Or: More TV Shows About Live Theatre, Please. By Gregory Jacobs-Roseman (Composer-Lyricist)
Well folks, it has happened. The long expected announcement
has come: Smash is no more.
I have long been vocal in my support of the show. But I
guess it simply couldn’t recover from its troubled first season. And whatever
you may have thought about the show, it was employing a lot of artists in my
industry who would not otherwise be employed, and for that I’m truly sad.
It got so much better this second season. I enjoyed the Hit List tunes as standalone pop songs.
And The “Opening Night” episode for Bombshell
was truly a thrill. Had the whole series been like that episode, I think they
would have had something more lasting. The fact that the episode focused on
real workplace drama -- for example, the real issues that arise between two musical theatre
writing collaborators while working on a piece of theatre -- rather than love
triangles or adoptions and the like was amazing. I really feel there’s an episodic television show in the business that we call show that Smash attempted to deliver on in its better moments.
If Happy Endings isn't picked up by USA I'm gonna hurt someone. I can't have another one of my stories cancelled this season.
So farewell to my beloved Smash. It was a brave experiment. I hope that our little industry
of sweet lady theatre garners the eye of television again, and sometime soon.
GREGORY JACOBS-ROSEMANis a composer/lyricist and theatrical sound designer. His musical Save The Date: A New Musical Wedding Comedy will premiere in the 2013 New York International Fringe Festival. www.gregjr.com EMAIL HIM | FACEBOOK | TWITTER | OTHER POSTS BY THIS AUTHOR
Sorry, Smash. The real thing is in the summer. By Gregory Jacobs-Roseman (Composer-Lyricist)
I’d like to begin by thanking Mr. Rob Shapiro for filling in for me last Friday while I was back home in Delaware doing sad family things. Rob is a pro and if you didn’t catch his post last week you should give it a read.
As for me, I’ve chosen to funnel all that sad energy into my upcoming show. That’s right folks, after developing the piece for longer than I’d like to admit, my musical Save The Date: a new musical wedding comedy has been accepted to the 2013 New York International Fringe Festival! We’re making our world premiere in August. Official dates and venues have not yet been assigned, but when they are, I’ll let you all know.
When I got the email saying we had been accepted, I was on a mini-vaycay sucking down wine with my parents and their friends in Sonoma wine country in California. The second I saw the email, I leapt from the sofa, ran out to the backyard patio where my mother and her friend Becky were enjoying a glass of sparkling, and shouted “YEEEEAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!! I’M IN DA FRIIIIIIIINGE!!!”
The point of this post, however, is not to offer shameless self-promotion. My excitement at learning that Save The Date would be a part of this year’s Fringe festival runs much deeper than the mere fact that it is being produced. I felt immense pride that my musical, which in some ways is very in and of New York City, was going to be in a festival that is so much a part of the city of New York.
"That's How It Happened" from a reading of Save The Date at the NYU Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program a few years ago. This is the only song from the first draft that still remains in tact.
The New York International Fringe Festival (hereinafter referred to as “FringeNYC” – sorry, I’ve just been reading through my participant agreement) is such an integral part of the New York theatre scene. Every year they select over 200 shows varying from full-scale musicals like mine, to solo works, dance pieces, multi-media theatre, and yes, the dreaded “performance art.” You’re probably aware that Urinetown got its start in FringeNYC. But for me the fun part about FringeNYC are those off-the-beaten-path performances that you’re only going to find in the New York Fringe. When I was an undergraduate student at Emerson College, I took a wacky course titled: “Living Art In Real Space,” which was basically Performance Art 101. Every class we studied a different artistic movement and were assigned to create a performance inspired by that movement for the next class. Some weird stuff went down in that class (people got naked, there was a food fight with raw meat) but it truly helped this little composer/lyricist who works in the most structured of art forms: musical theatre, to loosen up and appreciate a different perspective on live performance. Simply put, now I just love it. Bring on the performance art!
My group's final presentation in "Living Art In Real Space." That's me at the piano. Our group opted to do our final performance inside the Emerson cabaret
theatre instead of pelting raw meat at each other on the Charles river or
almost slipping and falling to our deaths off a paint-filled tarp on a Beacon Hill
rooftop. (True story.)
