01. FIRST STEPS & WRITING THE BOOK
This is a first article of a series called CREATING A MUSICAL. People usually buy a ticket, watch a musical, discuss it, praise it or criticise it, and then move on. The art of musicals has, in many cases, become purely entertainment. I would like to discuss what musicals mean to me and how I tried, throughout my career so far, to always create more than just entertainment.
Writing starts with an idea. What I love to call the “what if”. What if we told the story of…What if we mixed that style of music with that period of time…What if we took this character and put him 200 years in the future…What if we took that story and shifted the perspective…What if we developed this idea into a intrigue…What if! That is the most important thing a writer should begin with. Because that will force your creativity and teach you over time to take chances with your most crazy, illogical and daring ideas.
After that, once we have the “what if”, the premise, I always start by shaping my villain. Not only because I adore villainous characters, because of their sheer complexity and layered emotional and psychological structure, but also because stories without villains, simply…well, bore me to death. It is clearly a subjective point of view, but there it is. Now, a villain can take so many forms from Hannibal Lecter (The Silence of the Lambs) to Darth Vader (Star Wars), from Sickness to Death, from Hitler (Historical figure) to Scar (The Lion King), from Scarpia (Tosca) to Gru (Despicable Me). It doesn’t matter how real, symbolic, comical, tragical, the villain is, as long as he is well written. If you have a good villain, you have a good story. But more on shaping villains in a future post dedicated to this subject in particular.
Then, I obviously start shaping the hero. If he already exists then I would try to write him from a new perspective, one that the audience hasn’t thought about yet. If I write him from scratch, then I will probably bestow on him a maximum number of flaws, fears and doubts so as to crack the idealistic image of the pure hearted, morally impeccable, perfect force for good. I hate that image! Mainly because, in the real world, it doesn’t exist. We’re all flawed in some way. We’re all imperfect and it’s that imperfect, grey area of our human nature that fascinates me and that I want to write about.
After that, I usually write the main story arc and shape the structure of the musical. What actually happens in the story. Now, this part is essential because you want your audience to stay connected to your character and to the events unfolding on stage. And in the age that we’re living in, the harsh reality is that people’s attention span has drastically and tragically diminished. So, the story needs to be compact, captivating, touching, emotion driven and cathartic. Yes, I’m one of those “dinosaurs” that still believe that the essence of theatre is catharsis. If you don’t know what that is, I would urge you to read about the beginnings of theatre in the Antiquity. It’s a great read!
Then, I need to decide what type of musical I want to write : is it a book musical, a sung through musical , a concept musical…This decision will have a direct impact on the structure of the book (which basically means the script of the musical), how many songs I have, how many acts, how long the spoken scenes are, etc.
Once this is decided, I start dividing the story into scenes and decide what happens in each scene, in detail, what characters appear, what they say, what is being developed in each scene (character development, pushing forward the action, delivering comic relief, etc.). Once the scene structure is defined, I decide where to insert the songs and what they will be about.
There, and now…I start writing. This process might go very quickly or very slowly. You can never know. Now, one last thing I have to say, I taught musical writing for quite a long time and I, of course, guided students to always follow the rules. Rules help you write better, right? Well, not necessarily! They might, but not always! After writing, composing and producing musicals for over 15 years now, I can say that there are no actual rules. I mean, you need to follow some basic guidelines in order to keep a certain level of quality in your writing, but as long as it’s touching, enriching, entertaining, and oozes with your personality, with who you are as an artist and as a human being, it’s good.
In the next post I will be talking about songs, why they’re important, how I write lyrics and how everything needs to serve the story and nothing else.
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