We all know that getting a musical right is far more difficult than with a straight play. The medium of a play is very forgiving (if not encouraging) of experimentation. But with a musical, every piece of the puzzle needs to fall into place just so. Maybe that one song seems superfluous, and you want to cut it, but then you have two ballads in a row and the audience momentum gets hurt. Or maybe you want
to move the act break, but then you don’t have a good number to open act two. Maybe you want to give that secondary character a song, but you just can’t decide if doing so will pull too much attention away from your main character arc.
This summer I have had the great pleasure of working at two of the best musical theatre development programs that I know of: The O’Neill and New York Stage and Film. What has been so wonderful is that, unlike in NYC, we put together the presentation, did it, and then had another week to rip it open, make rewrites and do it again. Of course this is very difficult on writers because it demands that they work very quickly, but there is simply no substitute for seeing your work in front of an audience, reworking it, and then trying out the new material immediately. In both instances the writers learned so much, and the pieces got exponentially better. Notes to Marianne by David Rossmer and Dan Lipton and Myth by John Mercurio are now in excellent shape to take the next step.
Getting a new musical right (especially one not based on source material) is as hard as it gets in theatre. But with programs like this, the process is immensely rewarding.
More, please.