A Blog by Margaret Rose
A week or two later, Eric and I presented a re-write of our song, "Full Of Life," after considering the comments from our colleagues in the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop. We had made the changes suggested, added a verse at the beginning to get us into the song, and took Maury's suggestion about the
Eric and I had had decided to write a musical based on the story of the Donner Party. We knew we wanted to treat the historical subject with respect, in contrast to some previous adaptations of the event which ventured into the realm of parody and gruesome gory humor. We knew that we had to decide how to handle the subject of
I’ve been thinking a lot about what made me fall in love with musical theater in the first place. I have a flood of memories from my childhood, and I think each of them played a part in sparking my passion. This was one of the earliest. Our family was dressed in our Sunday best – it was probably a Sunday afternoon after church – we went with Grandma and Grandpa to
Which comes first, Music or Lyrics? For us, it’s generally the Book. Eric, Bill, and I are storytellers, and before we start writing songs, we need to agree on what the story is. This usually begins as a conversation – to get all three of us on the same page, knowing our goal for a given scene. Then, Bill disappears for awhile. Eric and I go out for pizza, take in a show, tend to real world issues like paying bills and getting on with life. We don’t hear anything from Bill as he
Writers, Directors, and Actors, and all of us who create musical theater … I think we all tend to think of ourselves as the creators of the experience. The writers who formulate the words and the notes to tell the story. The Directors, who provide focus and vision to make the story come to life. The Actors, who become the characters of the story. The story certainly wouldn’t exist without us. However, the great thing about telling a story is that
I remember sitting in the Booth Theater next to Eric, both of us enthralled with the calypso-infused score and the delightful storytelling of Once On This Island. It was 1990, and a time of transition for me. When I had moved to New York six years earlier, I wanted a career as a Director, and I had already directed several large productions of classic American musicals in the heart of Manhattan. But Eric had a different idea. It was around this time that Eric had suggested
I’ve always hated doing improv. Whether in acting classes or on the speech and debate team, I always wanted the script ahead of time. I wanted to be able to memorize it, rehearse it, try different phrasing, different delivery styles, wanted to be sure of my lines and sure of myself. Put me on a stage with a bunch of comic geniuses and nothing more than a couple of prompts, and I froze in terror.
In life, I want a script, too. I’m a list-maker. And when life throws me a curve ball and something
No one to whom I ranted ever took my side. They all nodded to indulge me, and I got the impression I had taken my obsession with accuracy in lyrics too far. No one else cared about the fallacy of this lyric in the hit song:
IT’S ONLY HALF-PAST TWELVE, BUT I DON’T CARE
IT’S FIVE O’CLOCK SOMEWHERE
But honestly, it would have been an easy fix for Mr. Jackson’s songwriters. It could have been written like this, and then it would have been accurate:
IT’S ONLY JUST TURNED TWELVE, BUT I DON’T CARE
IT’S FIVE O’CLOCK SOMEWHERE
That would have solved it all. But record sales continued, and time passed. Other songs
All of my friends know how much I love listening to musicals. Some of them also know my guilty pleasure of listening to country music, and many of them know I’m a bit of a Parrothead, too. So a few years ago when Alan Jackson posed the question, “…What would Jimmy Buffett do?” and was answered by Jimmy’s Gulf-Western twang chiming into his duet, my friends weren’t surprised that this musical theater-country music-Parrothead wanted to
The more we researched, the more we became passionate about telling the story of the Donner Party. Because it wasn’t about some distant historical event in our nation’s past. It was about the very real people who lived through it. We became inspired by them and by their courage. Even as we focused the story of our script and eliminated individual incidents and rearranged historical fact to suit the structure of a two-act musical, we were determined to
