s very difficult to show yourself how you can learn from the whole production process.

The amateur market prefers known quantities, mostly because “I’ve always fancied playing the lead in that…” so developing new musicals there is mostly unknown territory (although well worth exploring, in my opinion).

The youth market is potentially huge, but most writers look upon it with scorn, and that’s just their loss. If writers are willing to go there, once again they face the problem of not having a theatre professional to guide them. I’ve been very lucky to have worked at the youth department of a regional theatre, but mostly they just don’t have the funding to pay commission fees. And writers mostly can’t afford to do it for nothing.

The National Theatre Studio is… well, who knows what the National Theatre Studio is. A mysterious laboratory for the development of unique and innovative embryos of new genres, genetically engineered in darkened spaces, music and theatre being split and spliced in ways we can only imagine… because they’re mostly aborted after a few weeks when deemed unable to sustain themselves in the current cultural climate.

(None of that is true, of course. It’s just my fertile imagination. There is no information available on developing new material at the National Theatre Studio. I know they do it. I just don’t know what comes out of it, or how you get into it. Or anything else about it, to be honest.)

MMD has commissioned stuff. I’ve had a commission via them, and although it hasn’t come to a production yet, there’s always the possibility that it will one day, and I did get paid to write something: no mean feat these days. It should be noted that the aforementioned Jungle Book also came through an MMD commission, and the lovely Julian Woolford is working on a new project he met via MMD dating route.

The thing is, British Musical Theatre doesn’t have structure. The Theatre Royal Stratford East has been doing some amazing work developing and nurturing new musicals that specifically incorporate contemporary music into theatre, but to my knowledge it's a summer month-long program, and if you want to develop something outside of their target area, they probably can't help you (as much as I'm sure they'd like to).

There’s no place that teaches a solid foundation in craft to all writers in all types of musical theatre over an extended period of time. There’s no easy way into getting a production up on a stage and – crucially – learning from the process. There’s no obvious route into anything commercial, and then there’s a huge gaping hole between writers of new musicals and Elton John.

Not that he doesn’t belong, but he didn’t climb up the musical theatre ladder. He hopped across from somewhere else, which is something we cannot do. A big chunk of ladder, just gone.

In fact, there are no ladders anymore. I learnt most of what I know about stage management by working in a regional theatre, doing all the hours the gods send, taking on any job in every department, being a proper Casual and being far from casual about it.

I’m not sure you can actually still do that. It’s also very difficult to join a rep acting company and learn the ropes by doing a different show every few weeks for a whole season.

Life is no longer linear.

I love that! – but I need to figure out what it is now. Just saying “hopping around” doesn’t really cut it as a metaphor.

This post was prompted by the D&D4 session on writing to Andy Burnham.

It leads into the subject of a figurehead for British Theatre.

It’s also linked to thoughts from Peter Hall’s Diaries. (A book recommendation from D&D4.)

New website, new resolution

2009-01-23T23:02:00.002Z

I've just spent a week insanely updating my website. I used to just put up productions. You know, things that mean something commercially. But they happen rarely, and every time I looked at my website it felt like I have absolutely no creative output.

Which I know isn't true!

I just don't have all that much commercial creative output. Although I do have a damn site more than a lot of people who write musicals, and for that I am most grateful, don't get me wrong. It's just that I really do spend most of my working life writing musicals. I really do. I know! It's crazy! But to spend so much time doing it, and have so little to show for it just felt creatively draining.

Then I discovered Devoted & Disgruntled, and I experienced Open Space Technology in a creative instead of corporate environment, and suddenly I'm free.

So you will now find that my website is full of stuff. Half-finished stuff. Stuff in planning. Stuff I'm pretty sure I'll never get the chance to do, but I love the idea so I'm putting it out there.

In full! Some stuff in full! Because being afraid someone else will nick your idea is such a draining thing to feel, and so is being afraid to show something only half-discovered, and so is being afraid that if you try to explain what excites you, you'll sound like a schmuck because everyone else knew it all ten years ago.

Biggest of all boring and tiring things is this one: being afraid that you had one good idea, and will never have another one, ever again, so you need to hold onto that one so tightly that it can't breathe, and you can't breathe. (And then don't breathe, in case anyone hears you.)

You know - those things. They're boring, tiring, and not for me. I always knew they weren't for me, but I thought I was alone in that. And now I know I'm not. Thanks, D&D.

Also new: I'm about to blog something that sprang from D&D, but it's not linear so I've been trying to think of ways to blog it in this linear format. I've decided that links are the answer, so I'm going to create a web of links between small posts.

I encourage anyone who is a member of the D&D ning to copy/paste things into the forum there, link back to it and start a discussion if it sparks something for you. I encourage anyone who isn't a member of the D&D ning to go join!

I welcome open discussion in an open forum. One-on-one discussion is better face-to-face for me, so I'll probably be rubbish if you email me directly. But join the ning!

Devoted & Disgruntled IV

2009-01-13T20:47:00.002Z

I've just had the most brilliant weekend. Improbable host an annual gathering called Devoted & Disgruntled, which uses Open Space Technology to facilitate discussion and collaboration.

It works like this:

A bunch of people get together in a big room. Anyone who has something they want to discuss with other people writes that something down on a piece of paper and announces it. They choose an area of the room and a session time for that discussion. If anyone else in the room wants to discuss that thing, they sign up for it.

There are many discussions in each session, so you can't join in for the whole of all of them, but you can buzz around like a bumble bee and cross-pollinate from one discussion to another, or flit like a butterfly and see a bigger picture.

That's it... although this technology does have four guiding principles and one law:

Whoever comes is the right people
Whatever happens is the only thing that could have
Whenever it starts is the right time
When it's over, it's over

The Law of Two Feet dictates that when you no longer feel the ability or the desire to stay and contribute, you move on, and no offense is taken.

It's absolute genius, and I spent a wonderful two and a half days discussing all kinds of aspects of theatre with all kinds of theatre people. I met directors, actors, acting tutors, critics, performance poets, aerial artists, designers, lighting designers, photographers, theatre managers, writers... all of us equal in the room, everyone able to speak and be heard, able to listen and consider.

If you're involved in theatre in any way, either in the UK or abroad, I strongly recommend that you get involved with Devoted and Disgruntled. They also have regular satellite events one evening every month in central London, and sometimes they have events in other parts of the UK, and even abroad.

Most importantly, they have an online social network that anyone can join, where you can read the document created by this weekend's event, and make your own contributions to the topics raised. Go to the D&D ning to sign up for free and join in.

Even if you think you're not the right person for something like that.

Especially if you think you're not the right person for something like that.

Filtering Constructive Critique

2008-10-07T13:47:00.004Z

I've just realised how I filter constructive critique, so am making a note here in case it's useful or in case I forget.

People find it very hard to offer critique on something without colouring it with their own perspective: how THEY would have written the show, had it been theirs. This has the best of intentions, but is the hardest thing to see through.

So, most often you'll hear a comment like, "I felt that the main character needs a song at this moment" when actually, what they mean could be one of these:

1. The way you've chosen to use song in the show as a whole means that this moment stands out as an obvious song choice according to your own rules, that you have then for some reason chosen to ignore. That reason is not a clear dramatic choice, and is therefore distracting.

2. In most musicals, this moment would be a clear candidate for a song, so you might want to look at a) why that type of song-choice moment exists in so many musicals - which is about as close to a musical theatre writing rule as we will ever get - and b) why you have specifically chosen to break that 'rule' for storytelling purposes, and c) how successful that attempt has been in terms of what you want to communicate to the audience.

3. They just don't think there are enough songs in the show, and are suggesting a place where THEY would put one because they don't realise that they want to say, or that it's okay to say, "This musical feels a bit song-light".

... or they could mean that this is the character with whom they most closely identify, in which case you might have over-emphasised a non-essential character at this point in the show.

... or they could mean that this scene seems more important to them than you need it to be in the show, so they're missing a song in a big scene where, actually, there should just not be a scene at all.

... or they could just mean that if they were writing the show, they'd have made that choice of song-moment. Which is a pointless thing to tell another writer.

... and any number of other things they could have meant, all of which you as a writer must filter in order to find the comment that a) they really meant and b) is most useful to you.

After some kind of presentation of work to audience, I like to gather in as much written critique as possible from two kinds of people: those I trust creatively, and those I simply know.

After some time, I gather all those notes together and filter them. I keep most of the notes from the people I trust creatively, although I always re-word some of them to what they meant rather than what they said, as above.

I keep a pinch of the notes from people I know, because even if I don't trust their ability to give constructive critique, or their particular talents in the field of musical theatre, or their ability to speak to a writer as a writer rather than whatever their job may be, I do trust in their ability as a human being to relate to a story.

And then I go through them and try to join them up. If a lot of people made comments about one particular song, even if those comments vary greatly, I put those together in one place: something is clearly not working in that moment.

