And new for something completely different!

It's been a while, and for now Skyline is in the shop for re-tooling (more on that later).  Meanwhile, it's a new year and a brand-new musical -- for me and my multi-talented new collaborator, Jess Domain!  And in a nod to the 21st Century, this show will have a real, live website, not just a blog (not that there's anything wrong with that ...)  While it's under construction, please stop by, check out and "like" our Facebook page for regular updates.  

So!

It's been a busy week around these parts. Actually, it was a busy week around these parts, a couple of weeks ago. Specifically, in the completion (!) of the script and lyrics. Which, yay! Are done. If you actually read this thing, which I realize is doubtful, although if you're reading this I guess you must, so it gets confusing, but anyway, if you do you may recall that what kind of jump-started this project again after I'd put it aside for quite a while after The Troubles at my day job, was the fact that I wanted to submit the book for the Kleban last year.

As it turned out, there was no way in heck that I could have finished it in time, but a couple of months ago I realized that the deadline date was coming up again for this year, which kind of lit a fire under me. So I got back to work on it, hoping that for once in my life, I might actually get a submission for something in with at least a few days to spare before the actual drop dead date. Long story short, let's just say my streak continues unbroken, but I did get the thing in, at around 4:30 on the 15th, actually walking it into their offices on my lunch break.

In the end, I have to say I was very happy with the finished product. Quite frankly, there is one song that was kind of a temporary dummy lyric, and even that wasn't bad. And I realize I may need to write one more song for the second act, but other than that, it's quite good, and I only submitted the libretto anyway; they're not even going to be judging the lyrics, so it's all good.

Anyway, the deadline was Wednesday the 15th. That Friday, I sent out a copy to the composer, to the email address I'd always used for him in the past. Now, I had taken kind of a risk in not being in touch with him for a while, because the work had become so stop-and-start erratic that I actually felt kind of bad about it. I had finally decided I would just work full out on the thing whenever and wherever I could, and then just send him a completed script when it was completely finished. That way, no matter what happened on my end, it would be entirely in his hands and he could work at his own pace without having to wait for me and the vagaries of my daily life. If, God forbid, I got hit by a bus, he could finish the show and produce it posthumously, in honor of my memory.

So I sent out the script, and a week went by, and I heard nothing. And I was like, well, dumbass, that's what happens when you leave someone hanging for like, a year. He must have changed his email address, and now you have no way of getting back in touch with him. And I'mn going six kinds of crazy thinking, well, now I'm right back to square one, having to find a new composer and it's going to be a total nightmare and if I don't find someone in like, three weeks at the outside, or put it this way: if I couldn't get someone started on music in time to have at least three songs finished by say mid-January, that was it for 2011. Based on the way the deadlines run for the various festivals and workshops, timing wise, I would be completely out of the running until 2012. So there was a bit of a panic moment until ... I got a reply from him this morning! He was working on another show, had been busy, was glad to have received the script, lalala, all is good.

Meanwhile (and there will be more about this later, but:) I had a couple of major lightbulb moments a couple of weeks ago. One relates to the next show, which I'll be getting started on like, Monday. The other was that since I still haven't nailed down a definite replacement director, it might be a good idea to get in touch with a former co-worker of mine from the Law Factory. Who happens to have been an assistant director on Spring Awakening, Memphis, the Musical, and a couple of straight plays, also on Broadway. She's quite good friends with a couple of friends of mine, and seems like a lovely person, although we didn't interact much when we worked together because our schedules were so different. But both my friends have said absolutely, send it to her, they're sure she'd at least consider it, and now that I don't have to worry about whether I have a composer or not (a pretty major consideration, you know. For a musical!) I'm gonna email her next week and see if she's interested in at least getting involved at the Equity Staged Reading level, and then see where things go from there.

So all in all, a productive couple of weeks, and things seem to be moving in a pretty positive direction. Fingers crossed, they'll stay that way going forward.

small "h" huzzah!

So I finished Act I yesterday! It's one of those weird, let-downy kind of things, because I had been feeling very very optimistic about things, thinking, "wow! this is really ticking along, for a first draft." Everything was developing quite well, there was some humor, a little bit of emotion, and, of necessity, I had been doing a LOT of editing as I went, trimming every syllable that wasn't absolutely necessary, so it had a lovely, astringent crispness to it that is really not typical of my writing, but which worked beautifully with the early '60s "look and feel" I was going for. But it was all going so well that I felt compelled to end the act on a really strong note, and I think I wanted that so badly that I kind of doomed myself to failure. Which is absolutely fine, obviously, because it's just a first draft, and everything else feels pretty tight, and of course I can fix it. But the main reason I was rushing to wrap it up was that I had promised pages to the composer ages ago and hadn't followed through, and I just didn't want to hold off anymore. And that means someone else is going to be reading it, and he's going to be seeing it in a state I'm not 100% happy with.

ANyway, I made this other decision recently that I want to have a director associated with the project even before we start to write songs, which sounds weird. But I want to do at least one or two readings of just the book before we start thinking about music and lyrics. The whole idea is to make sure the script is really working before proceeding to the next step (it's so much easier to cut/edit/revise dialogue than songs), and I think it makes sense to hear the script read in order to determine that. And I have been forceably restraining myself from e-mailing the director I hope will work with us on that, because I don't want to do anything prematurely.

