Opposite of an Apple

I got the musical-writing gig on the strength of my previously recorded material, I guess. Apart from doing lights/sound for drama productions in high school, I didn't have a lot of experience with musical-style music. That was a fault that Jess, the director, was willing to overlook. She had Tabia Lau (MFA Playwriting, Columbia) writing the story and dialogue, and they both sent me musical songs to listen to and emulate.

Tabia sent me an approximate synopsis of the story and character sketches, and then paragraph-length briefs explaining what each song had to accomplish. They also had the song titles already, and some specific lyrical suggestions – all kinds of things, from suggested rhymes to possible ways to attack the song subjects.

I spent quite a long time sitting on that material, listening to the song suggestions, trying to figure out how to write for a musical, and also trying to get a handle on the characters. Tabia was writing the dialogue concurrently and I hadn't seen any of it yet, so all I really had was the one or two line descriptions of the characters and their actions. When I had any further questions about the characters' backstories as Tabia had written them, or about bits of detail she'd thrown in (eg. why did the Jewish groom insist on including Christmas lights in the wedding?), she couldn't give me clarification. “I just write what they do”, she said, which I was confused by, but which I later realized is an equally valid way to work that gives the director and actors more room to interpret the characters' motivations.

It's not my favourite way of working though – I don't trust that the things I just come up with for the characters to do will be consistent at all, so in order to feel comfortable writing lyrics for them, I had to do some thinking and exploratory writing on my own. For a given song, I'd try to write my way into the head of each character: what had already happened to them, what they wanted, what they were worried about. Then I felt a little more confident I could write from a specific place for them that was different from the other characters in the song.

I worked on a couple songs at a time, generally writing for voice and guitar at first, then adding instruments once I had at least one verse and chorus written. I'd initially been told not to limit myself, to write for whatever I thought the songs called for instrumentally, but when it came time to apply for venues, I was told to prepare for the songs to be pared down to three instruments. And one of these instruments apparently had to be piano, since a member of their theatre company was already signed on to play piano. I'm not a great piano player and I'd been imagining a guitar-based show, but faced with the possibility of just three instruments I knew I wanted bass and drums, so I rewrote the guitar parts for piano.

I sent recorded demos of my compositions to the creative team, with me singing all the parts, and they would give me ideas on how to improve them, or make them more musical-ish. Thankfully most of what I wrote already made sense to them, since they're fans of Jason Robert Brown, who I'd never heard of but who apparently writes in the same style. The dialogue started to appear, and I had to change some details of the lyrics to reflect the changes made to the story. One unfortunate byproduct of Tabia and I working separately from the same briefs is that a lot of the action I'd described in the song lyrics ended up getting repeated in the dialogue, or vice-versa. I guess that I wasn't confident enough as a story writer to feel like adding extra action to the songs, or energetic enough as an editor to overhaul what I'd already finished writing when the dialogue was too similar.

As we got closer to showtime, Jess and Tabia added a couple other songs for me to write, the most important being an intro song that got a lot of story exposition out of the way really fast. The show called for six characters to be played by only four actors (with costume changes), so it was kind of tricky to figure out how to get them all involved in the intro song since only four of the characters could be onstage at once, and how to clue the audience in to the fact that the actors weren't just changing clothes but changing what character they were portraying.

They skyped me in for the casting process, since we wanted people that could sing the sort of unaffected (by musical theatre standards!), pop-like vocals I'd written. As it was an internet connection with a macbook webcam and mic, it was hard to be confident that I was judging their skills correctly, or even seeing them well enough to recognize the ones we called back. There were a couple dozen girls auditioning for two parts, and five guys for the same number. Actually four guys, since one of the guys could only sing “Born to be Wild” a capella, and so off-key that even I could tell. It was hard for me to fully participate in the decision-making process, since my mic wasn't working and I'm a slow typer, but it was really interesting seeing what they were looking for in their potential cast.

I hadn't really given the acting part of the musical much thought up until this point, but they were understandably concerned with things like chemistry between actors, respective heights, hair, and general demeanour: bringing the characters to life as they imagined them. When I chimed in, it was mostly to do with vocal style or range. I was excited with who we ended up picking; it was hard not to be, seeing so many people wanting to be a part of it.

It did mean that I had to transpose all but one of the songs to accommodate their voices. And I had to rewrite instrumental parts when transposing them took them out of their playable range. One thing I was surprised by was that even though I'd written the vocal parts with specific female voice types in mind, using their quoted ranges, they came out sounding much too high and strained. It turned out that most female voices sound the best in the middle of their range, whereas in my experience male voices sound the best in the top half of theirs. Thankfully, I had Claire, a classically trained vocalist, helping me as vocal director, and she could tell me what was going to work and what wasn't.

The last part I had to figure out before flying out to music-direct the show was who exactly I was going to be directing. It turned out that we'd gotten one of the largest venues for Fringe, so space for musicians wasn't an issue, but our budget still was. Due to a happy miscommunication the producer sent me a bunch of craigslist applicants, and I thought I was allowed to hire them all, so I did. By the time I found out I was supposed to only hire one of them, it was too late and I had a five-person band: paino, bass, drums, violin, and french horn. I'd originally written for trombone, and french horn covered those parts, and I added violin to a bunch of the songs either as harmony or counterpoint to the brass. I couldn't find a bassist, so I decided that I'd play bass and we'd function more like a rock band than an orchestra with a conductor. Once I had the craigslist musicians interested, I sent them their parts to look over and my work was done until I arrived in Toronto.