How Musicals Work E-Book

Julian Woolford

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 500

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Musicals are the most popular form of stage entertainment today, with the West End and Broadway dominated by numerous long-running hits. But for every Wicked or Phantom of the Opera, there are dozens of casualties that didn't fare quite so well. In this book, Julian Woolford explores the musical-theatre canon to explain why and how some musicals work, why some don't, and what you should (and shouldn't) do if you're thinking of writing your own. Drawing on his experience as a successful writer and director of musicals, and as a lecturer in writing musicals at the University of London, Woolford outlines every step of the creative process, from hatching the initial idea and developing a structure for the work, through creating the book, the music and the lyrics, and on to the crucial process of rewriting. He then guides the reader through getting a musical produced, with invaluable advice about generating future productions and sustaining a career. The book includes dozens of exercises to assist the novice writer in developing their craft, and detailed case studies of well-known musicals such as Les Misérables, The Sound of Music, Miss Saigon, Little Shop ofHorrors, Godspell and Evita. An essential guide for any writers (or would-be writers) of musicals, How Musicals Work is a fascinating insight for anyone interested in the art form or who has ever wondered what it takes to get from first idea to first night. 'A comprehensive and thoughtful guide to everything one must consider in order to write a successful musical. It would take at least a decade to learn all of this on one's own. Invaluable.' David Zippel (lyricist of City of Angels and The Woman in White) 'If anyone knows how musicals work (I'm not sure I do), this highly entertaining dissection of every aspect of that bewildering art form reveals that Julian Woolford does.' Tim Rice

Leseprobe

How Musicals Work

and How to Write Your Own

Julian Woolford

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Dedication

Note

1. Beginnings

2. Forms of Musical

3. Source Material

4. Foundations

5. Structure

6. Song Spotting

7. Theatrical Language

8. Characters and Scenes

9. Songs

10. Lyrical Matters

11. Musical Matters

12. Rewrites and Workshops

13. In Production

14. The Lifetime After the Night Before

Finally...

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

List of Topics

List of Exercises

About the Author

Copyright Information

For Richard John,

withoutwhom my work is half-complete

and

StephenBarlow,

withoutwhom my life is half-complete

1

Beginnings

Beginnings

Musicals are like children. They are conceived out of an act of excitement, the pregnancy is long, frustrating and rewarding, birth can be very painful, raising them is an act of collaboration with many people, and, if you are very lucky, they will support you in your old age.

Writing a musical, like a pregnancy, will take your care and attention, it will often be demanding, it will fill you with love and it might even put a strain on your other relationships. It will tie you to the people you created it with for ever. But once you have created a musical, it will always be part of your life, and you should always be proud of it.

This book is, therefore, a prenatal guide for musicals. It will help you generate ideas to conceive your show, make sure that the skeleton is all in place and healthy, help you fill out the flesh and bones of the characters and help you finally see it born onstage in a living, breathing performance. It also has a section on how to put it to work and make it earn its living.

As the title suggests, this book also examines how musicals work. It looks at the storytelling and structure of some well-known musicals, and shows how the best musicals draw on ancient myths and tap into the human psyche to engage the audience. You cannot create great art until you understand how that art has been created in the past, even if you then work in your own idiosyncratic manner.

Like the creation of all arts, it is easy to write a bad musical. Some bad musicals even get produced and some of those shows even become hits. A bad painting can be walked past, bad novels can be put down, but bad theatre must be endured (at least for its running time!).

Shoddy work, ill-considered decisions and a lack of craft will generally mean that the work will not take its rank among those shows that are often revived. A true classic, like Sondheim’s Into the Woods, or Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, will have a long and successful life. This book looks at how successful musicals work, gives an indication as to why some musicals fail and considers the ways in which writers can ensure that their musical will be as good as possible. It can help you understand how the musical you want to write can have truth and depth, and how it might be more likely that people will want to produce and perform your musical for a long time to come.

Writing a musical is 10 per cent inspiration and 90 per cent perspiration. It is a lot of hard work. This book is full of the techniques that I use to write, developed through working as a professional writer of musicals and plays, from my work as a theatre director, from working as a dramaturg for Mercury Musical Developments, and from teaching the creation of musical theatre for the University of London.

Exercises

Throughout this book you will find shaded boxes like this one. Each box contains an exercise that is designed to stimulate ideas and to make you really think about the musical you are writing. Do whichever of them interest you, but at least read them and consider the point of each of them. You might find it helpful to buy a copy of a libretto for a musical that you like, as some of the exercises involve analysing existing musicals. If you do them all, you will have enough ideas to last you a lifetime.

Before starting you should think about the type of musical you want to write and about what your distinctive, original voice will be. I often read musicals that are derivative of other works. It is no good setting out to write like Sondheim, Lloyd Webber or Jason Robert Brown: those three have already mastered those styles. You need to think about who you want to be as a writer. The techniques can be taught, but the combining of the techniques with your own unique talents is something that only you can do. Some of the biggest hits of recent years like Matilda, Avenue Q, Spring Awakening and In the Heights have come from writers who understand the art form, but have combined it with a distinctive voice. It is time to find yours.

What is a Musical?

For the purposes of this book, I define a musical as a theatrical presentation where the content of the story is communicated through speech, music and movement in an integrated fashion to create a unified whole. The written work is formed of three elements, the book, the music and the lyrics. The book is sometimes known as the script, and is the unsung sections of the work; the lyrics are the words that are sung. The book also refers to the character development and the dramatic structure of the work; together, the book and lyrics are called the libretto, which is Italian for little book. The music and lyrics together are referred to as the score.

The following diagram shows how the different terms relate to each other and overlap:

You will note that there is no word for the book and music together. Music that comes under spoken scenes is referred to as ‘underscore’, as it comes ‘under’ the dialogue at a level at which the audience can still hear and understand what is being said.

