Finale – Act Two

Here she is, boys: the 500th post on this blog, which is not quite ten years old.

500?

That’s WAY too many.

Some may view this as an impressive accomplishment. You’re welcome to your opinion. But I’m sure we can agree that I have a lot to say about this world of musicals. At this point, I feel like I’ve run out of words. And, since I know the average length of a post, I can reveal that I’ve put more than half a million words on this site.

That’s WAY too many.

But there was no one to stop me once I started. And that makes blogging markedly different than musical writing. The late great Mark Sutton-Smith got me a free website, and off I went. Writing musicals, you always need collaborators, such as a producer and a theatre willing to put your piece on. They make their determinations – to present or not to present – based on an assessment of the quality and marketability of your work. No gatekeeper exists in the blogging world. Any idiot can put words up on the internet. Half a million, in this idiot’s case.

That’s WAY too many.

I’ve been thinking a lot in the past four months about the things we give away for free. You don’t pay to read this, and I don’t earn anything from writing it. In the fevered world of Facebook, an unhappy cacophony of worry and outrage, I decided to counter-program. Every day, I put up a song of mine. Every week, I live-stream a free concert devoted to a different Broadway songwriter. I feel good about entertaining Facebook readers that way, but it’s yet more giving away my art for free.

And that devalues everything. If my songs and concerts are any good, then, the theory goes, I deserve compensation for my work. From the consumer’s point of view, there’s all sorts of musical material you can enjoy for free, or for the price of watching a brief advertisement. We who create musicals aren’t being paid for the huge amount of work we do, generally. In a world where theatres are open, a tiny percentage earn a share of ticket prices, but that’s not happening as I write this. It’s as if the world is telling me “That thing you do, musical theatre writing, well, we think it’s worthless. You’re being paid (not!) accordingly.”

So, now that I’ve done my 500th post here – 

That’s WAY too many.

it’s time I put down my pen. I’ve given you, dear reader, quite a lot to read, and the site will remain up: Read posts you haven’t read before, or revisit ones you have. You can also listen to my three SoundCloud pages – 

and search my name on YouTube. If I had my druthers, you’d enjoy my writing the way it was intended to be enjoyed – live in a theatre, and you’d have to pay for a ticket.

And I suspect you already know this, but here goes again: musical theatre is a living art, meant to be experienced live. Sounds created by singers, musicians, orchestrators and sound designers are supposed to bounce off the walls of an auditorium into living ears. And if you applaud, or perceptibly react, the performers will take that in. You’ll feed their performance, with energy flowing across the footlights in both directions. That’s the way it ought to be.

Much as we all enjoyed the Disney+ video of Hamilton, there’s no denying that the energy of the viewing audience had no effect on the cast, who did their work many years ago. You may feel like you got away with a bargain, having spent less than ten dollars so your whole household could see it again and again. Liveness is so important to me, I feel I got a bargain when I paid $150 to see it in a New York theatre

Of course, no one has that option now. But there’s a couple fears I can’t help expressing. One is that in a world where everybody gets used to paying next to nothing for a how, it will become increasingly harder to convince people to see live theatre. The nature of liveness, so important to me, isn’t so important to other people.  

The other fear is broader, about performing arts in general. The revenue stream has been turned off at the spigot. When will it get turned on again? Relatedly, when will audiences feel confident about assembling in a theatre? Will I live to see the day?

Instead of blogging, I’ll be concentrating on ways I can eke out some income through my art. It’s something I’ve been doing all my life, and it’s hard to accept that the opportunity to squeeze some lucre from my artistic activities has ended before my life did. “The theatre is dying,” we often say. I’ve been working with a think tank of sort, attempting to innovate answers for this strange new world.

And this website, I suspect, will evolve into more of a demonstration of what I’ve done, what I can do. Look for pages to pop up about most of my shows. Perhaps I’ll offer dramaturgical services. And look, in the real world, for more musicals by me. I’m not giving up writing those. I really don’t expect that, when my 25th show is produced, I’ll say,

That’s WAY too many.

The beauty of your eyes

So, how’d it go?