What does your road trip music say about you? By Gregory Jacobs-Roseman (Composer- Lyricist)
St. Francis Vineyards in Sonoma.
Greetings from sunny California! I am writing this post from
Sonoma, where I am spending a wine-soaked weekend with my parents at their
house in Healdsburg. Though I hate, hate, hate that I am away for opening
weekend of the production of Once On This
Island I designed in Brooklyn (have you purchased your tickets yet? Click here and do
it already!) I left the show in good hands and this was one of those mandatory
family obligations. Also, I have no room to complain when this is the view out
of the front window:
As fellow Crazytowner Alisha commented when I posted this
photo on Facebook: “That looks terrible.”
My parents flight got into San Francisco about half an hour
after mine and we immediately jumped into the rental car and headed north to
wine country. While searching for something to listen to during the drive, we
discovered that someone had left a mix CD in the CD player. It was labeled simply:
“US 101”, which happens to be the highway that connects San Francisco to
Healdsburg (it actually runs along the enitre west coast of the United States – I sense those of you in and/or from California thinking “um, DUH” when you read that, but as a New Yorker who
hasn’t driven a car since 2006 this was all news to me) so it was clearly someone's road trip music. My father hit play, and was instantly thrilled by the music coming
out of the speakers. The track list was as follows (many thanks to the app
Shazam for identifying the tracks I did not know):
This Must Be The Place – Talking Heads
Smells Like Funk – Black Eyed Peas
Mannish Boy (live) – Muddy Waters/The Band
Got You All In Check – Busta Rhymes
My Neck, My Back (Lick It) – Khia
The Times They Are A-Changin’ – Bob Dylan
The Night They Drove All Dixie Down – The Band
Crazyhorse Mongoose – Galactic
A New Arrangement – Bright Eyes
Helpless (live) – Neil Young/The Band
Hillbilly Deluxe – Brooks & Dunn
Dead Wrong – Eminem/The Notorious B.I.G.
A live 9-minute Latin jazz/rock improvisational instrumental
track that Shazam couldn’t identify.
Another live track Shazam didn’t know. Come on, Shazam. You
had one job.
It's the day of the show, y'all. By Gregory Jacobs-Roseman (Composer-Lyricist)
First, a disclaimer: any and all photos or video of the
rehearsals for the show posted below are done so with permission. I know first
hand that rehearsal halls are a personal and private space, but we’ve decided
with this production that we’d wield social media to our advantage when it
comes to marketing. Hence the photos and video.
That said, the current job that has a stranglehold over my
life is sound designing a community theatre production of Once On This Island
in Brooklyn. As a sound designer, I am well past the point in my career at
which most other designers would still be volunteering their time for community
theatre, but when one of my closest friends who is directing the show called
and asked if I’d work on it, I enthusiastically said: “yes!”
Nikki Rothenberg, Director (in the background). Giving notes at the beginning of rehearsal.
Clearly both Rachel and I are excited about this production on Crazytown this week. But as someone who works in the business that we call show, I
think community theatre is a very important form of theatre, and every so often
I welcome the chance to be a part of it. It’s not just because I have fond
memories of doing it as a kid back in Delaware. It’s because it brings people
who wouldn’t ordinarily have the performing arts in their lives into the fold,
both in the audience and on the stage. It’s also because often the productions
that community theatre organizations are able to mount are very different from
those of professional theatre companies.
"Pray"
Let’s start with the issue that plagues all theatrical
endeavors, both professional and amateur: MONEY. In community theatre, it’s
pretty much generally accepted that you’re not getting paid to be there and you
know that before you even go to the audition. It’s simply not in the budget.
Which means two things: first, if someone’s job or a paying gig conflicts with
it, that will usually take priority. Second, the people who are participating
are doing so purely out of love for the theatre.
This is what you all think of when you think "Community Theatre." Don't deny it.
I find this last fact truly inspiring. Sitting in rehearsals
for Once On This Island the past week
and watching these performers, who span all ages, backgrounds, and level of
theatrical experience, was a breath of fresh air. There were performers who are
highly trained next to ones who had never been in a play before. But they all
had the same amount of passion and energy and they all had smiles on their
faces. As Alice Ripley once said to me (how’s that for a name-drop?)
when we were in a show at Emerson College: when theatre becomes your job it’s
really easy to get jaded about it. But seeing people who are doing it for no
other reason than it’s what they love to do really reminds you that you love it
too, and that’s why you got into this screwed-up business in the first place.