Why Write a Musical?

The fact that you are reading this book probably means that you are interested in writing a musical, but have you taken a second to ask yourself, ‘Why?’

For some, there is a love of the art form. The best musical performances feature ‘triple-threat’ performers who can sing, dance and act to a highly professional level, who can remain convincingly in character when combining all their skills and who can perform work that is thought-provoking, exciting, moving and stimulating. Along with opera, it is the most theatrical art form, and can deliver some stories better than any other. It is removed from real life yet capable of acting as a prism to it, transporting an audience to see sights and hear sounds they never imagined.

For some, the attraction is financial. The musical is the most commercial form of theatre. Broadway box-office income tops $1 billion every year, and this means that something in the region of $45 million of royalties is split between the writers of the twenty or so Broadway musicals playing at any time. That is before you take into account the national tours, the West End transfers and other overseas productions. If a writer of a musical mega-hit ever offers to buy you a drink, then let him because he can afford it. And if he ever offers to buy you a house, he can probably afford that too.

For some, the attraction is fame. Rodgers and Hammerstein, Andrew Lloyd Webber and George Gershwin are well-known names and this kind of recognition lights some people’s fires.

For me, the attraction is creative. I write musicals because I love the form. I love being able to tell a story in a truly theatrical fashion, and to be able to elevate the emotional content through song and dance. Musicals are often criticised for being unrealistic, that people do not suddenly burst into song and dance in real life. I live real life every day, and for me the attraction of the musical is its theatricality. I don’t want to go to the theatre to see the ordinary everyday; I want to go for an elevated, emotional experience where a performer is able to connect with an audience using all the skills they possess.

And, for me, writing musicals is simply the best fun I ever have.

Collaborators

There is a good chance that you are going to write a musical with a collaborator. A few successful writers manage book, music and lyrics all by themselves; Lionel Bart for Oliver! and Sandy Wilson for The Boyfriend have done so, but these are the exceptions rather than the rules. Most musicals are written by more than one person, and choosing your collaborators is one of the most important decisions you will make.

Depending on which parts of the musical you want to write, you will need to find a collaborator or collaborators to undertake the remaining work. You need to define how you see yourself:

Bookwriter: Writes only the book, but none of the sung components (e.g. Arthur Laurents for West Side Story and Gypsy).

Librettist: Writes the libretto, i.e. the book and lyrics (e.g. Oscar Hammerstein II for Oklahoma! and Carousel).

Lyricist: Writes only the lyrics (e.g. Stephen Sondheim for West SideStory or Oscar Hammerstein II for The Sound of Music).

Composer: Writes only the music (e.g. Leonard Bernstein for West Side Story or Richard Rodgers for Oklahoma!).

Composer-Lyricist or Songwriter: Writes both music and lyrics (e.g. Stephen Sondheim for Follies or A Little Night Music).

Think about your talents, what you are good at and which parts of the musical you want to write. Having defined your role, by deciding which part of the process you want to be responsible for, you should easily be able to define the talents you need in your collaborators.

You may already have a potential collaborator in mind, and you must begin a collaboration for the right reasons, not the wrong ones. The right reasons are that you like and respect their work, they like and respect your work, and that you think you are temperamentally suited to one another. A good collaboration is like a good marriage; a bad one, like a bad marriage, is a disaster. A good one is based on mutual trust and respect; a bad one can send you into emotional meltdown. If you are working with a friend, ensure that you like and respect their work. You don’t want to wreck a good friendship writing a bad show!

If you know you want a collaborator but don’t have an individual in mind, then finding one can be a tricky task. Some organisations, like Mercury Musical Developments, offer the opportunity to advertise for one, and theatres that produce new writing may know of other writers looking for collaborators.

A good collaborator will let you have the space to do your best work, kindly point out when you haven’t, and can do better, give you the space to fail, and support you when you are wrestling with a tricky problem. You should do the same for them.

You might end up with more than one collaborator. It is not uncommon for musicals to have three writers, one each for book, music and lyrics. Three-way relationships can sometimes be difficult, and you should treat each partner equally.

Having found someone you think you want to write with, then try the collaboration out on a very small project. Suggest to your collaborator(s) that you try out your relationship by writing a song, or a very short musical. As part of the course that I teach at the University of London, the students have to write a fifteen-minute musical, using a cast of no more than four actors and accompanied by nothing more than a piano. I usually give them a broad theme to write around, and these pieces are then performed in very limited productions for an audience of fellow students. A project like this can be an excellent way to assess your relationship with your collaborators. Alternatively, if both you and your collaborator(s) have written songs or scenes previously, then listen to or read each other’s work, and then spend ten minutes talking about things you liked about it, and things you didn’t like, or weren’t sure about.

Sharing Work

Share some of your previous work with your collaborators and then talk about the three things you thought were best about the work and the three things you thought were least successful. By doing this you can begin to establish a relationship where you can be honest and constructively critical.

Collaborator relationships vary as much as the people in them. Some writing teams have incredibly close personal relationships, some see each other only at meetings. Gilbert and Sullivan had a famously strained working relationship in which Gilbert would frequently write the entire libretto without consulting Sullivan, who would then compose the music without consulting Gilbert. I know of a Broadway writing team who never see each other except at the office. When questioned about this, they say that they are worried about what would happen if they spent time together socially! Similarly, there are partnerships that have close emotional or blood ties, such as the Gershwin brothers. The personal relationships you have with your collaborators are entirely up to you.

