Crazytown

LETTING GO

The time has come for letting go.
By Brett Ryback (Actor-Writer)

Parents and children are a recurring theme in my work.  I find this an effective theme because whether or not we have children, we all have parents. 

But one aspect of the parent/child relationship that I have a good deal of experience with is the "letting go" part.  And while there's interesting exploration to be done on the "child" side of letting go, I am currently on the parenting side.  In this case, the children are my pieces of art - The Tavern Keeper's Daughter and Darling, which are playing next week in Milwaukee and Boston, respectively.

All right, all right - maybe I didn't go through a physically painful labor, and raise them for the last 18 years - but I have spent countless, intimate hours with these pieces.  I know them inside and out.  I have fought for them, learned from them, been frustrated and confused by them, and I have protected and loved them the way any good parent would.

And now they go out into the big scary world to be judged.  There can be no mistake - this is the most exciting and frightening part of the process for any creator. 

In Genesis, God made the world, and at each step along the way stood back and said "I did good!"  Fortunately for God, Ben Brantley hadn't been born yet.

But here's the bigger lesson.  You cannot control what others will think.  People will have every opinion under the sun and those opinions will directly conflict with one another.  I don't just mean when it comes to your work - I mean ev-er-y-thing.

So, why worry about what you can't control?  All you can do, is stand up and say, "This is who I am," and let others decide.

What's the lyric? 

Stop worry if your vision is new.
Let others make that decision - they usually do.
You keep moving on.

And so I will.  As these pieces continue to find their feet, I'm off to bigger and better things. 

After all - it's not like they're gone forever.  They're gonna have to come back to do laundry eventually.

BRETT RYBACK wrote the music for Liberty Inn (Ovation Nominee, Best Music/Lyrics), the book music and lyrics for The Tavern Keeper’s Daughter, and the book for Darling. He also acts on stage and TV. www.btryback.wordpress.com
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STRONG WOMEN SINGING: THE LIST!

The top ten strongest female characters in musical theatre.
By Shoshana Greenberg (Lyricist/Bookwriter)


Last month, I posted about helping to create a list of the strongest female characters in musicals. Thank you to everyone who contributed characters, both here and on other forums. I loved reading your entries and discovering your reasons for why these characters are wonderful and strong.

I've now weighed all the entries and compiled the top ten list. Instead of explaining my reasons for choosing each character, I wanted to use your words, as those were what influenced the choices and the order. I have some of my own thoughts, which you'll see below, but, really, this list comes from you.

The Top Ten Strongest Female Characters in Musical Theatre

10. Mame from Mame
"She travels, she briefly marries (her husband falls off a cliff)-- but no matter. She forges on and wants her beloved nephew to be happy. For Mame, marriage is nice but not essential. And oh yeah, she coaxed the blues right out of the horn." -Wendy

"[A] wild party woman of the roaring 20s who is forced by circumstance to raise her nephew [becomes] a role model of living life by being true to yourself while weathering snobbery, the loss of true love, and the hardships of the depression." -Diane

Mame show art.

9.  Princess Winnifred  from Once Upon a Mattress
"You first meet Princess Winnifred in the most unladylike of circumstances--climbing over the wall soaking wet after swimming the moat--and singing the song "Shy", which she clearly isn't. She's not afraid to speak her mind and she impresses the Prince by all her diverse abilities ("Song of Love") rather than being coy and letting him impress her. And in the song "Happily Ever After" she sings about having to fend for herself without the aid of magical fairy-tale circumstances." -Tara

"Fred (well, Winifred) defies the convention of a damsel in distress. She's loud, brash, and doesn't need anyone to rescue her." -Diana

The trailer for the 2005 television version of Once Upon a Mattress.

 

8. Cinderella from Into the Woods
"She starts out as the typical Cinderella who wants to go to the ball and marries the prince, but by the second act she is helping to fight the giant and taking care of the remaining characters. She understands the truth about her philandering husband and moves on." -Shoshana

"Cinderella fights to survive and is not weak in the knees like in most fairy tale versions and assumes a caretaker role at the end, protecting everyone." -Aliza

Cinderella at her mother's grave in the original Broadway production of Into the Woods.