And as Akilah Williams, who is a trained actor playing Asaka in this production
pointed out to me: “Every single one of these people has a full day of work or school that
they do before they come to rehearsal. We're all exhausted when we get
there, but we get to work, and we have fun doing it.”
So this falls slightly into the category of shameless self
promotion, but my adopted hometown of Boston took a serious hit this week. And
as I say in this video’s description, when tragedy strikes, the only way I know
how to cope is at my piano, so I wrote this. It’s pretty hastily written and
produced as I put this whole thing together in one day, and I break down in tears at one point during the recording, but it’s from the
heart.
Boston, I love you. And we’ll all cope and recover together.
People who are awesome in many ways. By Gregory Jacobs-Roseman (Composer-Lyricist)
Ladies and gentlemen, this, if you are unaware, is Mr. Frank
Rich:
I don’t think I can accurately put into words how awesome I
think he is. I can think of no one better to be my inaugural badass of the
week. Suffice to say I want to be him. Can I be Frank Rich? Like, just for a
second? Can that be possible? Can I at least have his career?
Okay, let’s start at the beginning. We have the same
birthday: June 2nd. The very best day of the year to be born. Second, we’re
both of Jewish heritage, so there’s that.
But Frank Rich has basically done everything on my bucket
list. When he was an undergrad at Harvard he saw Follies before it went to Broadway, wrote about it for the Crimson, and got an invitation to lunch
from Stephen Sondheim. Total badass, right? Shortly thereafter, he became the
theatre critic for The New York Times
– which is not an ambition of mine but still falls under the category of
badass. Then he became an op-ed columnist for the Times, which is totally something I could fall back on.
One composer's advice to singers. By Gregory Jacobs-Roseman (Composer-Lyricist)
Last week my good friend and cabaret host extraordinaire Brandon Cutrell asked me to guest judge
the Stonewall Sensation competition he hosts downtown at the Stonewall Inn on Wednesday nights. It's an American Idol-esque cabaret
competition, where each week contestants perform
and patrons vote, and each week the singer with the least votes is eliminated
until the finale week, when a winner is declared. It’s a fun event, and one I’ve seen many friends
compete in since its very first season.
Poster for the current season of Stonewall Sensation (click to enlarge).
The contestants this season are a crop of extremely talented
young singers! As a composer-lyricist on the panel of judges last week, it was
a thrill to watch them each interpret their song both musically and lyrically.
There was one piece of feedback I directed to all the contestants that night, however, that I think bears
repeating here to a larger audience because I think it’s an important one that all
too often goes overlooked – and many singers may be surprised to know a
composer’s opinion on this issue.
Singers: transpose your music. It’s a must. All too often I
see singers whose books are simply direct photocopies from vocal selection
books (that they definitely purchased themselves because we totally wouldn’t
want to be pirating any published sheet music (I know, I know that’s another
discussion altogether)) and that is a big mistake.
Musician humor is so, so lame.
Let’s talk about key and modulation in musical theatre for a
second. For some composers, they absolutely want their songs sung in the key in
which they were written. Personally, while I don’t think these composers are
wrong (to each his own – this post is one composer's opinion on the matter), I do think they’re being a little short-sighted. As I wrote in my
post two weeks ago, my first songwriting professor was Jason Robert Brown. As an 18-year-old composer at the time, I
wanted to ask him about different singers picking different keys in which to
perform the same song. I thought this
disrupted the integrity of the work and I was sure Jason would agree with me.
Not so. His response: “musical theatre is a performer’s medium.”
Other issues facing the LGB and particularly T communities. By Gregory Jacobs-Roseman (Composer-Lyricist)
I want to provide a little context for what I’m about to say
in this post before you get really pissed at me. My hope is that you won’t get pissed at me – but judging
from reactions from friends to what I’ve been saying this week, it’s very
possible that you will. First let me say that I am a
gay man who believes that there should be marriage equality for all. I want
to be crystal clear on this point. I
support marriage equality.I think
it’s an important, fundamental issue and the singular civil rights fight of my
generation.
Everybody got that? Good. Now I would like to say that I also believe it’s time for the
LGBT community to face some cold, hard facts about ways in which we’ve focused our energy and activism that has left many
of our community members behind.