The relationship may impact on the methodology you use to write. You might go for the Gilbert and Sullivan approach and complete a whole libretto before a note of music is written. Richard Rodgers famously wrote the music before the lyrics when working with Lorenz Hart, but when working with Oscar Hammerstein II, the lyrics were written first. Kander and Ebb used to write music and lyrics simultaneously in the same place. You need to negotiate this with your partners, and it may never truly become fixed.

I have written a number of musicals with composer Richard John. I prefer to write the book first, then the lyrics, and then he writes the music, but we have many long discussions about the work before any words are written. We may change our methods for a particular number. When we wrote The Railway Children we literally locked ourselves in a room together until we had completed one particular song we were having problems with.

However you decide to work with your collaborators, you must never stop talking to them. Later on, other collaborators will join your team as the show goes into production: directors, choreographers, designers, etc. Musical theatre is one of the most intensely collaborative art forms. Talk about every moment of the show, talk about the musical style, talk about the physical look you imagine, talk about the story, talk about the characters. For this reason, I suggest that everyone in your writing team reads all of this book, not just the sections they think are relevant to them. I directed a workshop for a writing partnership where the composer took great pride in telling me that he never read the script – he just sat down with the lyrics provided and set them to music, not reading the scenes between.

He’s a talented, capable composer.

He’s never had a hit.

Ideas on Paper

This exercise takes a bit of setting up but it is worth it. It is one my favourite exercises when working with groups of people and is especially useful if you are working with three or more potential collaborators. In a room with a hard floor, roll out paper (like plain wallpaper or wrapping paper) the length of the room. At one end write, in big letters, ‘The type of musical I want to write is...’ and at the other end write ‘The type of musical I don’t want to write is...’ In silence and all working simultaneously, each person takes a different-coloured pen and writes their response to these statements, commenting on each other’s responses as they go. No one is allowed to delete their own or anyone else’s work, but they are allowed to comment on it by writing on the paper. Spend at least thirty minutes in silence, creating thoughts, adding and commenting, and then decide to stop and begin a discussion. You will talk for hours and will gain a very clear insight into your potential collaborators.

COPSE

COPSE is a term I use to describe the process of writing a musical. In the enthusiasm of the early ideas, of projects born out of excitement, it is possible to conceive a show and then very tempting to dive straight into writing beautiful songs and scenes that you can be proud of and play to your friends. That’s when you should think of COPSE.

COPSE stands for:

1. Concept

2. Plot

3. Structure

4. Execution

Never start one stage until you have completed the last.

Concept: The best musicals are built on good, strong concepts. You should be able to write your concept in one sentence, such as ‘A Rock Adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice’ or ‘An Opera Based on the Life of George W. Bush’. Then move on to:

Plot: This is the narrative that you want to tell. There is a difference between story and plot, which is covered in Chapter 4, along with many of the basics for this stage of the process. If you are taking a plot from a pre-existing source then you will already have a good idea of the story. If it is a true-life story you will have the facts. But regardless of the source material, I usually write a version of the story that is approximately 1,000 words as a good starting point. By reducing the plot of, say, Pride and Prejudice or the life of George W. Bush to this length, you will necessarily begin to focus on the aspects of the subject that most excite you. Once you have your plot synopsis, move on to:

Structure: Having got a good grip on your plot, you need to think about how to structure it as a musical. How do you translate the story you are passionate about into a piece of musical theatre? By the time you have finished the work on structure you will probably have a document of at least 2,000 words, maybe as many as 10,000, that will provide the backbone for your musical. This is all about making sure you have created a good, strong skeleton for your show so that it can be fleshed out when you come to:

Execution: This is the final stage of writing a musical. This is when the book, music and lyrics are written and by the time you have finished this, your show will be ready to rehearse.

It is important to work through these stages in order, and not to move on to the next stage until you are happy that you have successfully completed each step.

Some projects come out of a clear idea about a story; some projects originate as commissions where a subject, even a concept, is suggested. Some writers want to write a musical but do not have a clear concept that they want to write about. If you are in this final group, you have all the collaborators you need, but are not sure what you want to write about, here are a few exercises to help you on your way. If you decide to work up any of these concepts and are concerned about potential copyright issues, make sure you have read Chapter 3.

Ten Treatments

Take a well-known story and create ten different treatments for it, by varying the place it is set, the musical style or the time it is set in. For Little Red Riding Hood, you might end of with:

1. A classic fairytale approach.

2.  Set on a space station.

3. Set in the inner city, the wolf is a drug baron.

4. Set in the 1920s among a group of gangsters.

5. A rock ’n’ roll setting about a teenage werewolf.

6. Set in a political system; the other politicians are wolves.

7. Set on a farm in the Midwest.

8. Set during the Russian Revolution.

9. A puppet show.

10. Set in a Victorian music hall.

Don’t worry that any of these ideas may have been used before: keep generating them and building on them. Try it with other well-known tales.

Mash-Up

Modern music has popularised the idea of a ‘mash-up’: taking two songs and ‘mashing’ them together. Use this musical idea to create concepts. Use TV shows, fairytales, song titles, film plots or anything else you can think of. Take two of them and mash them together, so you might end up with:

• Fairytale characters on a desert island.

• Dickens characters on a talent show.

Before and After

Is there an interesting idea in the before or after of well-loved tales or classic novels?

•   What happened after Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy married?

•   What happened before Oliver Twist was left at the orphanage?

•   What happened after the Little Mermaid got everything she wanted?

I can’t tell you whether your musical is going to be the next smash hit. No one can. And if they tell you they can, they are lying.

I can’t tell you whether the subject you choose will make you happy writing about it. Only you can know that.

I can only teach you the techniques I use, and that others use, to create a musical. You can learn these techniques, master them and adapt them to make them your own.

But the hard work, the late nights and, most of all, the talent, you have to supply yourself.