Once I have that re-filtered list, it generally contains two levels of notes: meta-notes on the major plotlines of the show or journeys of the characters, and mini-notes, on specific moments in the show like a song or a scene.

Then comes the key final step when figuring out what my rewrites will be:

I try to make all of those notes be true.

I don't try to discard them, or de-value them, or decide that they're not relevant because I don't agree. I try to make myself agree with them in some way. (I'm not manic about it. If I can't, I can't, but at least I try.)

When I do that, I think all I'm doing is over-riding my own sense of creative self-preservation. I think I'm trying to be as objective as I possibly can about this very subjective thing, because I have found it to be true that when you're writing, you cannot try to be you. Instead, you must try to just be, and only then can the 'you' part come out.

It's like breathing: it gets all weird if you start thinking about how it works.

Don't think, just breathe.

Visual vs Verbal

2008-09-07T15:55:00.002Z

Physical comedy is stronger, funnier, and more immediate than verbal comedy.

It takes less time to hit the brain, and no time at all to process.

It hits our emotional buttons instantly.

As a writer, if you ever have to choose between a visual joke and a verbal one that are happening at the same time but in conflict with one another, take the visual if you can.

Addendum

2008-04-20T14:15:00.002Z

Question: Is the initial producer part of the creation or the reaction?

I said 'Creation', but I want to be clear because I feel like a lot of people misunderstand this in our world. From the point of view of a show, a new musical, the actual show itself, the writer creates and everything that comes after that is a reaction to that creation.

But if a new show is lucky enough to start its life with a production already written into its future, then everyone on that production is... I guess co-creating is a good way to put it.

The whole team is creating this specific production, each person playing their individual role. But the show itself, the actual storytelling part: that was created by the writer/s, and everything else is interpretation of that initial creation.

Complex, isn't it?

The Producer and The Writer

2008-04-18T00:09:00.003Z

My lovely friend and fellow writer Paul Alexander Boyd asked some questions that I’ve only just had time to respond to. So here are my answers, Paul – I’ve chopped your questions into segments.

Question: What is the writer's responsibility to the commissioning producer?

First and foremost, to do what they’re commissioned to do, which is write a show on an agreed subject, according to various agreed specifications that probably include the size and style of the intended final production.

This usually involves providing a series of completed drafts of script and score by certain dates that have been previously agreed by the producer and writer based upon the producer’s reasonable window of opportunity and the writer’s reasonable writing-time requirement, which drafts are then developed in previously agreed ways until the intended final stage is reached, whatever that may be.

And that’s it.

Question: How does the producer's expectation hamper the writer's freedom to tell a story using the writer's own sources, experiences, and encounters?

It doesn’t.

Presumably, a producer has hired a writer whose work they admire, to write about a subject they both like. Thereafter, if the producer has any expectations other than the fact that this good writer will tell this good story in a good way, then the producer needs to hire another writer or get this one to tell another story. Or the writer needs to tell the producer that they can’t find their way into the story after all, and all parties should amicably part ways.

More than that, it’s actually impossible for one person’s expectations to hamper another person’s freedom to tell a story in their own voice. I mean, short of dictating the actual dialogue to a writer, no matter how oppressively you try to influence their writing, what comes out of their pen will always be in their voice. It may be in their voice-which-is-reacting-to-oppression, but it’s still their voice because they never stop being a person.

That’s the glorious thing about being a writer. This thing we call ‘voice’ enables the process of research, because the writer will always make their own personal selection from those libraries full of books, those endless websites, those rooms full of improvising actors. No-one else will ever make the same exact selections because everyone’s life experiences are different, and that’s where our ‘voice’ comes from.

The ‘voice’ enables collaboration, because every writer has a unique contribution to make to the work, and no two collaborations are ever the same, either between collaborators, or between the team and the specific project. Or even the same project, years later.

The ‘voice’ enables critique, because the writer is able to choose what feedback to use, and what to disregard.

This thing called ‘voice’ is what makes us who we are as artists. People can try to influence it, yes, but only if we let that influence in. Hamper? No. Not without holding a gun to your head and telling you to take dictation.

But if you’d asked me whether a producer’s expectations can affect a writer’s storytelling freedom… yes, and that can be a great thing.

My producer for Mort expects that I will write him a show that caters for 35 – 40 young people, which can be produced on a minimal budget with very little set, and allows for student musicians to play in the band. All of these things affect my storytelling freedom. Why, this very evening I had to forget about the idea of beheading a General onstage and then giving his headless ghost a small song. (I have, however, kept in the scene that takes place on the flying horse.)

If a producer wants to be involved in the actual process of writing, then they want to be a writer/producer, and that is a different collaborative relationship. One to which I would not agree, since it’s my personal desire to work with producers who can view the show with the objective distance and producer’s-eye experience that I find almost impossible to have while I’m subjectively focused on writing something.

Question: Does a commissioning producer have any more influence because they are involved from the outset of a piece than the dramaturgs or directors who may come on board later in the process?

More influence, in what sense? The longer someone works on a project, the more influence they have on it, by simple deed of there being time to do more. So yes, if a producer is involved from the outset, it is possible for them to have more influence if that particular collaborative relationship works in that way.

The producer for Legacy was involved from the very start, and had very little involvement in the writing process. YMT also has very little involvement, and I very much appreciate that kind of trust.

On the other hand, I know that YMT will come along to interim readings we do with friends, and are interested in what’s going on. I also very much appreciate that kind of support.

Dramaturgs, and directors-who-are-doing-dramaturgy, can be involved right from the start too, as with Clive Paget on Mort, and with David Gilmore on Legacy, and also with all of my kids’ shows. Dramaturgy is an invaluable resource for a writer, but again, it’s a resource from which the writer can choose which advice to consider, and which to disregard.

It is rumoured that Mr Mackintosh likes to get his hands a bit dirty in the writing room. I’m quite sure I’d be intimidated into taking on board some of his suggestions – and possibly all of them, whether I agreed with them or not – but if I did, that would still be my choice. I’d be an idiot to have made changes I didn’t agree with, but it would have been my choice. I could have said no, at which point he would probably break the contract and tell me to fuck off, but it would still have been my choice. I’m the writer, and Mr M is a resource of options for me, like any other.

It’s a really important thing for writers to know: the writer chooses what goes into a piece, and what stays out. Those choices are made by who we are as people – this writer’s ‘voice’ is nothing more ethereal or mystical than just who we are as individual people.

For example:

I wrote a song for Death today. At the top of act two, he’s sitting in a bar getting drunk – well, trying out the experience of technically drinking alcohol and slurring your words. He sings a barbershop blues (with a few wizards who really are drunk).

Obviously, there’s comedy in that scenario, and it’s a light-hearted lyric about being sad because he has no friends, and no woman, and no skin. But it is based on truth, and somewhere beneath that light-hearted song lies my terrific fear of dying, the fact that I’m a control freak who doesn’t drink because it means being out of control, and my desperate loneliness as a writer who must take sole responsibility for every word she places in the mouth of a character.

I told my composer this the other day, when we were talking about what the song should be about. I don’t often talk him that far into my process, but this time I was feeling sorry for myself so I did. He went very quiet for a while, then said, “I thought this was going to be a comedy song?”

It’s in the novel that Death gets drunk in this bar. There’s even a reference to the blues. Many other writers doing a musical adaptation of this novel would probably choose to have Death sing the blues at this point in the show. But they wouldn’t write the exact lyric I have written based on those things I now wish I hadn’t written about here, and am studiously trying to not to go back and delete.

You know, I think actors are the most amazing people. I mean, they’re incredibly brave to play out in public the dark and awful secrets that I can barely write in my blog without twitching; the things I always slide in under my writing for them to use as subtext. Actors will stand up in front of me with material that is absolutely unknown to them, and bare their souls over and over again as I say, “Try it another way? Another?” without so much as a “Why didn’t you like the first one I did?” I love actors. I love them. Love, admire, and love.

But at the end of the day, even with a room full of Judi Denches and Laurence Oliviers, I still make my choices based on what I think is right, not on what they think is right, because the work is still mine until it finishes development. Once it’s in print, then anyone can pretty much play, direct or produce it any way they like. Just don’t tell me about it.

Question: Is the initial producer part of the creation or the reaction?

Creation. They collaborate as producer, and that’s good. (Someone sensible needs to sort out the money.) Writers collaborate as writers. Directors as directors, and so on. That’s not to say one person can never do two jobs. I just don’t think they can ever be actively doing both jobs at the same exact time. Plus, I find perfecting the writing so fucking challenging that I wouldn’t want to take on another job, thanks very much.

Can't write.

2008-04-11T08:31:00.002Z

I literally can't write. I'm so stuck. It's like banging my head against a brick wall, except I don't bang for long. I just walk away from it. I don't even check to see if the wall has a door.

I can't find the I Want song. I can't find the top of act two. I can't find my way into any of it. I don't know how I ever did this, and I don't know why I ever thought I could do it.

I don't know why I blog about writing, since I can't. And I can't reach my composer on the phone. Because he's writing, probably. Which just makes me feel worse.