On the other hand, I at least want to make sure her e-mail address is still good, since I haven't been in touch with her in over a year. So I think I'll wait until I hear back from Bob (the composer), at least acknowledging that he's got the script and hasn't changed his mind, and then e-mail the director and make sure I have the right contact info for her.

Oh, and look! I have updated this blog again, and it's less than four months since my last post!

So ... anyway.

So, about four months ago I slapped up my first post on this thingerydoo, and haven't been back since.

Surprisingly, this is not actually the result of sloth on my part (or at least, not entirely). I have actually been working on the show, there just hasn't been too much to post about. It's true that about the only thing duller than listening to people talk about their dreams is listening to them talking about their work, and I guess I kind of instinctively don't want to put up blog posts about how today, I typed four new pages and had an interesting insight into one of my characters, because, well. Who cares?

However, there have been a couple of small, actual developments worth noting: First, the composer I wanted to work with has agreed to do it! There's the small drawback that he lives in California and I live in New York, but at this point, that's not even going to be an issue until it's time to do a sample CD, so I'm not exactly sweating that.

The second thing is that I've decided to do this: http://scriptfrenzy.org, and it's kind of lit a small fire under my ass. I've been working a little more dutifully, and am up to about 28 pages of what I hope will eventually be no more than about a 60-page script. That's 60 pages of book, before music and lyrics. The good news is that by that metric, I'm almost halfway done! The bad news is, I'm nowhere near the end of first act, and there really isn't anything that can be cut so far. Which is a little unnerving, and exactly what I was afraid would happen.

The third thing is that I've discovered that the author of one of the books I read as part of my research for this project has a website, and apparently accepts personal e-mail through the site. This may eventually prove very helpful, if she can point me in the direction of some more detailed information regarding a particular aspect of the story that I've been unclear about up to now (gosh, this is so mysterious, isn't it?).

Anyway, at this point I'm thinking I may start visiting this blog a bit more regularly. So, probably I'll be back again some time in June.

Vroom

This is -- or, eventually, it will be -- the blog for my new show, an original book musical entitled Skyline.

My idea is to track the development of the show, basically from the ground up; from outline to first draft to finding a collaborator; through rewrites, auditions, showcases, etc. My short-term goal is to submit the finished project to NYMF in 2009, although there may be other small workshops here and there in the interim. Well, okay scratch that. My short-term goal is to finish the darn thing. My medium-term goal is to submit the finished project to NYMF in 2009, etc. etc. For the longer term, who knows.

This is my first post, and it's a bit ragged, primarily because this is kind of a big deal for me. Although I started out as a lyricist and librettist, only branching out into straight playwriting in my late twenties, this is only the second musical I've worked on in the last decade. The last one, a sweet, funny, character-driven book show, ended in disaster when my totally unique, original, never-been-done-before idea got put through some sort of burlesque meat grinder by another writing team and turned into exactly the sort of jokey-jokey musical/cabaret/pastiche "people hate musicals so let's write a musical for people who hate musicals!" kind of thing that makes those of us who actually like musicals, and want to write them for a living, recite the serenity prayer while weeping into our vodka tonics. They even used the our title, for crying out loud.

Which is why I'll probably be postponing writing about the actual plot until the idea is a little further developed. Once the show starts to get its legs under it, I'll probably feel a little more comfortable discussing it in detail.

Without giving too much away, though, it's sort of an adult romantic comedy, set in New York City in the early 1960s (yeah, yeah, Madmen. Rosey, meet Zeitgeist; Zeitgeist, Rosey. I'm hoping this can only help us, "something in the air"-wise). The idea actually came from, of all things, a Friday Five question asked of me on my LJ, some three or four years ago. As for where it stands right now, I'm doing exactly what I swore to myself I would not do, which is roughing in the first act, even though I haven't finished the outline yet. I keep telling myself that this will probably be okay, so long as I don't write too far ahead of myself and besides, I figure I probably shouldn't be not writing it, as long as I'm actually motivated to write.

I've got an e-mail out to a potential composer. This is someone I've worked with before, in a manner of speaking. We collaborated on the Raw Impressions series in 2005 (so, technically I guess this is the third musical I've worked on recently, although it's only the second full-length one). This guy is really talented and very versatile, as well as having a really clear-headed, "composer's" (as opposed to "songwriter's") mentality when it comes to approaching a theater project. When we worked together last time, he got all excited when he saw the first set of lyrics I gave him. "Look at all this white space!" He actually said that. I gave my standard, semi-tongue-in-cheek response of "Well, yeah. That's where the acting goes." And he said, "Yes. But it's also where the music goes." Which, duh. In twenty-five years had never really occurred to me before.

When you've spent enough time (which, sadly, I have) with composers who don't understand why the fact that they've set your quirky, up-tempo, comedy lyric as a mournful romantic dirge is a problem, or who, when you point out that the word is not pronounced "def-IN-ite-LY," say, "well, I think my setting is fine and I'm not changing it," you come to cherish the people who actually appreciate the time you've invested in the little throw-away details, like rhyme and scansion. This guy does, and I think he'll be a real asset to the production if I can get him to commit. The only drawback is that he's in California and I'm in NY, but you know, at this point, the technology involved here has advanced to such a point that even I probably won't be too hampered by that.

So. First post!

Awesome. And that's basically all there is to say about that. More as I know it myself.