There hasn’t been much talk about this in the media, with
one notable exception. The reason being is that marriage equality is such a
behemoth of an issue, and LGBT organizations are skewed towards issues that
concern gay men – and in many cases, white
gay men – in particular, that other forms of inequality under the law are often overlooked.
When you say “equality,” most people will assume you’re
talking about marriage. When you uploaded your red equal sign as your Facebook profile
pic this week, you did so in support of marriage equality. And that’s awesome.
But that profile picture is not just a red equal sign. It’s also a registered trademark of the Human Rights
Campaign Foundation – an organization that notoriously overlooks the issues I’m talking
about, particularly those affecting the transgender community. The HRC turned
their regular yellow and blue logo red during this week’s Supreme Court
arguments because “Red is a symbol for love, and that’s what marriage is all about,”
as HRC spokesperson Charlie Joughin said to MSNBC, and the whole thing went
viral. But this strikes me as a somewhat short-sighted decision.
To begin with, red is traditionally a
symbol of HIV/AIDS awareness, another very serious LGBT issue that has
faded to the background in recent years, especially among younger LGBT people
(also wasn’t the marriage equality “color” white? Weren’t we just wearing white
ribbons with a knot tied in them a few years ago for marriage equality? Is a
little consistency in my cause-related color-coding too much to ask?).
A new production brings up old memories. By Gregory Jacobs-Roseman (Composer-Lyricist)
69 Brimmer Street, when it housed the theatre department of Emerson College.
I was 18 years old and a freshman at Emerson College in the
spring of 2002 when Jason Robert Brown taught the first songwriting class I had
ever taken. I had already written my first musical by then, which I also
directed and starred in for my senior project in high school one year earlier.
While I had already taken some music theory classes and had been performing in musicals,
choirs, and bands for years (I picked up the clarinet in 4th grade and had
since learned to play saxophone, flute, and oboe, and began singing lessons in
junior high when a music teacher at school singled me out and told me I had
some talent in that department), I had no formal training in songwriting at the
time. The musical I had written when I was 17 was a full-fledged two-act book
comedy that had a pretty decent book, half-baked music, and atrocious lyrics.
In short, it was a valiant effort from a high school kid with some experience
in playwriting and no clue how to write a decent song. I didn’t even know what
scansion or prosody were, or how to wield either one properly.
It was with this humble background that I found myself
standing in the Fireplace Theater inside 69 Brimmer Street, with two other
students also enrolled as composers in Jason Robert Brown’s class (the course
was actually an audition technique class for actors, but there were three of us
composers that met individually with Jason after class to go over weekly
writing assignments). Jason sat at the piano, played through a song of mine I
had brought in as a work sample for our first meeting, then turned to me,
pointed at my sheet music and said: “your notation is great, but this is just
wrong.”
The Fireplace Theater in 69 Brimmer Street at Emerson College where Jason's class was held. Sadly, this space no longer exists.
He was referring to how I had set my lyric. The truth was
the scan was totally incorrect, though at 18 no one had ever pointed something
like that out to me before. In the song in question – a dissonant number
entitled “Here I Sit” – I had set the word “rejoicing” on a melody and rhythm
that caused the first syllable to be emphasized, like: “RE-joy-cing,” which is not how any human being who speaks English as their first language says that word. It took
Jason pointing out something so simple – something so basic that it just comes to most songwriters who are not me naturally – for the proverbial light bulb to go off in my
brain. I couldn’t just throw words and music together and expect everything to
work. There was a craft to it. It sounds stupidly obvious now, but as a
teenager it blew my mind. “Here’s what I want you to do,” Jason said to the
three of us: “forget how brilliant you are. Get over how amazing you are and
write a song for next week. 32 bars only. AABA structure. Music only, no
lyric.” Then he pointed at me: “except you. I want you to write a lyric for
yours.”
That semester my songwriting went from the work of a
teenaged kid screwing around and having fun to that of a craftsman in training. I still
wasn’t a remarkable songwriter by any means, but I was now thinking while I
wrote, rather than just flinging notes and words onto a page. Once a week Jason
and I would have a one-on-one session after class for about a half an hour to
discuss the writing exercise of the week. He had me take my 32-bar song and add
a trio section, an intro, then rewrite the whole thing as a ballad. He had me
look at different accompaniment patterns, (“rhythmic” vs. “flowery,”) melody
contours, etc. But perhaps the biggest impact that class had on me was the week
he invited all of us down to New York to see the invited dress rehearsal of his
new musical, which was opening soon at the Minetta Lane theater.