Gah.

Match It For Pratchett

2008-04-04T09:35:00.001Z

Please go and Match It For Pratchett, even if you only donate £1.

Thanks.

Writing a Song Music First

2008-03-24T23:24:00.003Z

I’m in the middle of writing a song. Okay, so I’m procrastinating because I’ve reached a difficult bit, but the difficulty is an interesting one that I wanted to post about.

The lovely Dom has given me a section of music for the middle of a song, for a new character, and to serve a more defined purpose for Mort than previously at this point in this song.

So I’m “dropping a lyric onto the music” here. I put this in quotes because Dom doesn’t much like it when I say that. “It sounds like the music is beneath the lyrics or something.” he says, just before he goes through a tunnel and I lose him.[1]

It’s not that at all, but I don’t remember where I got that expression from in the first place, and I should try to find another way to say it if he doesn’t like it. So here I am, sliding a lyric into the music (Hm. Not quite right.) and it feels a little like reverse-engineering Dom’s creative mind.

See, here’s what’s so brilliant about having a genius composer: he writes music that speaks (where, hopefully, I write words that sing). What I mean is, he writes music that is heightens the emotions in speech, rather than music that flies along a pure emotion. All musical theatre song music should speak like that, and Dom is a genius at it.

So I am stitching – yes, that’s much better – I am stitching a lyric into the new music, and it feels like reverse-engineering Dom’s creative mind. For example, the final musical phrase of this bit I’m working on has three sections to it. The first section is sort of repeated in the second, and the final section is like a full stop. Two halves with a natural end.

In terms of lyric, that implies an internal rhyme for the two halves, and a full sentence overall because the third section is like a full stop.

So I know that, in order to live up to the music, the lyric should go:

Ba-da ba da RHYME
Ba da da RHYME
... responsibility

The last word is the hook. It’s the word I gave him before my first cup of coffee the other day when he called at 8:30 in the morning and said “What’s his hook, this guy? What’s he trying to say?” And I mumbled something about responsibility. So Dom had that word already stitched into the music.

This is where lyric writing becomes like a mathematical puzzle. No wonder Sondheim likes inventing puzzles and games. Here, look:

1. My lyric must make sense for an Army General. (That’s the character.)

2. A General who has just died in battle.

3. And almost had his big moment spoiled by a stupid boy who was late.

4. At whom he is now barking as if Mort were cannon-fodder.

5. And he probably knows in the back of his mind somewhere that this is the last time he gets to bark at someone, so he’d better make it count and try to summon up everything a General should pass onto a cannon-fodder boy in just a few profound words.

6. But he should make it quick because he doesn’t know how long he’s got left in this state of being.

7. I’ve got 9 syllables with which to form a sentence in which the emphasis matches what would have been his spoken vocal intonation had he said the line, and which must lead very naturally into the word ‘responsibility’.

The reverse-engineering process goes thus:

What might come naturally before the word ‘responsibility’? Since the General is talking at Mort, and making this all about teaching him a lesson, the most likely option is “your responsibility”.

Ba-da ba da RHYME
Ba da da YOUR
... responsibility

What does he want him to do with his responsibility? ‘Honour it’ seemed about right, which gives me:

Ba-da ba da RHYME
Ba honour YOUR
responsibility

That pretty much takes care of that line, because the first BA will be ‘to’ or ‘and’, depending on the previous line. But what rhymes with YOUR? Most obvious choice for the General was WAR.

Ba-da ba da WAR
Ba honour YOUR
responsibility

In that first line, the syllable most highly emphasised by the music is this one:

Ba-da BA da WAR
Ba honour YOUR
responsibility

So I know that word has to be just as important in the sentence as WAR is. At which point, I found the whole thing:

Be a man of war
and honour your
responsibility.

Seems so easy, right? Took me a big chunk of today to get there.

Here’s a little reverse-engineering test. Say a sentence out loud. Any sentence. Something about what you did today, maybe. Now say it again, but without using words. Just use a non-word, like da-da-da, but keep your spoken vocal inflections the same, with natural rises and falls as you emphasise different words.

Now imagine Dom calling me and saying, “I’ve figured out what the General says! Ready? Here goes… da-da-da-dum, de dum dum, do-be-do blah blah blah…”

[1] When Dom and I speak on the phone, he’s always on a train. I say always because it happens to the extent that we suspect there’s something magical involved: even if he’s not on the train when I dial his number, once we’re talking, he is suddenly on a train. Most annoying for him, especially if he was, say, in the shower when I called.

Stage Directions

2008-03-20T18:33:00.003Z

As usual, my life is full of black and white, with no shades of grey. So it is with stage directions: I write short plays with hardly any at all, and long musicals with many. I think my purpose for each individual stage direction is probably the same, though – to explain.

I just tried to write a list of things I like to avoid doing with stage directions, but I can't list them. It's just a feeling. I have stage direction feelings. No, maybe instincts.

Anyway, because I pay them so very much attention, it annoys the fuck out of me if directors blatantly ignore them. To begin with, I just thought this was funny and cute. I even said that I had put jokes into my stage directions to see if the director was paying attention (but that's not actually true. I just thought the jokes while I was writing, so in they went. That's what happens when you get on the Train of Thought).

The thing is, a good stage direction will be stitched so firmly into the fabric of the scene that to remove it would unravel the lines near it, and possibly the whole damn thing.

I’m not writing an ordinance survey map for the director. I’m explaining why the spoken words follow on in the sequence and the way they do. Actually, the whole process is fascinating.

On its own –

Man Hello.
Woman You complete bastard.

And now with samples of stage direction –

1. The MAN reaches out and pulls the cigarettes away from her. She moans.

Man Hello.
Woman You complete bastard.

2. The MAN reaches out and pulls the boy away from her. She moans.

Man Hello.
Woman You complete bastard.

3. The MAN reaches out and pulls her left nipple. She moans.

Man Hello.
Woman You complete bastard.

The director can’t ignore that stage direction. Well, not in this specific context, anyway. We only have two lines of dialogue. What about this one to follow on:

The BOY struggles.

Boy Let me go!

Interesting, isn’t it, how a scene develops with the stage directions being stitched in just as the dialogue is stitched in? So far, there’s no reason why the Boy has to struggle in order for that line to work. He might be talking to the Woman. We don’t know yet.

On the other hand, they’re clearly arguing over who will have the Boy. In three lines, there’s a drama. (Of course there is. Rule of three. Gods, I love doing this for a living sometimes.)

[And here’s an afterthought I added in when I’d finished this post: as writers, I think we must remember that, just as an audience sees a show for the first time and interacts with it based on that first viewing, so a director interacts with a script based on that first reading. What we put on the page is so crucial to the start of the process. Crucial. It’s so amazingly power-filled.]

The other fascinating thing about this is the revelation of information. In three lines, we assume that the Man and Woman know each other, they don’t like each other, the boy is their son, or at least theirs to argue over, and the Man is taking him away from the Woman. She’s powerless to do anything about it, and the Boy doesn’t want to go with him.

The last stage direction is crucial for that last bit of information. If there was no stage direction, it would be ambiguous:

The MAN reaches out and pulls the boy away from her. She moans.

Man Hello.
Woman You complete bastard.
Boy Let me go!

Now the Boy is potentially talking to the Woman, a decision that must be made in the staging of the scene. But if the dialogue makes it clear, no stage direction is required –

The MAN reaches out and pulls the boy away from her. She moans.

Man Hello.
Woman You complete bastard.
Boy Let me go!
Woman Never!

She answers. No stage direction required because it’s now clear who he’s talking to, so he wouldn’t struggle. Unless she kept hold of him. It doesn’t say she let him go when the Man pulled the Boy away, does it? Do we care? Would it change things if she held on?

The MAN reaches out and pulls the boy away from her, but she won’t let go.

Man Hello.

[ – which changes an actor’s options for ‘hello’, doesn’t it? Fascinating.]

Woman You complete bastard.

The BOY struggles.

Boy Let me go!
Woman Never!

The WOMAN tightens her grip.

Suddenly, the Woman has the potential to be the Bad Guy in this, whereas before I saw her only as the tragic mother. Interesting. (That may say more about me than about stage directions.)

But wait! What if there’s something else going on with the Boy?

The MAN reaches out and pulls the boy away from her, but she won’t let go.

Man Hello.
Woman You complete bastard.

The BOY struggles.

Boy Let me go!
Woman Never!

The WOMAN tightens her grip and eyes the rollercoaster.

Boy Mum, I just want one more go!
Woman Why can’t I go with you, then?
Man It’s my turn, Gladys! I’ve only just got here and they close in half an hour!

… and so on. (Gladys?)

Way back when I first started writing the opening number for Mort, I had this chimneysweep as one of the tradesmen who’s looking for an apprentice at the annual hiring fair. Perfect choice, I thought. Proper medieval trade for a bloke who might want a boy apprentice. I had the Butcher’s first line all written:

Have you got the stomach, boy, to cut a cow in half?