Above all, you should write the show that you truly believe in. It should be a story that you can see and hear as a musical.

Don’t try and explain it to anyone except your co-authors at this stage. Many musicals, reduced to cocktail chatter, sound pretty uninspiring (‘It’s about a milkman in Russia just before the Revolution,’ or, ‘It’s about a girl who has trouble speaking the King’s English’). The best way to truly explain a musical is to write it. And write it only if you truly believe in it.

2

Forms of Musical

Forms of Musical

A Potted History of the Musical

Humans need stories. All societies have them and the ability to communicate a narrative is one of the defining characteristics of a human being. Ever since the Greeks got together in groups to act out a narrative, music has played a fundamental role in theatre. The earliest Greek theatre had a singing (and, sometimes, dancing) chorus, as did the theatre of the ancient Romans, who attached sabilla, a kind of metal clip, to their stage footwear in order to make their footsteps more audible and thereby created the first tap shoes. The mystery plays and travelling players of the Middle Ages all interpolated music and dance, and by the Renaissance these earlier forms of theatre had developed into Commedia dell’Arte, which went on to develop into comedies and opera buffa, an Italian form of comic opera.

In England, Elizabethan and Jacobean plays often included music and dance, and Shakespeare’s comedies nearly all end in a dance or song. During this time, court masques – elaborate presentations of singing, dancing, elaborate costume, and special scenic effects – became very popular among European royalty and aristocracy, and Shakespeare frequently included masque-like scenes in his plays, such as the Act Four sequence of The Tempest.

In Britain during the 1600s, the masques began to develop into a form of English opera, which survives most successfully in the work of Henry Purcell. After the death of Charles II, opera began to fall out of favour in Britain, but the eighteenth century saw hugely successful ballad operas, most notably The Beggar’s Opera, which held the record for the longest-running show when in 1782 it ran for sixty-two consecutive performances (about three months). Its author, John Gay, wrote new lyrics to popular tunes of the day, and became the first musical writer to ensure that his audience hummed the songs on the way into the theatre, as well as on the way out.

Whilst Colonial America didn’t have any significant theatre until 1752, after Independence, New York began to develop as a centre for the performing arts in the newly United States, as European operas, operetta, ballad operas and music halls began to find an audience amongst the European immigrants who wanted to be reminded of home.

The show generally credited as being the first ‘musical comedy’ is The Black Crook of 1866. This show largely came about through a series of catastrophes: the theatre Nibblo’s Garden was committed to producing The Black Crook, a reworking of the Faust legend (by Charles M. Barras) when a Parisian ballet troupe was stranded in New York with nowhere to perform as the theatre they were booked in to had burned down. The manager of Nibblo’s invited the ballet troupe to perform excerpts of their show during performances of the Faust play and the resulting mishmash became an unexpected smash hit, the first show to run more than a year in New York. Not surprisingly, the writer of The Black Crook claimed that the production had made a travesty of his script, but found that the pain was much easier to bear when he received a cheque for $1,500. In 1954, Broadway saw the opening of The Girl in Pink Tights, a musical about the creation of The Black Crook. It ran for only 115 performances.

This mash-up of songs, dances, sketches and a bare minimum of plot set the style for what became known as musical comedy. These shows were loosely held together by well-worn stories, which were simply an excuse for the routines. Musical comedies of this type were particularly popular during the 1920s and ’30s. Any real drama was ignored, and, although the scores were often strong, the shows of this period have proven un-revivable since modern audiences expect a much more integrated show.

Ironically, around the same time that The Black Crook was wowing New York, a new theatrical genre was growing in popularity: naturalism. Most notably exemplified in the plays of Émile Zola, Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekhov, naturalism aimed for the recreation of reality onstage, devoid of artifice. Whilst naturalism quickly took deep root in the theatre (and is still strong today), it radically diminished the importance of music, spectacle and theatricality onstage. These things survived in opera, operetta and the newly born musical theatre, but this divergence between naturalistic theatre and the more theatrical musical forms has led to a snobbery, most notably in the UK, that the musical is somehow a lesser, more populist, less serious form of theatre. In many ways the musical is the oldest form of theatre, and when I meet people who say, ‘I hate musicals,’ I immediately think, ‘No, you don’t. You hate theatre.’

Easily the most notable musical in the entire history of the genre is the granddaddy of the modern book musical, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Show Boat (1927).

Kern and Hammerstein’s achievement with Show Boat was remarkable for its time: they created a panoramic story with ten leading characters, of which eight are still in play at the end of the story. Most importantly, they tackled the important social theme of racism and they drew on different musical styles for the different couples in a way that no one imagined before them. Magnolia and Gaylord sing the music of European operetta, Julie sings the music of popular song, Queenie and Joe sing the music of the African-Americans, Cap’n Andy sings ballyhoos, and Ellie and Frank sing the music of vaudeville.

In their themes, their structure, their characterisation and their storytelling, Kern and Hammerstein created the first modern Broadway musical and a template for all of those that have followed. From Oklahoma! to My Fair Lady to Jesus Christ Superstar to The Producers to Avenue Q to The Book of Mormon, all modern musicals have their roots in Show Boat.

Although it was a smash hit, Show Boat proved surprisingly uninfluential at the time, and Hammerstein followed it with a string of flops. In 1943, he joined forces with Richard Rodgers to create a show with even greater integrity and proved to have an instant revolutionary influence: Oklahoma!

Show Boat

If you have never seen Show Boat in any form, then watch the 1936 film version on DVD. It stars Allan Jones, Irene Dunne and Paul Robeson. (Don’t bother with the 1951 version starring Howard Keel unless you are very keen!)

