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?

Well that's that, then.

Sixty-two pages! I'm not tinkering anymore. Sixty-two is respectable. Sixty-two will totally work. I am proud and happy to have gotten it down to sixty-two pages.

Now to start dropping in the finished lyrics and working on the new ones.

Random Drive-By Epiphany

I had wanted to get the book down to around sixty pages (I would have liked it to be less than sixty, but I figured sixty was the magic number) before I started placing songs in earnest. It was starting to look like that wasn't going to be possible, but I now actually think I may make it. It's down to sixty-two and a half, and I still have most of the second act to cut from.

Also? I solved a major (well, not major but nagging) problem with the opening number this weekend. If I weren't so bloody sick of the damn thing after reading it a hundred seventy-eight times, I'd say this might actually be shaping up to be a show I can get excited about.

Heh. Funny story.

Last year was kind of crazy, in the sense of being both very busy and just an awful mess at my day job. When I was able to work on my own stuff (like this show) at all, it was mostly in fits and starts, and although I liked much of what I was doing, it was hard to stay focused on it for any length of time, so I’d build up a great head of steam over a period of days or weeks and then have to stop abruptly, and it was kind of difficult to get any real momentum going again later.

So by the end of last year, I had made up my mind: come hell or high water, 2010 was going to be “my year.” I was going to commit to things and get things done, and toward that end, I actually got my ass in gear and sent out several script submissions, most of which didn’t really pan out. This wasn’t surprising, obviously, because they usually don’t – it’s the nature of the business, and that coupled with the recent economy makes it even more unlikely that anyone who isn’t someone’s wife or boyfriend or son-in-law or something is going to have a whole lot of attention paid to their work. The point was, I did what I needed to do, and I was feeling pretty good about it. And then back in mid-March, I found out that one of my straight plays had actually been accepted for a reading series here in NYC.

Now. This story does not end up casting the organization that runs the series in a terribly flattering light, so that’s all I’m going to say about them (no names, no details – I’m annoyed at what happened, but I am a firm believer in not badmouthing anyone in this business, ever). What happened was a very long and involved story and this isn’t the place for it, but here’s the gist: Mine was one of three plays chosen for this series, from a field of five finalists (that’s important later), culled from I have no idea how many submissions, but I’m guessing roughly … a lot, because you know. It’s an open-call submission for scripts in New York City, and it’s a pretty large group that puts this thing on. Fairly early in the process, something happened that was completely beyond anyone’s control (and with which I am entirely sympathetic), and we lost our producer. Fortunately, I had a standby producer who was willing to step up and take the lost producer’s place. Unfortunately, the group that was producing the series didn’t think they wanted to work with him, because he’s quite young and inexperienced. Which I understand, except that the whole point of the series is to train young and less experienced producers. Also? Without meaning to denigrate anyone’s skills or abilities, we’re talking about an Equity staged reading. My seventeen-year-old niece could have done this job, and I’m not being hyperbolic or ironic or anything — a bright, motivated high school student, with a clearly written set of instructions and a modicum of adult supervision could absolutely have fulfilled all the necessary obligations of producing this reading. What we later found out was that the show they now wanted to replace ours with had recently acquired a “Broadway producer.” I have no idea exactly what that means, except that the words “Broadway producer” were always typed in quotes that way, which seems to suggest we’re probably not talking about Cameron Macintosh, but I digress.

Now, all the while that we’re running around madly trying to keep this show in the series, we’re assuming (meaning me, my would-be producer, a director friend who was being considered to direct this play, and the few friends to whom I had given the details of the situation) that the play we’re about to be replaced with is one of the two plays that made it as far as the finalist round but didn’t get one of the three spots. Except … uh-uh. Apparently this is just some other random play that had been submitted (and passed on) the year before, and which I was told flat out by the organizers was not as good a play as mine, but since the focus of this series is to develop and train producers, the quality of the play is less important. Except (and maybe this is just me) if the guy producing the other show is a “Broadway producer” what the heck are these guys going to train him to do, exactly? Are they grooming him to produce on Pluto? I mean, as we say in Brooklyn: not for nothin’, but if this man has Broadway producing credits on his résumé, I have hard time picturing him lying awake nights, thinking “now if I only I can get a gig producing one-off, script-in-hand reading for (unnamed theater organization). That’d be a real feather in my cap.”

So anyway, this drags on for a couple of days, before we are finally told definitively that we are out of the series. And call me a terrible, paranoid, suspicious person, but my guess is that what probably happened was that at some point, the organizers heard through the grapevine that the play they had passed on last year now had a “Broadway producer” attached to it, and immediately, quite logically thought. “Hmm. How can we make this work for us?” And at the first sign of any setback with any of the plays in the series (ours just happened to be it), they figured this was the perfect opportunity to get the previously passed-on play into this year’s series, and thus make a connection with probably-not-Cameron-Macintosh. I’m guessing the only reason we were kept guessing for as long as we were is because they were madly running around behind the scenes, trying to explain to the people involved with the replacement show why it was so urgent that they step up and replace us, despite the fact that by doing so, they were now dissing not only me, but also the other two finalists, and it took them that long to get a commitment from them.

Okay. So. These things happen. I’m pissed off and disappointed, but what am I going to do?

And now … the punchline:

About an hour before I get the call telling me that were are absolutely out, a friend of mine whom I haven’t seen for a while stops by my desk to say hello. She went back to grad school a while back, and changed her hours from full to part time, so she hasn’t been around for a while, and she innocently asks me what’s up. I reply: #$*)_@?!! PL!IUO!! !..

“Why? What happened?”
“Well, remember that reading series I got into? It looks like we’re about to be kicked out.”
“How come?”
“Well, the short answer is, we lost our producer.”
“Oh. Well. Could you be back in if you had a new producer? Because I know one. My mom has been friends for years with (Name Redacted and okay, not Cameron Macintosh either? But a very big Broadway producer. Seriously.)”

Now. Maybe this is also just evil and wrong of me, but I’m the kind of person who, when she finds out she’s one degree of separation from Name Redacted and Okay, Not Cameron Macintosh Either? But a Very Big Broadway Producer. Seriously, thinks: I am not about to waste a connection like this on a one-off, script-in-hand reading for (unnamed theater organization). So I said, well, I don’t really think it would be appropriate to ask someone like that to become involved with something like this. But I added, half-jokingly, “it’s something to keep in mind when I finish this musical.”

To which she replied: “Oh totally. Let me know when it’s done. I’ve known him for years. If I gave it to him, I’m sure he’d at least look at it.”

So. While I’m still not at the full-on sour grapes stage of “being thrown out of this series was the best thing that could have happened to me,” I have to admit that this probably worked out quite well, because it forced me to take a look at the show and realize that I am a lot closer to being done than I realized. The lyrics are about halfway done, the book is in decent shape, although I still want to cut about five pages from it, and I’ve since spoken to my director friend (who is the same guy who directed the table reading of the book of this show back at the end of 2008, and we’ve decided that later this month we’ll do one last reading of the book, make whatever last round of revisions are necessary to get it “perfect,” and then work balls-out on the score through the rest of the summer. Which is something I would never have had time to do if I’d been working on this reading.

With luck, I’ll be able to send it out for a lot of the grants and prizes I missed the deadlines for last year, and the new short-term goal is to do a staged reading of the whole show in October, in front of a small audience that will hopefully include my friend’s producer friend.

So that's where things stand as of right now. With luck, I will have much more to say on things as they develop over the next few weeks.

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!