I liked this line. It spoke well for the Butcher: a man who can pick up a whole cow carcass with his big, strong, bloodied hands and slam it onto a meat hook, then swing a shiny cleaver at it and thunk through the bones until it’s cut in half. Good image, I thought.

But then I wanted a rhyme for ‘half’.

I had to rule out ‘barf’ straight away as being too modern for this pseudo-medieval piece, although puking is a good subject to explore when you’re writing boys aged 8-12. But you do have to think of the American market and the way an American actor would butcher (no pun intended) the rhyme by pronouncing the bloody R.

Also, I had to fit the rhyme to my other tradesmen. I chose the chimneysweep, for various reasons, and found the line:

I need someone smaller than the height of my staff.

Because I wanted small, see. Georgie Grubb, one of the boys, is very small – he’s a sidekick, and a sidekick’s size is of great comic importance – and he needed a good trade.

So I was very pleased with the staff line, but being a pedantic sort of person, I then had to know why the chimneysweep had a staff. It’s not a chimneysweep’s tool of the trade, is it? At the suggestion of a friend, I decided that he had a limp and then added this stage direction with accompanying footnote.

Meanwhile, the CHIMNEYSWEEP limps* over to the crowd.

* The Chimney Sweep hadn’t wanted to play the Hogfather for the orphans in the first place. He kept telling them that a man that fat is gonna get stuck up there and have to be pushed out, but would they listen?

It later occurred to me that the best way to identify a chimneysweep would be to give him a chimney-sweeping brush to carry. This, and a staff too. I was proven right when he was only given a brush in the workshop production, which he referred to as his ‘staff’. It made no sense at all. And the kid playing Georgie Grubb wasn’t smaller than the brush because brushes come in short lengths that slot together.

It was, in fact, rubbish.

I know it’s only a tiny moment, but it is an example of what happens when (for whatever reason) a stage direction is ignored. The chimneysweep had no staff because we were pushing it for time to find props as it was. Plus we didn’t have time to work out that he could carry a staff and a brush, and then gratefully hand the brush to his apprentice once he’d hired one, which would tell us in a brief moment that the chimneysweep’s life will be so much better now that he has a young boy to shove up chimneys.

A lot of drama would have happened in a few short moments, but the stage direction was ignored, so it never came about. And, crucially, the hole that was left in the scene never got stitched back together, so it was glaringly obvious.

Well… it was to me.

Random thoughts about stage directions. Very hard to remember everything I think about stage directions when I’m not in the middle of writing one.

Craft Bites #1

2007-07-02T20:24:00.000Z

There are a couple of things about what I do that I want to put here while I remember to blog them. I might expand on them another time, but for now...

Writing vs Dramaturgy (or any other non-writer input) is Creation vs Reaction.

I gather source material for my writing from all sorts of places: reference books, fiction, newspapers, my life experiences, traits of people I encounter, and so on. These are all sources of suggestions; I cherry-pick the things that suit the story I want to tell, filtered through who I am as a person and therefore as a writer.

It follows that an actor, a dramaturg or a director are also sources of suggestions, and I cherry-pick from them, too. No book can force me to say yes to including something, and therefore no person can either. They may presume they can, because they have the ability to speak and reason where a book does not, but that changes nothing.

For the audience, good writing is all about three things: confession, connection, catharsis.

Emotions are 'confessed' into the space by the characters. If they recognise 'confession', the audience connects with that emotion. By joining the character's journey through that emotion, the audience finds some catharsis for that emotion within themselves.

Might keep blogging these little craft bites if any others occur to me.

The Show vs. The Production

2007-06-02T10:18:00.000Z

I had an interesting conversation with my director recently. He has the first draft of act one, and we're meeting to talk dramaturgically next week. Just to give you some background: the show was commissioned by a national youth theatre company. The cast will consist of 36 young people from age 14 to about 19, I think. We'll all be in residence to rehearse it for two solid weeks, culminating in three performances at a regional theatre.

It's very difficult to do an existing full-length show from scratch in two weeks with a cast of 36, but it's almost impossible to do a full, brand new show in that time. It's a funny old mix, putting young amateurs and raw material together. I'm still not sure if it quite works. The last show I had published that was written for young people had actually received a final rewrite after a production with adult professionals, which I swear is the reason that the quality of the published version makes me happier than the quality of shows published after just one production with kids.

But that's about my oft-repeated belief that writing for young people should still be about the writing, not about the kids. There are no 'allowances' to be made in the writing just because kids will perform it. So naturally, I'm going to be in rehearsals with them, working the writing as we go along, just like I would with any show. (And the kids actually love working with me on that.)

Because of all this, we've decided just to do act one for this workshop. The plan is to get it to as high a performance standard as possible, then invite potential investors and see if we can raise the money to do a big production next year, possibly at Edinburgh Festival. Fun, fun, fun!

So he has act one, and he commented that his first and most obvious concern is the part the chorus play in the show. I should explain that my aim for this show was to give as many kids as possible a named part with a line of dialogue, or a little bit of solo singing. The thing most directors ask me about my shows is, "Can we have some extra dialogue? I've got a cast of 184 kids and their parents all want to see their kid feature!" (We do have a way to do that in the published shows, actually. For any cast size. I'm quite proud of figuring out how to make that work!)

I'm also quite proud of the fact that, as it stands, act one has 95 named characters. And not one of them was forced into the story. A lot of them are part of a crowd, and it was an interesting challenge to see if I could make a chorus be individuals-in-one-place rather than a Crowd. In some places, we've absolutely achieved that (and in song, too!). But it's always the case with me that the journey of the main characters makes up the skeleton of the show in the first draft. The second draft then consists of me fleshing out the world, the community, and so on. So I wasn't surprised that my director mentioned that problem.

However, amongst other things, he's focusing on having to keep 36 kids busy all day, every day, for two whole weeks. Which is a very valid problem - and more his problem than mine. I asked if we could focus dramaturgically on the show itself first, and then address that problem. He replied that although he understood what I was asking, we should bear in mind that the show was commissioned for this company, and this is how they work.

It's a good point, and we should absolutely keep that in mind. But the show must have a future beyond this company. No show exists just to serve the first production (even though it must totally serve the first production). Even the huge Miss Saigon was re-worked to fit in smaller, touring venues.

This company is pretty unusual in its method of having a two-week solid rehearsal/show period. Most youth companies will rehearse in evenings, and don't have to call the entire company to every rehearsal. Even if we did a professional, adult production of it, it would still not be necessary to keep the entire cast entertained throughout rehearsals.

I can't imagine how difficult it must be for a director to separate themselves between dramaturgical work and actual directing. Usually, I suppose they don't have to as much as I'm asking mine to do now. But it is very important to me that we don't force the show to be something so inflexible that it can only be done by this company in the future.

Luckily, my director is one of the good guys. It's great to be able to have this conversation with him, and for him to understand it. Hardly surprising, actually, since he spends a lot of time reading and advising on new musicals. We're also very lucky that the company only works with new writing, so they understand the nature of the process and are very happy to allow things like an act-one-only workshop.

We will address the issue of how a large-cast, big-chorus show can make the best use of its large cast and big chorus. We completely need to address that, and it will be very insightful for me since I've never actually sat down and thought about it. Big shows are rare these days. Youth theatre is about the only place you get to do them... well, you have to, for them. So I'll post more about that as I learn more about it.

But I wanted to post about this because, for me, it's a really important distinction to make: the show vs the production. I would imagine it's also true of things like the first cast. I'm sure there are many shows that have had songs added because the Big Star wanted another solo - and I'm sure that the character often benefitted from that, since a part that is worthy of a big star is surely important enough to warrant another big emotional moment. But there is the danger that one might rewrite a character for an actor who is, say, particularly good with physical comedy... thereafter demanding that only good physical comedy actors can play that part.

The same for venue restrictions, and other such things that are unique to a first production. I just think it's worth bearing those things in mind.

Reality TV and Musical Theatre

2007-05-07T18:07:00.000Z

Peter Lathan has a blog on his excellent website The British Theatre Guide. I responded to this post, and am cross-posting my response here.

I agree with View From The Stalls that this kind of 'reality' TV is good for encouraging those who may not go and see such a musical to buy tickets and tell their friends, because they feel they have some vested interest in the creation of the production. I also agree that audiences are influenced by the choices the TV producer makes in terms of editing and such.

However, I also agree with Peter that I would rather a panel of experts chose my brain surgeon than choose him/her myself based on my serious lack of knowledge about brain surgery (and, presumably, at a time when my brain isn't working all that well).

But I do have faith that the spread of the public's ability to choose that has been generated by the current incarnation of the internet (about which music, videos, news articles, and so on are worthwhile and which are not) will also result in the public being able to make more and more informed choices due to the similarly wide-ranging amount of information made available by the very experts who have been making the choices up to now.