There are many forms of musical theatre, and one of the most fundamental decisions you have to take is about the form of your work. At one end of the scale is the musical play, which might have only a few songs and where the drama is predominantly spoken; and at the other end of the scale is opera, which is normally fully sung and with an orchestral score that requires no amplification for the singers.

Categorising types of theatre is a tricky business. The terms are like slippery fish which wriggle away just as you think you have grasped them. It is important, though, to understand the different sub-genres because you need to be able to understand them in order to create structure and content. All art has a generic context and is judged against the generic orthodoxy: you can only create a truly great work of art if you understand how it develops work that has preceded it.

It is often said that ‘content determines form’. Put another way, this is about determining the best type of musical for the story you want to tell. It makes sense that The Phantom of the Opera is written in a form that is very close to opera; that The Producers, which is about a 1960s classic Broadway musical, should be written in that form; or that the form of Sunday in the Park with George is a musical and theatrical metaphor for the ‘pointillist’ work of its subject, Georges Seurat, in which the audience have to ‘join the dots’ to see the whole picture.

Here are the broadly defining characteristics of the different styles of musical, starting with the form that has the least music and moving through to the forms with the most music. You can write any one of these, but will probably want to think about which of them best suits your story or concept.

The Play with Songs

Many plays use songs in their storytelling. Sometimes this is an editorial decision by a director to add context or atmosphere, in which case the songs are not part of the writer’s concept of the work, such as when Trevor Nunn decided to add gospel songs to A Streetcar Named Desire, which might have caused Tennessee Williams to raise an eyebrow. Some playwrights include songs as part of the play, and write lyrics as part of their script. The most notable exponents of this are William Shakespeare and Bertolt Brecht, who used songs in many of their plays in very different ways.

Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children contains twelve songs, designed as a theatrical technique to shatter any notion of naturalism. These had music by Kurt Weill in the original production, but the play is not what most people would class as a musical. Sometimes directors cut some of the songs, and it is very common for directors to invite current composers to set the texts to new music for new productions. This is very different to another Brecht/Weill piece, The Threepenny Opera, in which Weill’s score is an integral part of the work.

Many of Shakespeare’s plays include at least one song (such as ‘With hey, ho, the wind and the rain’ in Twelfth Night), reflecting the fact that music was important in both Elizabethan theatre and life. As You Like It contains lyrics for six songs, but again, it is not a musical. In Shakespeare’s plays the songs can be, and sometimes are, cut in production without damaging the story, although possibly reducing the theatricality of the audience experience.

Most importantly, in a play with songs the drama is carried in the spoken, not the sung text.

Physical Theatre

This is a catch-all term that is used to describe a wide range of works that exist in a largely non-commercial milieu, but still use dance, text and sometimes song to create a theatrical experience that often does not fit into any simple category. In 2010, the Cornish physical theatre company Kneehigh took their physical-theatre piece based on Noël Coward’s Brief Encounter to Broadway, the commercial home of the musical. This was a reinterpretation of the play with interpolated songs of the same period which used movement to explore the emotions of the leading characters.

The notion of physical theatre is very contextual, and the commercial success of Brief Encounter was surprising to many. Kneehigh’s next project was a physical reinterpretation of Michel Legrand’s musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, produced as a West End musical. Whilst Brief Encounter was quirkily endearing in the commercial context, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg was not able to trade on such charm for a second time and was a short-running failure.

Physical theatre tends to rely less on songs and more on the physical interpretation of moments, although music (often instrumental) may be very important.

The Book Musical

The book musical is still the most predominant sub-genre of musical and is often what comes to mind when the term ‘musical’ is used. The chances are that, if you want to write a musical, this is probably what you think you want to write. This is where the book, music and lyrics have been written specifically to tell a linear story. It will have songs, probably some kind of dancing, and some spoken scenes. The book musical is able to carry a vast range of subject matter and styles. It is this style of musical that we will look at most closely in this book, as it combines sung and non-sung text and music.

The story may be comic, such as Me and My Girl or The Producers, in which case it is usually known as ‘musical comedy’, or dramatic, such as My Fair Lady or Carousel, in which case it is known as a ‘musical play’.

Most of the classic Broadway and West End musicals fall into this category, including such diverse titles as Show Boat, Oklahoma!, The King and I, Oliver!, Annie, Half a Sixpence, Avenue Q, The Lion King, Hairspray, Wicked and The Book of Mormon.

The Chamber Musical

A small-scale book musical that does not include an ensemble, normally takes place in only one or two locations and includes little dance is sometimes known as a chamber musical. It is no different from a book musical except in terms of scale. Some examples of this are Thrill Me and I Do! I Do!

The Concept Musical

The concept musical is similar to a book musical, but is one where the concept or theme of the show is more important than the linear story but it is all told through bespoke book, music and lyrics.

This term is applicable to George Furth and Stephen Sondheim’s Company, which tells the story in a non-linear fashion; to Cats, in which the entire musical is largely a revue of character songs set within a loose framing device and in which the production concept is to take the audience into the world of the cats; and to Hair, which does away with plot almost entirely.

If you want to write a concept musical, you need to ensure that the concept you have is robust and interesting enough to allow you to eschew the audience’s desire for story – and you also need to be very careful about how you introduce your audience to your concept.

The Meta-Musical

A meta-musical is a book musical wherein the characters are conscious that they are performing in a musical. This is not the same as the ‘backstage musical’ which is a book musical where the plot concerns putting on a musical (such as Kiss Me Kate). Characters in a meta-musical generally believe that being in a musical is perfectly normal, or are commenting on their status. Examples of this genre are [title of show] which is about a group of friends writing a musical, or Urinetown: The Musical.