Jason performing "King of the World" from Songs for a New World.
Today on the Ides of March, the fateful day when Julius Caesar met his maker at the hands of Marcus Brutus, I considered continuing my New
York series of the pastthreeweeks into a fourth installment devoted to the
now overturned soda law – a development that made me quite annoyed this week. But so much happened this week – what with Mercury in retrograde or something, that I figured the time was
right to do a week-in-review post. So here’s what went down this week by category, through
the eyes of yours truly.
LOCAL/U.S.: Food Fight
Unless you were living under a rock this week, you heard
that Mayor Bloomberg’s so-called “soda ban” (an awful name for the law) was
struck down by a judge.
Everyone has their opinion on the law, but talking to
friends and hearing the media this past week, it seems few people actually
understood what the law was trying to accomplish. This law was aimed at
stemming obesity in kids living in poorer neighborhoods of the city – kids who
often buy their meals at fast food restaurants and other local establishments.
I for one say limiting the amount of sugar and calories they can imbibe in one
sitting is a good thing, and could have gone a long way to promoting healthy
living.
But we live in America, and this story was ripe for media
outrage. It was sold as if the government was telling adults what they could
and couldn’t drink, which is the opposite of what it was going to do. No one
was going to stop a grown adult from getting a refill on his or her 16-ounce
soda. But don’t tell that to the anti-education, FOX News-watching yahoos out
there, because in an effort to do nothing more than give a big middle finger to
Michelle Obama and what Sarah Palin dubbed “fake America,” Mississippi
lawmakers approved what they call the “anti-Bloomberg bill,” a law that bans
Mississippi cities and counties from enacting legislation limiting portion
sizes, banning trans fats & the like, or posting calorie counts on menus. Really,
Mississippi? Hey, how’s that whole being the state in the nation with the
highest rate of obesity thing working out for you? You better be thankful the
healthcare law passed, otherwise your entire state would be diagnosed with a
pre-existing condition.
It’s the children that really suffer in all this, and that’s
what makes me crazy. A bunch of so-called “freedom-loving” adults are content
to watch their kids grow overweight and develop disease just so they can enjoy
their big gulps. I have yet to hear a convincing argument for why kids should
be consuming that much sugar on a daily basis.
Here's the only kind of sugar you need (any excuse to include a little Hedwig). Also: are there any Musical Theatre songs about soda? I can't think of a single one.
WORLD: Does The Pope Shit In The Woods?
I'll have you know, dear readers, that I searched long and hard for a video clip of the "does the pope shit in the woods" quote from The Big Lebowski but it does not appear to exist online in a form I could find. There's this one from Californication but it's just not the same.
Did you hear? There’s a new Pope! Pope Francis was selected
on Wednesday as white smoke rose from the Sistine Chapel chimney, and this guy
reportedly walks the walk – the first ever Pope from the New World, he’s also a
Jesuit which means he’s super into poor people or something and doesn’t even
like fancy cars or those Prada shoes all the Popes wear.
Now here’s the thing: I was raised Jewish, I’m currently agnostic,
gay, and a socialist, so I shouldn’t give two fucks about the Papacy. And yet,
I’m also a student of history, so I can’t help but be in awe of the historical
moment for a deeply flawed institution that has been around for centuries.
Yeah. The dude is awful on gay rights and women’s rights and whatnot. But remember
that this is the Catholic Church we’re talking about here. It took them 400
fucking years to forgive Galileo for suggesting the Earth revolves around the
Sun. I’m not saying that gives them an excuse, I’m just saying this is an
institution that doesn’t take kindly to change. A new Pope isn’t gonna suddenly
catapult them into the modern era, and anyone who thinks he can is being a
little naïve.
But hey, unlike the last guy, this one wasn’t a member of
the Nazi youth. So, you know… that’s something.
Growing up Jewish and gay, this was my only exposure to Catholicism. Thus I assumed that all nuns behaved like this all the time. (Also, Rue McClanahan, I still love you.)