More than that, the experts are not always purely interested in the enjoyment-value of a song, or the informative content of a news article. In many cases, online, for the public, that's exactly how we make our decisions.

I'm not advocating a lessening of the value placed on an expert's opinion. But we must remember that the audience of a musical are an expert at being an audience. Any theatrical presentation would not be a theatrical presentation without the presence and collaboration of an audience. (There is no sound when no hands clap.)

This is the same for me as librettist having an opinion about casting, even though I am not the director, whose job it is to ultimately make a call about casting. I would be outraged if the director of a first production of a brand new show completely ignored my opinion on the characters and cast totally against what I thought I'd written. It is, in fact, fairly standard with many theatre companies producing a new show to allow me a clause in my contract that gives me right of approval over director, and I wouldn't work with anyone who had radically different ideas to mine. However, if they collaborate with me and take my intentions into consideration, I will always fight for their right to make that final call. It's a collaboration.

Andrew Lloyd Webber presumably has the ability to tell the TV producers that the way the public is voting will result in something that would actually be harmful for the production, at which point something would be done. We may not find out about it, but I guarantee you he's not investing that much money in a production and then letting the public have absolute say. Long-runners are where recoupment happens. Reality shows won't guarantee an audience indefinitely. As was pointed out, after a few months they can fire the person hired and re-cast anyway.

I was just discussing these TV shows with a friend of mine who is studying to be a musical theatre performer. He's writing a paper on the 'triple-threat' actor (one who can dance, sing and act) and I suggested that the state of arts funding is directly responsible for the kind of skills a performer requires to work in musical theatre.

When companies choose to do musical revivals to guarantee them an audience through affection and product-recognition, they produce shows that were written in an era when being a triple-threat was the norm: Carousel, The Sound of Music, West Side Story. Thus they require a cast with those abilities.

When companies choose to do small-scale productions for budgetry reasons, and have a cast of actor-musicians, they require a triple-threat of a different kind - and perhaps even a quadruple threat, unless we wish to lose dancing from musicals entirely. They cast those shows accordingly.

When companies choose to do cross-genre productions that include another performance skill (eg: the puppetry in Avenue Q or the roller-skating in Starlight Express, or even the drumming in Stomp) because the novelty of it will attract more bums on seats, they require perfomers with even more skills. Admittedly, they have production 'schools' for these during rehearsals... but if you already have some knowledge of that skill as a performer, plus you're as good at everything else as other people auditioning, who gets the part?

So, effectively, as in the old days when you learnt to sing, dance and act equally well, and to the best of your ability, the state of funding in the arts is having a direct effect on the amount and variety of work available to performers, the amount of training they have to do and skills they have to perfect, and therefore the pressure on drama schools to include as much as possible into the curriculum and hire more members of staff who are experts in more disciplines.

That money has to come from somewhere, and as per tradition in the arts because of lack of funding, the people who are the most vulnerable are hit the hardest. As Peter so rightly said: the foundation of the pyramid is the one that gets chipped away. More productions start to require actor-musicians, so actors pay money to learn an instrument that they can add to their resume. Drama schools have to charge more, so they put the fees up. Producers have to recoup their investors' money, so they ask the writers to waive their royalties. Record companies are stung by online file-sharing, so they put outrageous clauses into artists' contracts.

I don't think triple-threaters are a bad thing. I love being able to include dance in my musicals. I didn't hesitate to write puppetry into my current show, and wouldn't hesitate to write in any other skill I thought necessary to enhance the storytelling. But there are consequences of my doing that: people have to spend more money learning skills, or I immediately disbar some actors from ever being in that show, or I create a situation in which my producer asks me to waive my royalties. The consequence of my writing choices is not, and has never been, that the government offers me and my team financial support and encouragement to expand and experiment with the artform.

So what is Reality TV doing for my artform? It's expanding the popularity of it - which is fantastic. It's enabling the public to have more choice, and to potentially make an informed choice by learning what the experts on the panel say - also good, in many ways. But the fact that these shows are revivals draws in a big TV audience - and yet also forces us to produce shows that require triple-threaters, which puts pressure on the industry in many ways. Not a bad thing, except for the fact that the industry cannot, or does not, entirely support itself.

In their defence, I note that the money from phone calls into Any Dream Will Do will be used to fund a musical theatre bursery "with the intention of helping aspiring young performers to further their career ambitions in the area of musical theatre". I would imagine it's quite a lot of money.

I can't imagine it's enough to completely redress the balance.

The Art of Being a Postman

2007-05-04T11:52:00.000Z

Just got a draft of an agreement in email - the legal equivalent of a handshake between writers and producer. So I did what all sensible writers should do: read it in great detail, and wrote some detailed comments which I ran by the composer and then sent to my lawyer.

Why do I know all these things? Why do I have to understand the legal terms, know the latest law that covers all this shit, and be practically fluent in legalese when I respond?

And by sending such a detailed response to him, why am I teaching my lawyer to suck eggs? (Metaphorically speaking.) He's one of the best lawyers in the business! He's also a very lovely person, in whom I have great trust.

Yet I have to understand what I'm signing. I have to understand what I'm agreeing to, else how can I agree to it?

The first world is generally very confused about artists. We don't quite understand the way in which any art is created, and in that I include the art of doing a job - any job. Take postmen, for example. Every individual postman delivers the mail in his own, unique way. The differences may be tiny, but they're there.

Mine just delivered something that wouldn't fit through my mailbox, so he left it on the steps (since it's a nice day) and lightly knocked on the door to let me know it was there.

Now, we have a door knocker. It's a big, black iron thing that makes a very loud noise. I'm sitting in my kitchen, working, and the door knocker scares the crap out of me. But my postman doesn't use the door knocker. He knocks lightly on the door, and then goes to the next house to deliver. I know it's him that knocked. I know there's something I need to pick up from the steps.

He also knows that sometimes I sleep late, and the bloody door knocker wakes me up. When he first started delivering mail and used to use the door knocker (because it's there), I would lean out of my bedroom window above the front door looking tousled and not very up yet. His light knock on the door doesn't wake me now.

I like that. It's thoughtful. My postman, as the person he as become through his life experiences to date, has decided on a light knock rather than a big, heavy, iron one. Maybe his mother taught him to be respectful of how he enters other people's spaces. Maybe someone used to bang on his door, and he hated it. Maybe he's made the decision that a postman should facilitate the delivery of mail in a subtle but active way.

Whatever the reason, that is the art with which he does his job. The fact that there is a reason makes it an art.

In EIRE, they understand this. No artist there has to pay any tax. They are allowed to live tax-free, since it is known that everything they do in life makes them who they are as an artist. In England, I'm allowed to claim all manner of things on my tax return: movies, books, magazines, but also theatrical props of any kind (a telescope was the last one of note) and lunches with producers. I can even claim some of my household bills, since I work from home.

But I can't claim everything, and I should be able to because everything in my life (most of which costs me money) continuously informs who I am, and who I am makes me what I am: an artist.

So why am I not advocating my postman being exempt from tax payments? Much as I love him, there are other people who deliver my mail sometimes. They do use the door knocker, but they still get my post to me efficiently. They do the same job as my regular guy, even if not in exactly the same way.

But give two writers the same exact subject for a musical, and they will write two completely different shows. Completely different. You could even give them a basic plot outline of the events that must take place in the show, and the shows will still be totally different.

They're totally different people. With different life experiences. They will feel emotionally drawn to different characters, or to the same character but for different reasons. This is what makes it so important to me that I treat the novel I'm adapting as basic source material like any other. I cherry-pick the bits I want to use because I'm not trying to write the musical Terry Pratchett or Geraldine McCaughrean would write. Or even the one my sister would write. I could never do that because I'm not them. So I just do what I can do and write my own musical.

This is one of the most useful tools I have as a writer in a very small and therefore competitive genre: I'm not actually in competition with any other writer of musicals. I can't be, because no-one else can write what I write. I am unique because that's just the way it is. It makes rejection so much easier to handle: no producer has ever chosen someone else's show over mine. They've just chosen the only show that they could choose. At that point, mine was never even in the running, because what I write was not what they were looking for.

It's like someone choosing an apple over an orange. If you went shopping for an apple in the first place, as long as there were apples for sale, it's inconceivable that you would buy an orange. Unless you changed your mind and decided you'd rather have an orange. At which point, it's inconceivable that you would buy an apple.

So why do I need to know all the legalese? It's not just about making an informed choice. It's also about the fact that no matter how amazing my lawyer is (and he is amazing) and no matter how experienced a producer is, the product I have for sale and the service I offer is totally, completely unique. The person best-placed to make decisions about the immediate future of that product is me, because I'm the only one who fully understands it right now.

Of course, once I actually hand the child over to someone else, I actively seek their input. That's why I'm handing it over. I just want to be absolutely sure I know what I'm doing when I choose to whom, and how, to hand it.

Waiting for me...

2007-04-28T10:55:00.000Z

Sometimes I despair. It hits me, washes over me, drowns me. Sometimes I don't write because I can't. I don't have the skill. It all vanishes. I lose my tenuous grip on it and it flies away from me. Or flies around me, mocking me that I never had it in the first place.