The Dance Musical

A dance musical is one where much of the storytelling is accomplished through dance, as much as through spoken or sung text, such as West Side Story or A Chorus Line. I would argue that West Side Story is a dance book musical and that A Chorus Line is a dance concept musical, because West Side Story tells a linear story with some of the story told through dance, and A Chorus Line is a concept musical with a very high proportion of dance. Most musicals include dance or movement, but in many musicals you can remove the dance element without damaging the storytelling, whereas in a dance musical you cannot.

Dance musicals can be hugely exciting and if it is appropriate to include a strong dance element in your story, I would encourage you to do so, as you can show a character in physical action.

The Jukebox Musical

A jukebox musical is one that uses a pre-existing song catalogue, often by one person or a pop group, as the score for a book musical. Jukebox musicals fall into two types: the first is a straightforward book musical telling a fictional story, such as Mamma Mia!; the second is a biographical-style musical of the original artists’ lives, such as Jersey Boys or the long-running West End hit Buddy.

The obvious advantage of the jukebox musical is that it is hugely attractive to producers because it automatically has a score of known songs, which will appeal to fans of that pop group or singer.

The disadvantage of the jukebox musical is that you will invariably be dealing with pop songs that may not have any true dramatic content, because pop music works in very unspecific terms. For a musical to engage the audience, and meet their expectations, it is usual for the songs to develop character and action, and so the songs must be very carefully chosen or you could end up with a deeply unengaging show. This may explain why many jukebox musicals, including Lennon, Good Vibrations, All Shook Up and Desperately Seeking Susan have proven unsuccessful.

If you are interested in creating a jukebox musical you will need to get permission from the owners of the copyright to the songs early in the process. You may wish to write a musical using the songs from one band, or by a range of bands, but the important factor is who wrote the songs, not who performed them. Some bands, such as ABBA, only performed material written by their members. Other bands, such as Take That and The Spice Girls, performed songs by a wide range of writers. You might also be interested in taking songs from a certain period from a range of writers. BlueBirds, a play with songs that I wrote as a commission, uses songs from the Second World War, all by different writers.

The Through-Sung Musical

The through-sung musical, also sometimes called the through-composed musical, is one in which all, or nearly all of the material is sung, and the music is continuous or nearly continuous, using recitative, or moving from song to song, such as Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar. It has been a hugely successful commercial form, particularly in the European musicals that opened during the 1980s, including The Phantom of the Opera and Les Misérables. Americans sometimes refer to this form, somewhat disparagingly, as ‘European poperetta’, but it is different from opera and operetta in two major regards: it uses music in the popular, not classical tradition and it uses amplification.

The advantage of this over the book musical is that it does not include those occasionally awkward moments of elision between the spoken and sung text. Andrew Lloyd Webber maintains that this was a huge attraction for him in his early work, as he always found that those moments when the orchestra struck up emphasised the un-naturalistic style of the musical, and that by eliminating the spoken text altogether he could create a musical language that, to him, remained consistent.

The disadvantage of the through-sung musical is one of time. One minute of spoken dialogue contains considerably more words than one minute of sung text. Therefore, if you have a complex plot, it can be difficult, or time-consuming, to convey everything you need to in sung form. In the case of a musical like Jesus Christ Superstar, the plot is already well known and is very simple. In more complex plots like, for example, Aspects of Love, it takes a deftness of touch to cover the material successfully. In a musical such as Les Misérables, singing all the complexities of such an epic text was clearly impossible and so the writers chose a ‘pageant’ style in which slightly drawn characters are given a song in which to establish characterisation, and the plotting of Victor Hugo’s novel is savagely simplified.

Some musicals, such as Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, are pretty much ‘through-composed’ in that the music is almost continuous. This means that the moment of lifting into song is never a jolt, but there are spoken scenes for some of the exposition. The entire piece is about 80 per cent sung and the music only stops at very carefully executed moments, giving added power to the moments of silence.

Revue

A revue is a collection of songs, dances and sketches which do not form a narrative but may have a collective theme. An example of this might be The Shakespeare Revue, a collection of songs, sketches and comedy pieces with a Shakespearean theme. The link might be that they are all written by the same person, such as Side By Side By Sondheim or Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, and if they have no sketches are often known as ‘musical revue’. Sometimes a performer may create a biographical revue from materials taken from shows in which they have appeared, such as Chita Rivera’s A Dancer’s Life. Some works that are often thought of as musicals, such as Hair, have a structure that is closer to a revue.

Music Theatre

Like physical theatre, music theatre is a catch-all term that is often used to describe work that includes song, music and text, and sometimes dance, to create a non-commercial theatrical experience that often does not fit into another category. Sometimes it is close to modern opera; sometimes it is closer to the more popular music style of a musical.

This term is normally used to describe works that include the elements of a musical, but where the audience experience will be different from a commercial musical, and the companies want to manage the audience expectations accordingly. It is often more experimental than commercial musical theatre and, in the UK, is usually produced by companies with public funding. You will find work of this type at the ROH2 (at the Royal Opera House) and the annual Grimeborn Festival which takes place on the London fringe.

Operetta

Operetta is a light form of opera, often romantic, comedic or satiric, performed without amplification, but containing spoken scenes, such as Gilbert and Sullivan’s celebrated work The Mikado. Today, operetta tends to be a historical form, and its heyday was from the 1880s to the 1920s, although musicals such as The Phantom of the Opera and Love Never Dies nod heavily towards operetta in both their romantic and comic passages. Songs such as ‘All I Ask of You’ and ‘Once Upon Another Time’ pastiche romantic operetta and the theatre managers’ number ‘Notes’ is very similar to a comic operetta style. New operetta is rare, but its influence is still felt in a good deal of modern musical-theatre writing.

