Songs About New York (Part II)

Who’s the luckiest girl I know?
I’m the luckiest girl I know!
Here in the heart of a city just starting its day
After waking at dawn to its siren song of urban decay

Where’s the prettiest town I know?
Here’s the prettiest town I know!
Under the crime, and the layers of grime — like Pompeii!

Now, the dirt the noise and the fear
May not be what brought me here
But attractions like these
Are just some of the reasons I stay

Who’s the victim of unfair press?
You’re the victim of unfair press!
People complain that you’re loud and you’re vain and you’re cold
Put me straight in the ground if I ever sound so tired and old

Who’ll be with you through thick and thin?
I’ll be with you through thick and thin!
Here at your side, I’m along for the ride — all the way!
I can take on whatever may come
If here’s where I’m starting from
Think of all that could be
And it’s easy to see why I stay!

Back home they think I’m crazy
New York’s no place to be!
Well, E.B. White and I respectfully disagree
Ring Lardner and O’Henry —
They seemed to liked, too
Why not? When every window
Offers a bird’s-eye view
Of a fabulous picture postcard
From the city of my dreams
Where the message on the back says: BOOM!!
And it rattles and crashes and screams:

“Who’s the luckiest girl I know?
You’re the luckiest girl I know!
Stick with me, kid, like those other guys did and … some day!”
The allure of wealth and acclaim —
Sure, that may be why I came
But it ain’t happened yet, and do I look upset?
So please don’t ever let me feel doubt or regret
Could I leave you, my pet? Rue the day that we met?
I’d be lost you can bet, if I ever forget why I stay!

The Song That Almost Wasn't

I posted a while back about my doomed efforts to rush through a bunch of lyrics for this show to meet a prize deadline. And while it was almost certainly for the best that this didn't happen, it did at least finally get me working on the songs for the show. I've actually written six of them now (well, actually five and a half — the opening number, which is fairly complicated, is only about half complete).

This was an incredibly hard thing for me to get started on. Partly because of circumstances generally: my work situation, the lack of time, the fact that the work situation has made me so awfully miserable that I couldn't even bring myself to think about writing. But part of it was that I just feel so strongly about this show. I want it to be "perfect," which of course isn't possible, nothing is ever really perfect. But the book turned out to be so solid; I was so happy with it, and so pleased with how relatively painless the process was. Not that I didn’t agonize over it a little, I did. But that was mostly in the thinking and planning phase, not so much in the writing phase. I don't remember if I've mentioned this before, but I'm writing this show using a musical theater book-writing technique I've developed over many years, and which I actually hope to start teaching next year. I wanted to use this show to sort of "beta test" that method, and I have been very pleasantly surprised by how well it's worked. In fact, the only thing in the very first draft of the show that really didn't work was the one thing that didn't conform to the "template" I'd devised. Once I went back and re-wrote the scene following the "rules," it all worked about eighty-five percent better.

So, I was obviously very determined, when writing the score, to adhere very closely to the rules I'd set out for myself (and anyone else who cared to use them). And one of those was that, in writing a new show, one must never, ever, ever go into a project thinking — before any writing has taken place — "well, I know I want there to be a song about such-and-such." Basically, the idea is that you never, ever write any song until after the book is completely finished, and even then you never even contemplate writing a syllable's worth of lyric that isn't absolutely necessary and doesn't make perfect sense in the moment. That seems absurdly obvious, but it's probably in the top five stupid mistakes every writer makes when writing a musical, and one that causes untold frustration and agony when they wind up spending months trying to find a way to re-write an entire scene — or an entire show! — to accommodate one ill-placed song, simply because that song is "so good! We cant cut it, it's the best thing in the whole show!" or worse, simply because it's too much work to write a new, more suitable one.

Well, I'd gotten to the top of the second scene in the first act, which is the scene where Allison first mentions Paul's crusade to her lecherous boss. And it felt like the boss should have a song there. It felt like the "right place" for a song. But there didn't seem to be any logical reason for the boss to be singing. His whole through-line in the scene is, he's encouraging Allison to be more assertive in the way she pitches her story idea, and I thought he might have a song about that (the hook "Sell Me!" came to mind), but the truth of the matter is, he doesn't give a stump about her story, or her career at the magazine or, frankly, her. He just wants in her pants. He wouldn't actually sing a song about that, because it would be grotesequely inappropriate. But he wouldn't waste his breath on a song about how she can present her story more persuasively, because he doesn't give enough of a rat's hat.

So, one night about two weeks ago, I was lying in bed, half-asleep, when it suddenly hit me: Of course Barry isn't singing about the story. He's singing about getting Allison into bed — he's just couching it in "pitching the story" terms. He's using his "advice" on how to get her story into print as a means to communicate his interest in her nether regions.
So I jumped out of bed and scrawled a couple of quick notes, and the next day, while I was out run-walking on Shore Road, the song literally wrote itself in about twenty minutes, and I have to tell you, it was the most fun I've had writing anything in I can't even tell you how long. The ideas, the rhymes, the rhythms, the wordplay, all just kept coming at me unbidden. I felt like I've always thought Cole Porter must have felt when he was writing "You're The Top" — just giddy with the fun of it, and never wanting it to stop. Sitting there at the piano thinking, "oh, come on, there's gotta be another — aha! Roxie usher! That'll work!" scrawl, scrawl, scrawl.
So anyway, here's the song that proved the easiest one of the bunch to write so far, probably because it was the one that I never planned to write (and almost didn’t write) to begin with:


You’ve gotta sell me —
Sell me!
It’s not enough to tell me
You have to overwhelm me
With the soundness of your case
So make a play for my attention
And then hold it once it’s got
If you don’t grab it first time out
You may not get another shot

So go on pitch me
Pitch me!
Your goal is to bewitch me
Show how this will enrich me,
Make my world a better place
You’ve got a lot of competition
Try to rise above the mob
And if it doesn’t leave me wanting more
You haven’t done your job

I only want to help you
If you’d give me half a chance
Those other guys won’t give
A kid like you a second glance
They see a pretty girl
And they’ve got one thing on their mind
But I can see the raw potential
They can never hope to find

So come on, schmooze me
Schmooze me!
But quick, before you lose me
I’m asking you to use me —
Let me help you win this race!
Because I’ve been around the track before
A couple hundred times
So if you learn from my experience
Would that be such a crime?

Yeah honey, woo me
Woo me!
Wind up and pitch it to me
Your best ideas don’t do me
Any good out there in space
‘Cause an idea is like a woman
Playing coy will often fail
And if you want to close the deal
You have to open up the veil

And baby, flaunt it!
Flaunt it!
You gotta make me want it
If I’m not feeling haunted
Hours later by the trace
Of your alluring proposition
Like a perfume in the night
And if it doesn’t drive me crazy
Then you didn’t do it right

Remember I’m your reader
If I buy it, so will they
Convince me that you’ve got
A vital message to convey
I don’t have to agree with you
I only have to care
So be eminently reas’nable
Be eloquent, be fair —

And then you hit ‘em!
Hit ‘em!
Divide ‘em up and split ‘em
This rag is the epitome
Of pressure under grace
You know, a couple million people
Look to us for what to think
And if they won’t write angry letters
Then it isn’t worth the ink

So come on, sell me!
Sell me!
Your message should compel me
Or else you might as well be
Running endlessly in place
You’re on a straight line to the finish
Bring it home before we’re old
You gotta sell me, sell me, sell me!
Sell me, sell me, sell me!
Sell me, sell me, sell me, sell me, sell me —
Until I’m sold!

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.