Progress!

Something in the corporate white-shirt world wants its occupants to suppress their emotions, speak calmly and dispassionately, leave every feather unruffled.  Under the lingering influence of that setting, the dutiful office-bound lawyer I had been for over 30 years started to write this blog entry under the title “Status Update.”  That’s what it is, but is there any more boring or noncommittal way to describe it? It’s like a 1963 newspaper going with the headline “Presidential Status Update” instead of “Kennedy Assassinated!!”

(Apparently academia has the same penchant for deadening expression–I recently “helped” my daughter rewrite a psychology research report, the primary objective of which was to put all sentences in the passive form so nobody could tell who actually ran the tests, reached the conclusions or wrote the damn paper–“The effects of introducing anthropomorphism to promotional materials were tested . . . ” “The following tentative conclusions were reached . . .” “Suppression of original thought and vivid expression was successfully accomplished . . .”  Mamby with a pamby chaser.)

So instead, let me dare to characterize the last year’s adventures as Progress!, and show some enthusiasm about it.  I find that enthusiasm, self-generated and self-directed, is about the only antidote to the deafening silence that greets the early-stage and infrequent blogger (clicking on your own blog a few times to register some views can only go so far). I intend to blog more regularly now, since I retired from the law practice this year and am starting to find time for self-indulgence.

New Musicals, Inc. in Los Angeles runs several programs for fledgling writers and composers, and I’ve now completed three of them.  The first was a one-on-one tutorial last summer about how to pitch and promote a musical. It was useful, and forced me to prepare marketing materials and think in terms of where my work could be commercially presented.   Scott Guy was a bright, knowledgeable and enthusiastic coach.  I then attended their annual “Biz of the Biz” conference, at which industry insiders talk about how to get going in the business, what separates the pros from the amateurs, and where the action is.  I took a lot of notes, shook a lot of hands and came away energized, although I haven’t to date realized any concrete opportunities as a result.  But that was mostly because instead, my spare time (I was still a full time lawyer) was taken up with the third and by far most demanding NMI program, their “core curriculum”–about half a year of very structured collaborative musical-writing projects, coupled with homework-intensive learning labs. Most of the work was submitted electronically and group sessions could be attended remotely via Zoom. Very convenient for me in the Bay Area, although something is always lost in the video-conference translation–and it’s usually the ability to hear much. My biggest challenge with the long video sessions (sometimes 8 hours) was trying to stay mindful of the fact that I was on camera (we were each displayed in our own Brady-Bunch video boxes) unless I elected to stop my video feed, which I sensed was frowned upon because you could slip out unnoticed and watch Netflix for an hour–not that that ever occurred to me.  So I will now confess that, on camera, I (i) slurped and dribbled soup (ii) picked my nose at least once, and possibly more, and (iii) took at least a 45-minute nap, during which my iPhone sat flat on my desk and transmitted the lazy circles of my ceiling fan. I only hope that the other video participants were similarly engaged and didn’t notice. We’re now working on the culmination of the core curriculum program–each collaboration team has written an original 15-minute musical that will be presented by a professional cast directed by NMI in three shows in July.

I’ve learned so much as a result of these activities–the nitty gritty details of musical theater script-writing, lyric-writing and composing, the formatting of scripts, scores and integrated script/scores, and the obscure terms for all sorts of things I did not think I needed to have obscure terms for.  For instance, music in musicals can be divided into music originated from a source within the piece’s world (dancing to a song on a jukebox or an onstage mom singing a lullaby to an onstage baby) versus songs that are sung more or less to the audience.  The first is called “diegetic” music, and I guess the second is called “not diegetic” music.  BTW, when an off-stage mom sings to an off-stage baby at a play, that ‘s just called “being a rude A-hole.” There’s a word for when a syllable is sung over more than one note–that’s a “melisma” and my instructors may have confused it with “melanoma” because they heaped scorn on it whenever it happened. I’m not so clear why “Don’t You Worry Bout a Thing” isn’t great, melisma and all. There are also tons of terms for different metered feet (a la Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter) but, like so many rarely needed or used facts these days, there is absolutely no reason to learn them as long as your smart phone is within reach.

In the course of taking the course, I reworked the Last Mountain Lion, reformatted  the script and score and wrote a couple more songs.  Feeling cocky about the improvements and my newfound smarts, I submitted the show for a table reading by Musical Cafe,  a nonprofit in Berkeley dedicated to helping Bay Area creatives develop musical shows (God I love the Bay Area!).  They selected the show and provided a space with four actors and a dramaturg to have an unrehearsed, first-impression reading–no songs, just lyrics read with the script.  It was exciting and rewarding to finally hear what I had been working on for roughly a decade come to (limited) life.  The actors were good and got laughs where I wasn’t expecting them, brought out reactions I was hoping for, and made me feel this whole thing just might be possible.  A week later, one of the actors requested a few song demos, and when she heard them (posted elsewhere on this site), more or less commanded me to send them to the entire board of the Musical Cafe as an introduction and for consideration in their Next Stages program, which is a more elaborate reading, review and development process conducted in the fall.  I am putting finishing touches on my application today, and hoping Next Stages will be the next chapter.

I’ll let you know what happens.