Gak.

So for the past month or so, things have been going pretty well on the administrative side -- things have been proceeding at a pace that was pretty much in keeping with the deadlines for various submissions that are coming up in 2011.

But I just went over to the ASCAP website to see what the deadline was for the 2011 workshop and apparently? There IS no 2011 workshop. Due to "schedule conflicts," the whole thing is just suspended until 2012. Of course! I mean, what would be the point of suspending it for any of the previous fifteen years, in which I didn't want to submit anything?

I mean, it was pretty low on my list of priorities, but I do not like it when stuff like this happens. I'm keeping up my end of the bargain, Universe. Kindly starting pulling your weight around here.

Proposed Tagline

So when the show is finally done, and we have to promote it, I was thinking about this for a tag:

"Skyline, The Musical. It has nothing to do with space aliens."

What do you think? That could work, huh?

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!

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.

Songs About New York

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.

Oh, fuck.

Oh, fuck fuck fuckity fucking fuckity fucking fuck.

http://www.hollywoodgo.com/movie-news/skyline-the-movie-9535/

Not Procrastinating So Much as Multitasking

All is going well with the writing, but I've been meaning to do this for a while and I wanted to dash this off before I packed up some stuff on my desk (including the magazine I scanned this image from), so here it is.

I guess it's probably impossible even to think about writing a musical set largely in 1961 without acknowledging arguably the musical of 1961 (there's a song early in my first act that I have already started referring to as "the I Believe In You song"). Early in the process, I bought a bunch of period magazines, partly for research purposes but mostly just to get me in the mood, and this December '61 edition of the late, lamented (by me, at least) Theater Arts seemed like a must-have.

I quote their review in full because (a) it's short and (b) why not?

"Here’s the happiest news of the season: a musical comedy in which everything works — in which, for a wonder, our pleasure accumulates all evening long and the stage is even more charged with merriment at the last curtain than it was at the first. This model musical is called How to Succeed in Business With out Really Trying, and it chronicles the rapid rise of a very tough but beguiling young man, J. Pierpont Finch, from resident window washer to chairman of the board of the World Wide Wickets Company. When we encounter Finch, he is perched on his window-washer’s scaffold, studiously poring over a book by Shepherd Mead that bears the same title as the musical—Mr. Mead actually exists and so does his book, and it’s a fairly funny one — and preparing to follow the book’s scandalously corrupt recommendations from start to finish. The increasingly complicated jams that young Finch gets into and then out of provide an ingenious and outrageous series of Lanier Davis episodes, and though good musical-comedy books are as rare as civic virtue between elections, the story line here is both strong and light and proves able to support a considerable weight of satire without sagging. As Finch, in direct contradiction to the title of this venal pilgrim’s progress, fights his way fiercely onward and upward, the more conspicuous arts and artifacts of American Big Business get a nice, sharp going over-the coffee break, the office party, the cleaning woman’s sorry nightly feather dusting, the brisk intramural lingo, the advertising presentation that presents nothing, and even the executive wash room, where, one gathers, careers are made and broken with terrifying speed! All of the many diverse talents involved in How to Succeed mingle and merge into a handsome family likeness that amounts almost to genius. The Frank Loesser songs—among them “The Company Way,” “Happy to Keep His Dinner Warm” and “A Secretary is Not a Toy” — make comments no less witty and incisive than the dialogue, which is j by Jack Weinstock, Willie Gilbert and Abe Burrows, who has directed the whole slam-bang affair in a splendidly broad, slam-bang fashion. Bob Fosse’s staging, Robert Fletcher’s costumes, and Hugh Lambert’s choreography are of a piece with Robert Randolph’s nervy, lively scenery, which conjures up a Mies building full of Loewy-like objects that one sees, at a second glance, are merely desks and chairs. Everything is vivid, playful and more or less preposterous; its purpose is to exhilarate us, and it does.

"Robert Morse is the wily Finch to perfection. As animated as silly putty and with a leer that manages to be both dastardly and disarming, young Mr. Morse bounds through what might have been a rather repellent part with such ardor and, where necessary, such a lack of conviction that we forgive him his worst crimes and silently beg him to commit still more horrendous ones. Charles Nelson Reilly plays the equally difficult part of Bud Frump, the boss’s nephew; he stands in Finch’s way and must be destroyed, and though his destruction would in any event give us no pain, since he is as ambitious and unscrupulous as his rival, it is much to Mr. Reilly’s credit that we don’t wish him to suffer too much. (He ends up, of course, on the window-washer’s scaffold that Finch has vacated, and his misery as he dangles there has a certain charm.) Rudy Vallee, marvelously undisguised by a heavy pince-nez and costumes out of John Held, Jr., plays the president of World Wide Wickets with relish, and why not?—it’s a grand, silly part, and when Mr. Vallee cups his hands at his mouth in imitation of a megaphone, one doesn’t have to be a strict contemporary of the Maine Stein Song to find him both moving and hilarious. As for the young ladies of the cast, they are decorative and, in all but one case, decorous. The exception is a hard-as-nails hoyden called Hedy La Rue, who takes dictation in the longest longhand you can imagine and has a voice like fingernails on slate. How Virginia Martin carries on that screeching night after night I don’t know."

For those interested in this type of thing, other shows reviewed in this issue include A Shot In The Dark, Milk and Honey and Purlie Victorious.

It also contains an article about the death of satire (!) entitled "Satire's Last Stand" (apparently it was on its way out even then. Go figure. Yes, I am being satirical), which includes some not entirely kindly comments on the subject of a brand-new, Chicago-based phenomenon, something called "The Second City." And another about the potential for increasing public participation in television, "a medium now at the crossroads."

I wonder how that worked out?