Opera

The grandest form of musical theatre is opera, which at its finest is the pinnacle of the classical traditions of the performing arts: classical singing, classical dancing (ballet) and acting. The defining characteristics of opera, compared to other forms of musical theatre, is that it is generally performed acoustically (without amplification), is commonly through-sung without dialogue, and that the music is in a classical rather than popular style. This means that the construction of the musical material does not follow popular musical song forms, but is rooted in the structures of classical music. Compared to new musicals, new operas tend to be fairly rare. Most major opera companies commission very few new works and some opera companies never perform world premieres.

Opera companies that do perform new works generally commission them from established composers, who may not be established opera composers but may have built a reputation through their orchestral, concert or vocal works. The composer normally chooses their librettist and between them they settle on a subject. It is very rare that a company would produce a new opera that it has not commissioned.

In recent years, certain opera companies have commissioned operas from artists from other strands of music, such as Monkey by Damon Albarn and Prima Donna by Rufus Wainwright, and some opera companies have new-writing schemes where composers and librettists can learn about the art of creating opera.

If you want to write an opera, it is worth getting in touch with opera companies near you to see if they have any of these schemes. You are likely to be expected to already have created some classical music. There are some small opera companies who develop new work, and it is also worth searching them out if you are interested in creating opera. Opera demands large resources and I would advise you to have a strong idea about who might produce your work, and to have sounded them out, before you begin writing.

Try Something New

Try and experience as many different forms of musical as possible. Go to see opera, jukebox musicals, concept musicals, operetta, physical theatre, etc. By experiencing these you will make yourself more aware of the choices of form available to you. Which are your favourite genres? Which are you least attracted to?

New musical writers constantly blur the lines between these definitions of genre. Follies, for example, is a book musical until about two-thirds of the way through, when it suddenly becomes a concept musical. Bernstein’s Candide and Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess have had commercial productions as musicals and also been presented in opera houses by opera companies. Are they operas or musicals? For Sondheim, whose Sweeney Todd, A Little Night Music and Pacific Overtures have all played on Broadway and in opera houses, the distinction is unimportant but largely about context. He said:

I really think that when something plays Broadway it’s a musical, and when it plays in an opera house it’s opera. That’s it. It’s the terrain, the countryside, the expectations of the audience that make it one thing or another.

This book is largely concerned with the book musical, as it is the most useful model to examine because it involves the integration of music, lyric and script, but everything I have written in this book is relevant to creating an opera, a musical play, a concept musical or piece of physical theatre.

3

Source Material

Source Material

If you start young and have a long career, you might reasonably expect to write twenty musicals in your lifetime. In 2010 Andrew Lloyd Webber was sixty-two years old and had written about fifteen to date, and Sondheim was eighty and had written about twenty. Richard Rodgers wrote forty in his lifetime and Oscar Hammerstein wrote thirty-nine, and they both wrote some films as well. Bear in mind, too, that Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote shows at the beginning of their careers when there were sometimes more than 300 Broadway shows opening in a year. In one year, 1926, Rodgers and his first collaborator Lorenz Hart opened The Fifth Avenue Follies, The Girlfriend, The Garrick Gaieties (Second Edition), Lilo Lady, Peggy-Ann and Betsy. All of these were Broadway openings except Lido Lady, which opened in London. Today it would be remarkable for any writer to open more than one musical in either London or New York per year.

My point is that the number of musicals you are likely to write is quite small. Today it takes quite a long time for a musical to be produced from the moment that you have finished writing it. It is very rare for a musical to be produced in less than a year, and a large-scale West End or Broadway musical might be in the planning stages for two or three years or longer.

The process of getting a musical produced in the twenty-first century is generally a long one and, even with a commissioned show, the journey from first idea to opening night is rarely less than three years. You should therefore choose the subjects for your musical very carefully. You want to be sure that this subject is going to sustain your interest for the writing process and for the production period. Like having a child, you should really want it.

Most musicals are based on a previously existing work in some other form. The truly ‘original’ stage musical is a very rare beast. Hair, A Chorus Line and Anyone Can Whistle are the exceptions rather than the rules. For every truly original musical you will find numerous adaptations from other sources, whether they be from novels (Oliver! or The Phantom of the Opera), short stories (Guys and Dolls or South Pacific), plays (Carousel or My Fair Lady), a poem or group of poems (The Wild Party or Cats), films (Ghost or Sunset Boulevard) a TV series (Avenue Q is a spoof of the children’s TV series Sesame Street), or a real-life story (Gypsy or Evita).

Inspiration for a musical can come from many sources, and from almost anywhere. Stephen Sondheim has based two of his musicals on pictures. Seurat’s painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte is so integral to Sunday in the Park with George that the picture itself is practically a character in the show. The other, a photograph of Gloria Swanson in the rubble of a Broadway theatre, formed the initial inspiration for Follies, but is never seen, nor mentioned in the show. Sondheim’s other inspirations have ranged wildly, from an obscure Italian film (Ettore Scola’s Passione d’Amore, which was, in turn, based on Iginio Ugo Tarchetti’s novel Fosca) for Passion; to Bruno Bettelheim’s academic analysis of folk tales for Into the Woods; to a British play, which was in turn based on a folk legend, for Sweeney Todd; and, perhaps most surprisingly, the political events that led to the opening up of Japan to Western trade for Pacific Overtures.

You must find your own inspirations and find the stories that you want to tell. You must be able to understand what it is in any story that you want to make ‘sing’.

Adaptations

The great musicals that have been created by adapting from other sources such as plays, short stories, novels, films, etc. have always added value to the source material. They have not just added songs, they have transformed the work into a new greater artwork in the art of the adaptation.

Oklahoma! adds value to Green Grow the Lilacs in the unlocking of the romantic subtext. Cabaret adds value to I Am a Camera in the opening up of the cabaret scenes to comment on the action. Cats adds value to Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats in the creation of a magical stage language in which the poems are illuminated.