I have an idea. It's an enormous idea, and it's terrifying. It's separate to me, a thing so huge that as soon as I thought it into existence, it became something of its own. Already, instantly too big and strong for me to hold. So there it stands, a giant, waiting for me to create it yet already existing alone.

I suspect that I don't know what I'm doing, and I can't prove that I do. I can listen to moments, and find myself in them, but I can't prove it to someone else. But I will have to prove this. I'll have to prove that I can do it, and I have nothing to show. I have nothing to show.

So I'll start small. Take it down to the tiniest thing, a thing that looks like it might fit in the palm of my hand. A thing so small that if I mess it up, I will only be killing a very small thing. A little death. A spider. An ant.

Start small, and ignore the giant. He doesn't know what shape he is, anyway. Look at him, morphing, like a big lump of clay. Waiting. If he's so strong and clever, why is he waiting? Why is he watching me? He's unsure, that's why. He's waiting because he has to wait. And now he's sad, scared, lonely too.

Oh. I see. He's waiting for me.

And so am I.

Note to self

2007-04-19T00:48:00.000Z

Write less. Say more.

Voice

2007-03-24T12:58:00.000Z

I've been trying to figure out who I am. I mean, that's what therapy is all about, isn't it? Shedding all the Stuff that sticks to you as you go through life. De-magnetising yourself until you're left with yourself.

I used to think I had nothing to say as a writer. How can I ever be a writer? I have no opinion about anything. I can always see all sides of an argument. Nothing is ever decided in my mind. Everything can be re-thought. Isn't a writer supposed to have a Voice? I have no voice. I can't be a writer. I've got nothing to say.

When I wrote my first show for kids, I determined that it would have no moral to teach. I was sick of doing bible-story shows: Joseph, Jonah, Noah. Moral, moral, moral. I set out to write shows that were just fun, that had nothing to teach. Looking back on those first four shows, I discover that they have things to say after all, although no-one seems to have noticed. Even I didn't notice at the time.

That's the thing about Voice: it happens when you're not looking. In fact, it only happens if you're not looking. Try to put words into a character's mouth and you end up with blatant exposition: it becomes entirely your voice, which is not the same thing. Let the character speak, and you probably won't know what the hell is being said until it's written. Until you see it on stage. You can only hear your Voice in playback, and then only if you know how to listen for it.

I can only see myself if I step away to look. I use my therapist as a mirror: I express myself, he reflects an image back to me and then I see myself. It's the same with my writing: I express myself to the characters, they reflect a story back to me and then I see myself.

But I can't stop and look when I prepare to write, or while I'm writing. I have to trust, and damn, I find that hard. I'm an appalling dance partner: a good dancer, but terrible at letting someone else lead in improvisation. I cannot be waltzed. I cannot let go.

During the writing process, I find it very hard let go of my insecurities as a writer. That's the strongest part of me as Writer, of course, so it's the most prominent. My poor characters have to shout to get through. So I interview them. I make it their problem. I pretend they have a problem talking, and I try to engage them as my therapist engages me when I'm finding it hard to talk: I ask them questions about themselves.

Doing that puts me in the role of therapist, which means I have to make it all about them and nothing personal about me. I have to show real interest in what they have to say, and give them the freedom to say whatever they want - even if it's not the direction I wanted the conversation to go in. I have to trust them to speak, and trust myself to believe them.

Sometimes we talk about things they don't want to talk about, or can't articulate. I push them gently, pry answers from them, keep asking.

Step away from the work, and that's all me. Step into the work and it's not about me. I give myself the freedom to speak, and I make discoveries. Real, honest discoveries. Things I didn't know about the characters - about myself.

And then the truth comes out in the writing, and truthfulness allows the audience to connect with the characters. People can sense a lie, even if they don't know it, and lies create emotional alienation. We don't always seek the truth, but we have to react to it when we encounter it.

I've been trying to figure out who I am. Shedding all the Stuff that has stuck to me as I go through life. De-magnetising myself until I'm left with myself. I am daunted by that task: how far back do I have to go before I found the me who doesn't consist of reactions to the world? Coping mechanisms, defense devices, bandages, band-aids and butterflies. How can I know what still needs healing if I don't look beneath them?

And what if I strip them all away and find that beneath them, I don't actually exist?

I used to think I had nothing to say. That I had no Voice. But when I step away from my writing, I can see myself in it. I can sense a lie, and when I encounter the truth, it hits me like a ten-ton truck. There I am, bare-boned, de-fleshed, truth-full.

Beautiful.

Podcast

2007-03-22T09:48:00.000Z

MusicalTalk is a website featuring a great podcast all about musical theatre. For some reason, they decided I had something interesting to say, so they interviewed me. You can hear me waffle on about writing, Tisch and eggs in episodes 23 and 24.

Check out their other casts, because they've had some great people on.

Adaptation

2007-03-19T11:55:00.000Z

I'm currently on my second adaptation of a novel, and the whole process is fascinating for me.

I saw Wicked recently, and had read the book beforehand. I've also read all the Harry Potters, and subsequently saw the movies. The act of adapting from one genre to another seems to swing from something quite different to the source (Wicked) to something very faithful to the source (Harry Potter). Right now, this act of adapting has settled with me thus -

I treat the novel as source material, in the same way I treated historic documents about Horatio Nelson for my musical about him. In the same way I treated research about clockwork automata for a show about a clockwork woman. (Ref 'Men vs Women': when I do write women, I make them not be human!)

In other words, I take what I want from it and ignore the rest. I have a very short attention span, so if something from the source instantly grabs me, I keep it. Anything I can't instantly recall, I disregard. Well, at least in terms of the global structure of a show. I sometimes go back if I want a specific tiny detail, but for the most part, once I'm away from the source, I'm away from it. Beyond it.

For me, the intention is not to faithfully recreate someone else's work in a different genre. I want to create something entirely new. I'll cherry-pick at the source, but only to serve my intention for this new work I'm creating. If it doesn't serve my story, out it goes.

Frankly, I don't see how an adaptation can, or should even attempt to be totally faithful to the source. There are writers involved in an adaptation, and as soon as you get creative people involved, they can't help but filter the story through themselves. It should be new, and true to its creators.

After all, even Shakespeare had source material.

Men vs. Women

2007-03-19T11:43:00.000Z

I'm much more comfortable writing men than women. In fact, I hate writing women. I've pondered this for many years. I guess you'd have to ask my therapist for the real reason, but I suspect it has something to do with the fact that women are just out there anyway. They're all about emotion. The display of emotion is a fairly natural thing for them because it's part of their direct process of change. Not that men don't do emotions, but logic is a more natural tool for them to use in the process of change. And change, as we all know, maketh drama.

I suspect I prefer writing men because their emotions have to overcome their logic to get noticed in the first place. The emotions have to creep, steal or filter out, so lyrics can creep, steal or filter out of dialogue. Sometimes there's a brief burst but it can only last for a maximum of three minutes, often including rise and sometimes fall too.

Maybe I find that more naturalistic. It's quite hard for me to make women sing. They don't really need the facility of song to display an emotion. When they do use music, it feels in some way manipulative. No, go with me on this one for a minute. A man is less likely than a woman to discuss his emotions with his workmates over lunch.

I mean, he might talk about her, but it would be in a more logical, active way: she hasn't called - what should I do? It's less likely to be the more female, emotional approach: he hasn't called - what does that mean?

It takes a little more intimacy - a few pints, or a very close friend - for a man to be given facility to get to 'what does that mean'. It's the same with song: like a few pints, music gives him facility to emote.

But a woman can more easily express an emotion in dialogue. She can already do 'what does that mean'. It's still true that the more intimacy she has, the more she can open up - a few pints, a close friend do make a difference for her - but in more complex ways. Not only can she do 'what does that mean' for him, but also 'what does that mean for me'.

So when a woman uses the facility of song, it doesn't just open her up, it adds another layer to that emotion. Since the way we choose to express anything (eg: gesture, vocal inflection, facial expression) says as much about what we're communicating as the actual words we use, I'm suggesting that a female character chooses to use song (just as we choose the way in which, and the extent to which we communicate about something) to add something else to the listener's experience of our story. To make ourselves seem more sympathetic, more jolly... to draw the listener in with a bit more definition. It's calculated.

When a man sings, there's just one floodgate to open - a little or a lot - and out come the emotions. When a woman sings, there are a series of smaller floodgates to control and direct the flow. Hence, she has more tools to use, and hence - she can manipulate the expression of the emotion to a greater degree.

At this point, I should admit to being a very bad writer. No, seriously. If I'm honest, I see all men as hunter/protectors and all women as bearer/nurturers. Plus I really see only the two emotions: being afraid and being hungry. Not even feeling those things, actually. Just being them. Being afraid of, and being hungry for. I'm probably the most guilty of discrimination against either gender, depending on which one you are. I'm all about sweeping generalisations.

