The book pictured at the left is a new reprint of a wonderful 1960 children’s book by Miroslav Sasek. I happened to stumble across it in, of all places, an Anthropologie store last week. It was one of those funny little WTF moments, because the second song in the second act of Skyline is called This is New York, and I had just been thinking about it, and about the other New York song in the show, and about New York songs in general.
Broadway musicals have produced a whole catalogue of songs about New York, from New York, New York (On the Town) to I Happen to Like New York (The New Yorkers); from NYC (Annie) to Another Hundred People (Company) — and dozens more, each with its own distinct character and flavor, each a near perfect evocation of the city, in all its guises and forms: big and exciting, scary and loud, alienating and cold. And in writing a show set so specifically in New York, and in such a particular time period, it was probably inevitable — even necessary — that I’d wind up writing a song that aspired to those ranks. That second act song is a plot song, by which I mean that it’s less a celebration, or even generally descriptive, of the city, than it is a means of unifying the events that transpire in this particular scene. But there is “New York song” in the show, in the opening number in fact. It’s Allison’s portion of a musical scene called Go!(Stop)/Go!(Stay). It’s the number that introduces both Paul and Allison to the audience, and gives us a sense of who they are, their characters and desires and what we can expect of them and all that “Musicals 101” hibbeldy-bibbeldy.
I don’t know why, but Stay (Allison’s song) was just one of the most hair-pullingly, infuriatingly difficult things I’ve ever had to write. It took – without exaggeration – over a year of on-and-off, pick it up and put it back down writing and re-writing. Even though I knew exactly what I wanted to say, exactly the way I wanted to say it – even the basic structure I wanted the song to take it just kept being … too much! It was too long, the lines were too long, the rhyme scheme too complex, the details too wordy and overdrawn. I just.couldn’t.get it. And then one day, while standing in the shower (which as we all know is the place where all the best ideas come – seriously, I don’t know why world leaders don’t just all take a bath together. They could solve 90% of humanity's problem in about an hour), it suddenly came to me. I figured out how to take the first two lines of the first A, slap them together with the last two and eliminate everything in between (or at least, move it somewhere else). Once I had that, everything else followed, and although it still took months to actually write the damn thing, when I finally finished it, it was one of those things where – okay. I said in probably the first post on this blog that there were few things in the world more boring and obnoxious than writers talking about writing, but the thing is, we all have experiences in our lives where something just goes so beautifully right: baking a perfect tray of lemon bars, completing our first continuous three-mile run, successfully potty-training our kid, that no matter how petty and mundane they are, we just can’t help wanting to share it. We bring the lemon bars to work, post our miles on a runner’s website, memorialize the event for grandma in a photograph that will keep that poor kid in therapy for the rest of his life.
And this is one of mine: I’ve written a New York song. And I did a good job. Not only in the sense that it’s “a good song,” but in the sense that it does everything it needs to do dramatically speaking. It’s not just a New York song, it’s Allison’s New York song. It’s a song for a character who is both young and inexperienced and a little naïve, and also smart and ambitious and tougher than she looks. A young woman who moved to New York at a time when young women simply didn’t do that kind of thing, because she wanted to be a “real writer,” and you couldn’t be a “real writer” back in Ohio. Who loves everything about the city, the good and the bad of it, but who still manages to maintain a true New Yorker’s sense of humor and irony about it. A young woman who, shortly after singing this song, will sing another song, one in which she describes the moment, experienced by bright, ambitious young people throughout history, where she realizes that “I could change everything – and I probably should.”
I am happy about this. It was a long, drawn-out, painful process, but it’s done, and it’s good, and I really feel like it’s a great way to start a musical. A song about New York, for a musical about New York.
