I am currently writing lyrics
for a musical based on The Honeymooners. It's a good fit for me:
old-fashioned, conventional, broadly comic... the kind of thing I know
I can do. It's also the first show I've worked on that I can imagine
actually making it to Broadway. We shall see...
But since I've been honeymooning for the better part of this year,
I haven't really been able to work on any new Prospect show, which is
unusual. (I still count EVERGREEN as the new 2010 show--even
though it opened in 2009-- so that I don't ruin my
"one show per year,
every year since 2000" streak.) The question is, will I be able to
work
on a new Prospect show during 2011?
I hope so. I would like to have a project to balance The
Honeymooners. Where Honeymooners is big and commercially viable
and the kind of material that comes more easily for me, the new show
will be small, completely unmarketable, and
most importantly, very different from the kind of things I've done.
The hardest thing for me, I think, would be to write something more
serious, more earnest. To ban wordplay and alliteration and fancy
rhyming... all the superficial bits of cleverness that distract me from
saying anything of substance.
So I would like to begin with something to say. I would like to
reject most of the first ideas I have, because they will be too easy.
I would like to struggle, early on, because it's hard to break
old habits and do something new. And then eventually I would like
to "find it" and start writing faster and faster and be deeply absorbed
in it.
I would like to write music and lyrics. Because, I've often
thought that the main area in which I can excel is at the nexus where
words meet music. While not being fantastic at either, I do have
some feel for both... so that I think I can sometimes put them together
more harmoniously than a separate composer and lyricist might.
I'd like for someone else to write the book.
I would like to find five or six notes on the piano that make a chord
no one has heard... and that would be the sound of this show, like a
latterday Tristan chord. I doubt any such combination could exist
in this day and age. But I will search...
Most of all, I would like to take a little more time developing the
show and getting it right before putting it out into the world.
There goes my one-show-per-year streak...
Musings
Past