And can I just add that I've never written a gay man... or any man who identifies heavily with a female approach, gay or straight. I suspect that you should include men-who-identify-more-with-women in my definition of 'female' in this. I'm aware the division I've made is not gender-accurate, but I'm also aware that there are yin people and yang people and I have to describe them somehow!

I don't quite know how I manage to write men, not being one. Maybe the distance I have helps me observe them, where writing women is too close for comfort. Maybe I take my experience of female emotions and plop them into men so I can study them without getting involved. Maybe I just want to explore the first emotional flow and avoid going too much deeper, so I choose men in order to have a more simple floodgate system.

Ask my therapist. He'll nod and ask you what it is about you that makes you want to ask that question...

What are lyrics?

2007-02-22T13:05:00.000Z

What are lyrics? Are they sung dialogue? Are they poetry? Are they some other kind of unique expressive language?

They clearly don't need rhymes in order to tell a story or express an emotion. See Ben Folds' song The Luckiest for evidence of this. (Read the lyrics here.) I'm guessing it gets played at a lot of weddings, and you don't need much more proof than that of its success as a love song.

The Luckiest is a perfect crossover between pop and musical theatre: that song would work just as well in the middle of act two as it does standing alone on YouTube. Whilst some pop songs simply inflate the emotion of the hook (for example: How Do I Live (Without You) ?) others illustrate that emotion with a story. You can often tell by the hook: the hook 'The Luckiest' requires a story as explanation. The hook 'How Do I Live (Without You) ?' contains the entire contents of the song. The rest of the lyric simply puts that sentiment in other ways.

If you put How Do I Live (Without You) ? into the second act of a musical, what would happen? The character would hover in a single emotional moment. No-one moves on anywhere in that song, but then no-one moves on anywhere in The Luckiest either. However, The Luckiest does have a story for the audience to follow, and I think that as an audience, we expect to be moved by show. Not just emotionally moved, but also moved on.

After all, it's a storytelling genre, and being told a story is all about being taken on a journey. One of the most successful love songs in musical theatre is If I Loved You from Carousel by Rodgers and Hammerstein. Although the lyrics do not describe an actual change of sentiment, there is the possibility that either Julie or Billy will actually say how they feel about each other. In fact, they do say it, and then they take it back. They come so damn close to just being honest with each other (and with themselves) that they must surely both be aware of what the other is saying.

That's the beauty of the lyric: it's multi-layered, even without the dialogue in between the sections of the song. They tell each other a story, but then they claim the story is just imagination. They inflate an emotion, but then claim not to be feeling that emotion. On the surface, they almost go on a journey. Emotionally, they clearly do go on a journey, but deny it. The song teases us with a journey, and takes us somewhere too.

How Do I live (Without You) ? wouldn't work in the same way. We'd have to stop journeying. The Luckiest might work in the same way, since it has a story... but is that enough? I say the context might make it enough.

If the character singing it were responding to someone who is doubting the good fortune in loving them, then the story within the song becomes an offering of proof: this is why I'm lucky - because loving you gives me a reason to live.

The answer is not about how much they love, but why they are lucky to love so much. Because there is an answer to be found in the lyric, there is a question implied: what makes you think you're lucky to love me? (Implying: you idiot!)

With How Do I Live (Without You) ? there is no answer to be found, and therefore no implied question. In fact, the lyric is a question. And this is where the subject of catharsis is raised.

An audience must be able to collaborate with the show; to access it emotionally in some way. A story demands an audience in order to exist. In fact, our lives are made up of stories, from "Guess what happened to me today?" to "What are you implying?" - we try to fit every little detail of our lives into the subjective story of how we perceive our experiences.

When we collaborate with a show, we identify with the characters' emotional journeys. Thus we can encounter emotions without actually experiencing them: love, fear and so on. We gain catharsis - a sort of purging, or perhaps a reaffirmation - of that emotion.

To obtain catharsis, we must go on a journey. Emotions travel, they don't just appear and vanish. No matter how quickly an emotion rises, it still rises and falls rather than just being and not being. Therefore we need a characters' journey to lead us through that rise and fall. Drama consists of journeys. In its most simple form, there are three 'beats' in a dramatic journey: first, a situation; second, a conflict; third, a resolution. The conflict can be seen as a question about the situation to which the resolution provides an answer.

To return to How Do I Live (Without You) ? : if there's no specifically-implied situation-question-answer, there's no specifcally-implied journey. In that lyric, there is only a question. Why couldn't it exist in a show as the question part? Because there's no specific situation to which the question can refer. The 'I' in the song must be everyman, since no details are provided in the lyric as to whom the singer specifically is as a person, or where they're at (in this relationship) other than some implication that they're missing the person they love. But that loved one could be anything from dead to gone to out shopping.

That's the beauty of the lyric as a pop lyric. It must exist as a stand-alone song, played on the radio, on TV, on a stereo. Therefore, it must be able to exist within anyone's day, in any location, in any situation. And it can, because it's generic enough to make no specific situational implications. It would work at a wedding and in the office. Anyone, anywhere, can connect with it on their own emotional level in their choice of emotional situations, and thereby gain some personal catharsis for whatever matters most to them.

The lyric says: "Here's a question. Pick your own situation and resolution."

However, when we go to see a musical, we expect to be led with a little more structure than that. We're expecting a whole story, not something generic for which we have to do our own work. We want to be given a situation, a question and a resolution. We want to be told a whole story.

The Luckiest implies a situation simply because the focus of the hook is not on the love, but on the luck of experiencing such love. Luck is not an emotion, in and of itself, but it is a situation. One exists in a state of luck. Ask any gambler about this. The emotions they experience during that state of being lucky - that's another thing entirely.

So there's a situation, which implies a question: what emotion are you experiencing in your state of luck? A profound sense of love. All we have to do to dramatise that is set the situation and the question in an appropriate context for a resolution to be possible.

For example: Jane's life is a nightmare - everything seems to be going wrong for her. One of the things that makes all this worse is the guilt she feels for putting her partner John through watching her struggle with things that are beyond their control. Because she feels guilty about this, she fights any support he offers her. He desperately wants to help her in any way he can, but his hands are mostly tied. However, he can try to resolve this guilt she feels, thereby allowing them to at least have each other to fall back on.

He doesn't just tell her how much he loves her, because that would imply that she is a Good Thing, and she knows loving her is currently not all good. What he tells her is how lucky he feels to be able to love her. She already knows he loves her, but by pointing out that he's lucky to love her, his love for her is suddenly able to incorporate everything in her life, both good and bad. The value is not placed on the love itself, but on the luck of loving; on the state of loving, which clearly includes all the not-so-good stuff.

Therefore, there is a situation which begs a question, and an answer to the question: a journey.

To return to the question of whether lyrics are sung dialogue or poetry: in some ways, they are both. Poetry tends to view a subject through a linguistically-creative lens: the structure, or the rhyming scheme, or the condensed language, or the subjectively-perceived description of the subject are some of the tools that shape words as poetry.

Dialogue is more linguistically free in that respect. The emotional slant is provided by vocal intonation and physical gesture, by context and situation.

With lyrics, music provides a lot of the emotional slant. The music sets the emotional tone. The Luckiest is a ballad - the slow tempo somewhat implies a sense of thoughtfulness, or of longing, or even of sorrow. I would have added things like 'peacefulness' to that list, but the fact that the word 'lucky' is used in a comparitive sense - luckiest - gives it additional weight that implies (at least to me) that it's attempting to win a 'lucky' competition of some kind. That fact (at least, for me) takes away some of the peacefulness of it.

(Interestingly, the music - or at least, the orchestration - of How Do I Live (Without You) ? has a sense of urgent passion behind it that implies the same sense of competition, to me. Which gives a little hope for it being able to exist in a dramatic context, but not as successfully as The Luckiest would.)

As I've said, I don't think rhymes are necessary. In fact, I think they often get in the way of musical theatre songs. They can help in a more generically-accessible pop song because they allow the listener to 'fall home' frequently: the rhyming word is a satisfying end to the opening left by the word with which it rhymes. This works in a similar way to a familiarity with song structure.

Although many people wouldn't know what AABA song structure is if you asked them, most of us are familiar with the Beatles' song Yesterday which is a perfect example of the structure. (You can see the lyrics here.) Two A sections, followed by a B in which the melody changes, and then a return to the A section.

We may not realise that this is AABA, but in our hearts/psyche/subconscious the musical structure is familiar to us. This musical structure is fantastic for supporting a dramatic journey:

First A: the situation is set up. (As opposed to today: yesterday, everything was good.)

Second A: the conflict or question is introduced. (Today, there's a shadow over me. Something has changed.)

These are both fairly factual: here's what it was like yesterday, and here's what it's like today.

The B: some kind of exploration or consideration of the conflict. (I think I did something wrong to make the situation change.)

This tends to be more emotional, more personal, less factual. Hence, because there's a different approach to the subject in question, the music changes to give support to the more subjective slant.

