If you are going to stage your own musical you need to find a venue before anything else. It’s counter-intuitive, scary and finite but it has to be done. All your time frames are based around the opening night and you cannot have an opening night without a venue.
Okay, here goes.
(Not being a particularly consistent, consistent or successful blogger this may turn out to be terrible. There’s your warning.)
This coming October I am having my musical Zombie Wedding staged in my local area. As I am just at the beginning of this journey I thought to myself “Hey Daniel, why don’t you blog it?”. Since I was in no mood to argue with myself I turned on my computer and stared typing. This is the fourth or fifth sentence of that session. Over the coming months I am going to try to document as much as I can all the whats, whys and wherefores of putting on a musical, in particular my own musical.
Obviously as you might have observed by my less than frequent postings of late, I am busy, and it only takes the slightest bit of work to make me feel overwhelmed. Anyway, to force me into posting something now and then I have decided to start mini-blogging. Not micro-blogging, I do that here. No, instead I will be posting regular and short musings and ideas as I think of them. I have gone as far as to outline essay-like postsonly to abandon them becauase I failed to find a good closing paragraph. But not anymore. The future is one hundred words or less.
So here goes…
It’s late and right now I am trying to write band parts for Zombie Wedding, which I’m flying out to help with rehearsals for in a few days. Eek. And if that wasn’t eek enough, we have a band. A four piece band. Thats drums, keys, bass and lead. I have to write the parts for that band. For that four part band. How well will I do? Find out in this *essay*. I will update it as and when I get more information and try and make this as concise a piece about writing for band parts as it can be.
Sometime in 2010, It must have been in the Spring, R.C. Staab and I submitted Zombie Wedding to the Academy for New Musical Theatre in LA for a screen cast open reading. This is a service the Academy staff offer in which the senior faculty read through and then review a few scenes or a couple songs from a musical in development. I found the whole experience very helpful and would certainly recommend it for anyone doing anything a little ambitious. Aside from general lyrical and musical notes, much breath was spent belying my piano score, from the size of the cord symbols, the use of ties notes and other such and such that one would think was rather petty considering the show was only in an early reading. Well one would be wrong.