 

7. Margaret from The Light in the Piazza
"The mother of a grown daughter, she's not your conventional heroine/narrator. I was struck by the power of her audience-address privilege throughout the show, as she was able to share her inner logic, her justifications, her deepest fears. I found her terrifically fallible, proud, petty, wounded, funny, and in the end strong enough to open her heart to the possibility of her daughter being fulfilled in love, a possibility that she herself had lost out on." -Daniel

  Margaret sings "Fable" from the televised version of the original Broadway production of The Light in the Piazza.

MULTI-PASS

A new model of membership for NYC's Off-Broadway Theaters

 By Ryan Bogner (Producer, Wingnut) 

Subscription sales are the foundation of many of the non-profit theater companies in this city...and are essential for the livelihood of several of the institutions with major budgets. Though by all accounts subscription sales are back on the uptick this year after a serious decline during the economic recession, they are still running up against a major hurdle in capturing younger and new audiences.

Subscriptions run counter to the way consumers behave in the 21st century.

THE LESSON I SHOULD HAVE LEARNED A LONG TIME AGO

I've always been a bit slow to figure stuff out. I didn't even realize Rosie O'Donnell was a lesbian until I saw that ridiculous haircut she got after her show finished. But that's not the point! The point is that I had a revelation recently and I'd like to tell you about it.
By Geoffrey Kidwell (actor)

Picture this:

I’m sitting in the waiting room of a casting office.

(I won’t tell you which one for fear that I’ll be blacklisted, but I will tell you that it rhymes with Belsey…You with me? Great).

Okay, so I’m sitting in this waiting room and I’m surrounded by the usual goings on:

An angry equity monitor who behaves like the Mussolini of monitoring and seems to think that running an audition is akin to running a small sovereign nation.

There are rolling suitcases stuffed with cheap Forever 21 cotton dresses and highlight scores from Aida and Merrily We Roll Along.

And then, of course, there’s the usual chitter chatter – Where did you work last? Oh, you love Raul Esparza? I just worked with him in a concert. He’s so great, - such a doll.

Have I painted a clear enough picture?

WHAT RHYMES WITH HUMOR?

Roses are red, Violets are blue,
Sometimes rhymes are funny, but sometimes they're not.
By Brett Ryback (Actor-Writer)

Stephen Sondheim has gone on record to say that while "there are reasons not to rhyme...In the theater, true rhyme works best on every level." 

True rhyme being defined as two words or phrases whose final accented syllables sound alike except for the consonant sounds which precede them.  Perfect rhyme, in other words.  Home/roam, never/forever.

Let me be the first to say that I, for one, couldn't disagree more.  I mean, really.  Who does this ::air quotes:: Sondheim think he is?

Okay, in all seriousness, I do mostly agree with him, but I disagree with him at least a little when it comes to comedy.

In comedy, non-rhymes can be just as funny - if not FUNNIER - than perfect rhymes. 

THE SONG MONKEY, OR THE MYTH OF THE COMPOSER-LYRICIST

To you playwrights, bookwriters, and other theatre folks who think it's the primary job of the composer-lyricist to write the songs of a musical: you're dead wrong.
By RSO 

I'm not your monkey.  I'm not a "songwriter."

I'm a composer-lyricist, someone working in both the fields of music composition and lyric writing, as they apply to one form: theatre told with music and lyrics.

It's not my job to write songs to fulfill someone else's story.  If someone wants that kind of song person, they should go ask Alanis Morisette if they can make a juke box musical from her canon.  She may oblige them.

I think musicals are at their best when all the authors (whether it be one, two, three or more) respect this definition, forcing or allowing the writers of the music and lyrics to take on the onus usually believed to be the burden of only the bookwriter.

Stephen Sondheim (Composer-lyricist) and James Lapine (Bookwriter).

In fact, many people believe the bookwriter is "in charge of the story."  But this isn't, or at least mustn't be so... not if you want to write a cohesive theatrical work operating at full force.

While I've been blessed to work with a number of bookwriters who support me in this belief, there are still many out there who do not.  I find this is most often true of bookwriters who start out as playwrights and/or screenwriters. ...  They believe the story is their story, their sole domain, and the composer-lyricist is designing songs to fit it, like the costumer designs costumes.

In many ways a writer who writes for television is more equipped to write a musical than a playwright is; they are used to collaborating on a story with myriad co-writers, and separating their ego from the notion that this story is "theirs," and its foundation, with its twists and turns, is theirs to devise.