When the process of turning a work into a musical does not add value, or is not able to add value, then the process becomes redundant. 9 to 5, Napoleon, Carrie, Breakfast at Tiffany’s: the list of flops is a list of projects where the adaptation was not able to add sufficient value to make the project viable goes on and on. It is not the only reason for a flop, but it is often a major factor.

The most important thing to bear in mind when adapting is that you are creating a new work of art. Each art form has strengths and weaknesses and you need to understand how you are going to transform the source material by turning it into a musical. You do not need to follow every detail of the original slavishly. Feel free to cut characters, change the time frame, alter the story, and make any other changes you wish, so long as you are true to the spirit of the original.

Sometimes practitioners talk about the ‘needs’ of the musical to describe the aspects of stories that work well as musicals, and you need to understand something of these needs to make the right choices in your source material.

If you want to see how adaptation has worked in practice, it is worth looking at the genesis of the work Cabaret. The source material for the work is two short novels by Christopher Isherwood: Goodbye to Berlin and Mr Norris Changes Trains, which were based on his own experiences in Berlin in the 1930s. These were adapted by John Van Druten into a successful play, I Am a Camera, which is the source material for the stage version of Cabaret, which then went through one final transformation as it became the multi-award-winning film musical. The interesting thing about each of these works is that at every stage the creators completely understood the strengths of the art form into which they were adapting their source material: Isherwood understood how to take his own experiences and tell them as stories. Van Druten understood how to turn this material into a play: he builds up the character of Sally Bowles, and the whole play is set in one shared apartment. Joe Masteroff, John Kander, Fred Ebb and director Harold Prince understood how to take this play and make it a stage musical: they re-imagined the story into multiple settings, took the audience into the cabaret where Sally works and introduced the character of the EmCee, the host of the club and the only person who speaks directly to the audience. Finally, Bob Fosse took the stage musical and understood exactly how to turn it into a film, cutting many of the songs, adding new ones and creating a film where all the musical performances are completely natural within their context.

One Story, Four Works

Read Christopher Isherwood’s two Berlin novels, then read (or see if you can) John Van Druten’s I Am a Camera, then read (or see) the stage version of Cabaret, listening to the songs on the original Broadway or London cast recording as you come to them in the script. Finally, watch Fosse’s film of Cabaret. Each time, see how many major changes you can notice between the works. (It is worth noting that, such is the influence of Fosse’s film version, many current stage versions of the show incorporate changes made for the film, so reading the original Broadway libretto is advised.)

Every writer or writing team has their own style and finds their own solutions to the knotty problems of adapting a text. Rodgers and Hammerstein, at the height of their fame, were approached to musicalise George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, but couldn’t find a way to ‘open it up’ and use the kind of large-scale chorus required in a Broadway musical at that time. They turned it down. Lerner and Loewe later found the perfect set of solutions when they moved a tea-party scene to Ascot, showed the Embassy Ball, and enlarged the character of Alfred Doolittle to provide two rip-roaring chorus numbers: ‘With a Little Bit of Luck’ and ‘Get Me to the Church on Time’.

When we adapted E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children, composer Richard John and I faced two major issues. The first was that the novel is very domestic: there are a few minor characters in the village to which the family move but most of the story takes place with about eight characters. The second was that the novel, like many books written for children, was really a set of short stories, each one a self-contained adventure, and each short enough to be read at bedtime. There was a ‘framing device’ of Father’s disappearance, which causes the move to the country and the adventures to begin, but there was no overarching narrative.

We solved these two problems in a number of ways. Firstly, we ‘built up’ the characters in the village into more rounded human beings. Secondly, we chose very carefully which of the ‘short-story’ adventures to include and which to omit. One of them, ‘Perks’ Birthday’, which is a charming chapter in the novel, was only cut late in the writing process. Thirdly, we took a long hard look at the character of Roberta and decided that the central theme of the musical, but not the novel, was her rite of passage from childhood to adulthood. This is most obvious in Act Two when Roberta accompanies Mother to London to help secure Father’s release from prison, and in the romanticising of her relationship with Jim. Both of these elements are an original invention and not included in the novel. The rite-of-passage theme was also built into the architecture of the musical in the songs written for Roberta. In the first act, her part is written as one of the children and she joins in with songs, such as ‘Together’ and ‘Fancy Talk’, as a child. In Act Two, as she learns and grows, her music becomes more mature and she sings solos, similar in musical language to those the adult characters have sung, culminating in the long solo sequence ‘Nearly Autumn’. Audiences don’t sit and analyse the writing in this way, but you can see them ‘feel’ it as the emotional pitch heightens towards the inevitable ‘Daddy, Oh My Daddy’ that ends the show. You need to find elements of the story that you are adapting that will be strengthened by musicalising them. If you are not transforming the story, adding new dimensions by making it a musical, then why bother?

When the legendary librettist Oscar Hammerstein II mentored the young Stephen Sondheim in the writing of musicals, he designed a course for Sondheim on adaptation and the construction of a musical. He set Sondheim an assignment: to write a musical based on each of the following:

1. A play he admired.

2. A play he thought was flawed.

3. An existing novel or short story not previously dramatised.

4. An original story of his own.

Each of these types contains its own challenges for the adapter and Hammerstein knew that each would teach Sondheim a good deal. For the first of these, the young Sondheim chose Beggar on Horseback by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly, which was later performed at Williams College where he was a student. For the second, he chose High Tor by Maxwell Anderson; the third, Mary Poppins (the Disney film had not been released at this time); and the fourth, an original show, Climb High, from which a number of songs have been recorded. Only the first was produced, and that has never had a professional production. Climb High