The final A: draws a conclusion - which can again be more factual. (This is how today is for me, as a result of the change.) The music helps us return to that more objective point of view by repeating the original melody.

Yesterday was written as a pop song, so in order to be more generically-accessible, the singer doesn't actually learn anything from their process within the B section. In musical theatre, the possibility of learning something about the situation or themselves within the B (in which the music changes to support some introversion and subjective consideration) allows for a conclusion or decision to be reached with regard to the situation in the final A: back to a more factual aproach, yet the character has gone on a journey, literally, from A to B.

When we encounter the AABA format, even though we may not know it, we're encountering something we inherently recognise from years of exposure to it. Thus we might not know that we're expecting a B after two A sections, but we would feel that something was slightly wrong if it didn't happen that way.

There are, of course, ways to take the AABA format and break the structure for a specific dramatic reason. By using the audience's expectations of the song structure as a tool, we can shape the story for them in a different way.

The same thing applies to rhyme. By setting up a word-structure in which rhymes are expected, we can deliberately forego the rhyme where it should happen, thus prompting a specific emotional response from the audience: a laugh, for example, if the most obvious rhyme in the situation would be an anglo-saxon oath but we break that expectation and use an innocent rhyming word instead.

Musical theatre lyrics have the responsibility of continuing the dramatic journey of the character, so how does rhyme fit into that? Considering The Luckiest again, even though it's not a musical theatre song, it's clear that rhyme is not necessary for a song to imply a dramatic journey. But with regard to If I Loved You, a very musical theatre song, the rhyming scheme is quite tight. Look:

If I loved you, time and again I would try to say
all I'd want you to know.
If I loved you, words wouldn't come in an easy way.
Round in circles I'd go.
Longing to tell you, but afraid and shy,
I'd let my golden chances pass me by.
Soon you'd leave me.
Off you would go in the mist of day,
never, never to know
how I loved you.
If I loved you.

(Lyrics copyright Oscar Hammerstein II etc etc, fair use only here)

The rhyming scheme is ABABCCAB - incredibly tight. The audience is allowed to fall into a comfortable place at the end of every line! But the character is being very cautious - the lyric says as much: "I wouldn't know what to say to you". So the character never strays far from home, unwilling to make a break from her comfort zone of lying to Billy about how she really feels.

So the choice of rhyming scheme is a dramatic one: it's another songwriting tool, used carefully and deliberately to encourage the audience on the intended emotional journey of the character, thereby more effectively facilitating the audience's own emotional catharsis.

The Luckiest feels very honest, to me. It believe that the person singing the song is being utterly truthful about his feelings. One of the reasons for this must surely be the lack of rhyming scheme. There is a linguistic structure to the lyric, since it floats atop a musical line that has structure: a verse/chorus structure, in fact the chorus being nothing much more than the hook.

The person singing steps right out of their home - in fact, there is no home in this song. No rhyme for the next line to fall back on. It's linguistically free, which implies an emotional freedom in that person's expression of the sentiment.

Actually, it's not true that there are no rhymes in that song. There is one direct rhyme:

And in a wide sea of eyes,
I see one pair that I recognize.

(Lyrics copyright Ben Folds etc etc, fair use only here)

Although this rhyme has the suggestion of being accidental, existing alone a sea of no-rhymes as it does, there is a good reason for its presence in this line: the fact that the second one falls home on a rhyme supports the idea of one's gaze roaming through a crowd and falling home on the one pair of familiar eyes there.

To return to my original questions: just as poetry makes use of such tools as rhyme to facilitate the writer's intent for the audience's experience, so lyrics use rhymes. However, since a lyric does not exist without the music - even in reading lyrics, if we know the song it's very hard to 'hear' the lyrics in our head without hearing the corresponding melody - all of the tools a lyricist can use must also allow for the music to do its own work.

Are lyrics dialogue? If dialogue is person-honest (and what we say always comes from something in us) then a lyric must be person-honest. A song is surely inherently honest, since music is emotional-honesty brought to life. If a song is heavier with an unnecessary rhyming scheme than it is with emotional honesty, then the usefulness of the song in facilitating an audience's emotional connection with it is weakened: they have to look past the rhyming scheme to get to the emotion. You can't access an emotion on command. They rise and fall when triggered by something, so the trigger must be as accessible as possible.

Imagine Julie speaking to Billy instead of singing. She might say:

"You know, if I did love you, I'd probably keep trying to tell you... but I'd have trouble finding the right words, and I'd just go round in circles all the time without ever actually saying it. I'd really want to tell you, see, but I'd probably be so shy about it that I'd never actually get the words out... even when the perfect moment came, I'd mess it up and not say. Eventually, you'd just go off somewhere and I'd never see you again, and I'd never have told you I love you. I mean, if I loved you. That's what would happen if I loved you."

Add to that a lyrical structure, a rhyming scheme and some music and you've got yourself a more efficient and accessible way for an audience to instantly connect with her emotions. It works the same way with The Luckiest, but a rhyming scheme would actually detract from the sense of openness achieved by having none. Ben Folds knows how rhyming works as a tool, so he deliberately chooses not to use it in order to add to the overall effect he wants to create with the song.

Now look at the sentiment expressed in How Do I Live (Without You) ? - as dialogue, it might read thus:

"I can't live without you. Hell, I can't even breathe without you. If you ever leave me, I'll die!"

If someone said that to you, how would you view them? Personally, I'd say: Drama Queen. If someone said that to me, my only reaction would be a desire to run as far away from them as possible. So the song's sentiment expressed as flat dialogue doesn't exactly inspire me to feel an emotional connection with the person speaking.

But the song was written to be a generically-accessible pop song. It has to work just as well heard on the radio in the office as it does at a wedding. For something to trigger an emotion without being situation-specific, it must work harder. It must hit with more impact. Therefore the heightened language, in the context of a pop song, does the job perfectly.

But with regard to musical theatre, where there is a specific situation, a lyric is certainly dialogue in that we believe those words honestly came from the mouth of that character. And yes, lyrics are poetry in that they make use of the same kind of linguistic tools. Since a lyric cannot exist with its music, a musical theatre song is a collaborative animal, using tools from all of these genres to create a new, unique language of expression.

What that means for me as a writer of musical theatre is this: there are many linguistic tools I can use to make a song trigger the intended response from an audience. They key is that it's a choice, and I can also choose not to use them, or to use them in an unexpected way, to achieve my desired effect.

A sculptor uses tools to create a sculpture, but they don't put those tools on display with the sculpture (unless the intention is for the audience to connect with sculpture-and-process rather than sculpture). In the same way, I don't want to put my rhyming scheme or song structure on display. They're an intergral part of the song but, as with the AABA format of Yesterday, no-one needs to know that in order to make an emotional connection with the song.

Most importantly, ultimately, musical theatre songwriting is not about the tools. It's about the story, the character and their emotional journey. Being true to those things is really all that matters in the end.

A Show is a Child

2007-02-22T12:52:00.000Z

One of my directors wants more female parts. "There are never enough guys - can you change some of these to be female characters?"

Quite right, too: there are always more women than men. And, yes, I could. But not yet. I have to write the show in the way the show wants to be written. ("Don't you understand that it's not about me?") Once I've written the show, then we can make it work for the production... but a show is not about the production.

A show is a child. The first production is its coming-of-age journey. You don't tailor a child to fit the education system; you tailor the education system to suit the child. (Although try telling that to some boards of education.) Alright, the child has to make some adjustments. We can do that together, me and the director. Once the child has actually been born.

Don't get me wrong: I don't want to genetically-modify my children. The process of giving birth isn't just one push and out it pops. Changes are made slowly during gestation: it gradually becomes male or female. It gradually forms blonde or black hair. Sometimes it looks like one thing is going to happen, but in fact you get a different, unexpected result. It's not about crafting perfect children, it's about letting the child grow.

And then letting go.

Producers

2007-02-22T12:30:00.000Z

So one of my current producers decided, with infinite wisdom, to delete the show website without so much as notifying me, let alone asking me if I'd like to take over the payments, or even asking if there was any content I wanted to retrieve before it all got zapped.

I just hope to gods they haven't deleted the domain names too, since they're due to be returned to me with the rights.

Lovely to have support, isn't it? Oh for the day when the show is mine again.

Another producer (whom I do adore, it has to be said) has yet to pay the first part of the commission fee. Since it's so unusual to actually be paid to write musicals, I'm torn between being endlessly grateful and downright insulted. Normally, I do this shit for nothing. If you're going to offer to pay me, at least see it through in time for me to make the rent.

Yet another producer - well, the director - is supposed to be reading the book I want to adapt for that venue. No word yet, but then she is a bit busy. And a bit crap.

And finally, there's a show for which there is no producer yet. Not sure where to take that show. I think it's going to be small, intimate... but then, who has the funding to produce a new musical these days?

Where have all the reps gone? How am I supposed to develop my craft without them?