But lest my haughty tone confuse you, I admire bookwriters tremendously and despite traditional sharing agreements where a bookwriter would receive 1/3 of the show, and I (writing two parts) would get 2/3, I often feel so strongly about my collaborator and our work together that I ask for only 1/2.  It's no donation; it's philosophy.

Some are painfully aware that when a musical is done best, too often the composer-lyricist gets the credit, which is unfortunate and unfair.   And they're aware of the old rule that when the emotion rises high enough you must sing, and that their best monologue will likely be "cannibalized" and turned into a song, and here we are again, the credit goes to the composer-lyricist, not the bookwriter who had the original idea.  It's hard to be a bookwriter in this business, but it's hard to be a doctor, too, and fuck knows we need them both desperately.  For some, both are needed equally!

Left, William Finn (composer-lyricist) and Rachel Sheinkin (bookwriter).

We composer-lyricists contribute the words that are sung, just as we make the notes to be sung and the notes to be played.  In the same way, the bookwriter contributes the words to be spoken.  But we create the story together.

Furthermore, I create the structure of the notes to be played and the notes and words to be sung and the bookwriter creates the structure of the words to be spoken... which is to say, I decide if it's an AABA song and where the high note goes and the bookwriter decides how long the scene is and when Harry comes in and may decide that this scene is actually, quite funny in the end.  But we agree that the song is about Harry loving Sheila and why, and we agree that this scene is indeed between Harry and Sheila and in the end Harry breaks up with her.  Together we decide WHAT, WHO, WHY, WHEN and WHERE, and individually we decide HOW.

We must agree on the content, but allow each to dictate his or her form.

And while writing, can we question the who, what, when, where, why we decided together because something better comes along and inspiration strikes, or it isn't working at all and redirection is necessitated?  Of course!  We must!  And when we deliver to our collaborator a redirection, must we acknowledge it and explain why we feel this is better and prepare potentially to be awarded a medal of honor or to take arms and do battle?  Yes, of course!

It's hard enough being a bookwriter as it is, as the ones I know and love will tell you.  Book too often gets blamed for why a show doesn't work (though, thankfully, the trend is lessening as more and more terrible scores inundate the marketplace).  Unfairly only in the sense that story matters most of all and is the hardest to fake, and when a show doesn't add up it's glaring and the story is likely at fault.  They blame the bookwriter, but it's not her fault; it's our fault.

Adam Guettel (composer-lyricist) and Craig Lucas (bookwriter)

So for the horror and the glory that is Story, let the composer-lyricist share in the duty, the blame, and the praise... at LEAST half, if not 2/3 of the blame (depending on the deal their agent worked out).

RYAN SCOTT OLIVER wrote the music and lyrics for Darling, Mrs. Sharp, 35mm, Jasper in Deadland and is currently at work on Freaky Friday for Disney Theatricals. www.ryanscottoliver.com
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BROADWAY BABY SCHADENFREUDE

One part of graduating that I'm looking forward to is no more studying. Although I get to study Golden Age musical theatre, it's more fun when I peruse Youtube clips of Carol Channing, Mary Martin and Bob Fosse of my own accord. Here are a few stories of Broadway legends faceplanting to make us feel better.
by Joshua Page (Guest for Jenny Donoghue) 

I don't know how much of this is common knowledge, but the amount of celebrity failures that you hear about when you take a theatre history class saturated with information takes you by surprise. It makes every little frustration seem a little more manageable, so take a look at the list Broadway Legend Did-You-Knows:

MARY MARTIN: Known for her starring roles in Peter Pan, South Pacific, and Sound of Music. However, she also did some less stellar works, like Jennie and Lute Song since she turned down leading roles in Oklahoma, Mame, and My Fair Lady. Not that being in a bad show is particular to her; in fact they say Gwen Verdon and Ethel Merman were the only two stars who were never in a flop! 

More after the jump...

PLAY CLUB AUDITIONS

PLAY CLUB (New York) Is having auditions to add new actors, directors and writers to their family! 
By Pam Quinn (Writer)

Auditions to add ACTORS to the email list will be February 7th starting at 8pm and February 8th starting at 7pm at 36th Street Studios. Please email uaplayclub@gmail.com with your HEADSHOT and RESUME to sign up for an audition time slot and to receive sides for said audition. Read about the club below...