The Influencer had two public zoom performances in late June and was seen by roughly 500 people worldwide, from Haiti to Hong Kong. Instead of the roar of a standing ovation, we got a lot of this – 👏👏👏👏👏👏  – in the chat column. For people who do live theatre, that’s nice, certainly, but a little disconcerting. Ghostly. Lee Adams, in a show tune called Applause, called it “the sound that says love.” Here it was, iconic but silent.

I can’t help it – morose sort that I am – I focus on all that was lost. We turned a full-length stage musical into a half-hour video and had to jettison things that, in my mind, were essential to making The Influencer work. Yet, everyone tells me they loved this abbreviated version. I may be the only one experiencing loss now. And maybe writing down these “Lord, what might have been” items is a sort of self-therapy.

Back when we were meeting in person, I was asked to come up with an opening number that would introduce various communities and then come together in glorious counterpoint. The model was Tradition from Fiddler on the Roof. You hear from the poppas and the mommas, the sons and daughters, and then they all reprise their tunes simultaneously. Our opening had an added element: each number would be written in a completely different musical style. Company member Nick Guzman provided a tune we used for the family driving from the Midwest. Their car pulls up to a corporation, where a new employee is greeted in a techno style, Then, the youngest of the family gets shown around her new high school. On this we were conscious that the opening number to Mean Girls does exactly that, but mine is actually funny. When these disparate numbers are reprised together, there’d be thunderous applause.

Nobody watching the video gets the idea that this is one number. In between each song is dialogue with no underscoring. The songs are never heard in counterpoint and, of course, no applause.

But I don’t mean to imply there aren’t a lot of things the self-taped truncation does very well. One of my better-loved numbers, Give Me a Like, shows an online influencer seducing her audience into liking and subscribing. It was conceived as a solo and we were to see other characters watching. Then, we were to see this group following her recommendations of things to buy in a comic production number called Clio Says. As assembled by the brilliant young filmmaker Justin Long, hearts and thumbs-up icons float from the bottom of the screen. The viewer understands that Clio is having an outsized effect without the second number, and it’s no longer a solo.

I wrote a song in which a country singer influences an urban rock band with his softer sound. As he sings, the band members pick up their instruments and join in. This would have proved a bit complex for us to film, so it never went in front of cameras. Disappointing, and the scene, as shot, doesn’t illustrate what we intended originally.

Puzzling to the audience, as well, are references to squirrels. The payoff was supposed to be a comedic chorale we also didn’t have time to film, but some dialogue remains.

When you compress a ninety-minute work into one third of its length, it’s natural that certain things happen too quickly to make sense. In the final week of filming, we discovered a major plot point was rushing by rapidly, sewing confusion. I’ve been credited with coming up with the idea of a character’s inadvertent viral video. The thing I’m proud of here is that it’s a cinematic idea, not something that would have been thought of had we produced this for the stage. There, the climax would have involved several strains of plot coming together all at once: the new sound of the urban band that added the country kid utilized as a publicity jingle by his older brother’s employer. A crisis of conscience leading to an idea about using influence for positive change.

The conversion to on-line presentation giveth and it taketh away. Back when we were rehearsing live, choreographer Marina Munoz was having a field day with a number called Buy Buy Buy. She was using a large chorus, spreading them out in three dimensions over a fairly large stage. The switch to screen flattened her work to two dimensions. She ably instructed dancers as to what to do in their individual boxes, but that couldn’t involve moving forward and back like one does in the theatre. Compensating for this was Justin Long’s visual effects, which moved the self-created boxes against a background film of a shopping mall. It’s eye-popping. But what I like best about this number is the orchestration of Adin Boyer, who created the wacky and funkalicious feel I wanted in the music. Truly, I never would have been able to figure out how to do this, and here’s the unexpected gift. Had we done this at the Wallis-Annenberg Performing Arts Complex, I would have had a teeny tiny band. And my handful of players would only have been able to make a limited variety of sounds. In the movie, though, a virtual orchestra of unlimited size allows each song to have a completely different feel. If I wanted to use a harp for half a bar – and I did – I could, because it didn’t involve hiring a real harpist to lug her heavy instrument all the way to Beverly Hills to play for less than two seconds.

So that’s a saving grace. And I’m particularly pleased that the performers stepped up and acted for the camera so well. That’s what knocked out the audience the most. If you were not among our viewers those two times in June, I’m really sorry you missed it.