“Play Club” consists of several artistic members residing in New York who will meet during the month to participate in a series of Play Club events that focus on performing, writing, directing and producing. Started by The Unknown Artists in the Spring of 2011, Play Club has hosted over 35 readings and has helped hone the cold reading skills of over 150 members. We’ve also given several writers the opportunity to hear their pieces out loud and receive feedback from their work. In the summer of 2011 we even opened up a Play Club branch on the West Coast. Play Club West has been very successful as well and we look forward to continued success with the club on both coasts.

We have a membership due of ONLY $10 a month (And that’s only if you choose to participate that particular month)

FOR ACTORS – Participating in “Play Club” will be beneficial in strengthening your cold reading skills, learning about a play you may not have heard of or know little about, being a part of the beginning stages of someone’s original work, flexing your instincts as an actor, and possibly being considered for a role in a future production of certain plays read during Play Club.

FOR WRITERS – You will be given an opportunity to hear your script out loud. We will provide you with skilled cold readers, a space and script copies of your work in addition to useful feedback.

FOR DIRECTORS – Play Club gives you the chance to flex your directing creativity whether it be a scene for the scene workshops or getting your hands on a full staged reading or production.

IT'S ALWAYS RIGHT NOW UNTIL IT'S GOB SQUAD'S KITCHEN

What you get when you combine Daniel Kitson's latest show with Gob Squad's Kitchen.
By Shoshana Greenberg (Lyricist/Bookwriter)

Last Sunday I saw two extraordinary works of theater, but what made them extraordinary was not just the productions but the experience of seeing them back to back. Daniel Kitson's It's Always Right Now Until It's Later at St. Ann's Warehouse and Gob Squad's Kitchen (You've Never Had It So Good) at The Public Theater made for an engrossing five hour period in which I experienced the entirety of life itself.

Daniel Kitson in It's Always Right Now Until It's Later at St. Ann's Warehouse.

In It's Always Right Now Until It's Later, the stage is empty save a chair, a small step ladder, and dozens of light bulbs suspended from the ceiling. Kitson runs from bulb to bulb as he tells the stories of William Rivington and Caroline Carpenter--one story from birth to death and the other backward, from death to birth. The characters' lives don't intertwine, however. The stories are just about two peoples' lives and the many moments that fill them. Kitson describes life as a deluge and these moments as drops in the ocean of that flood. He says that our brains fill in the gaps between these moments, but that there are, in fact, no real gaps in time.

Gob Squad's Kitchen, and the Andy Warhol films that inspire the piece, give us the gaps.  Four members of the British-German group Gob Squad (the cast changes nightly, sometimes with the same actors playing different roles) attempt to reenact Warhol's 1965 film Kitchen, as well as parts of his movies Sleep, Eat, Kiss, and Screen Test, in which someone sleeps for eight hours, eats, engages in three-minute kisses, and sits for a long screen test, respectively. By the end of Gob Squad's delightful experiment, four members of the audience have taken the actors' places, and we are left with the hauntingly beautiful line: "In 100 years, people will look at this and say: 'That's why.'"

 

The combination of Daniel Kitson's tiny moments with Gob Squad's stretches of seemingly mundane routine equals the breath of human experience. Unfortunately, It's Always Right Now Until It's Later closes today, but you can still see Gob Squad's Kitchen at The Public Theater for one more week until February 5. You won't get the entire human experience, but you'll get a part that, as Gob Squad says, looks for "the hidden depths beneath the shiny surfaces of modern life."

SHOSHANA GREENBERG is a writer, lyricist, bookwriter, and playwright.  http://about.me/shoshanagreenberg
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insignificance

THOUGHTS FROM THE FUTURE

My thoughts after attending TEDxBroadway, an event looking at what Broadway could be in twenty years.

By Ryan Bogner (Producer, Wingnut) 

On Monday I was fortunate enough to atttend TEDxBroadway, which was an independently organized TED event dealing with the future of Broadway. If you aren't familiar with TED, they are an organization that holds conferences that deal with really big ideas, where experts in various fields give short talks on big ideas that could change the world. (head on over to ted.com to check it out)

TedXBroadway was much the same, with speakers from the world of Broadway and Live entertainment as well as outside the box thinkers from everything from marketing to cultural research. I won't give you a rundown of the whole event as Howard Sherman has already done a great job of that with his live blog coverage (found here.)

There was a lot of talk about reaching the next generation, and about how the world is changing. The big question being how does our art form remain relvent in a world with boundless opportunites of entertainment available at our beck and call?

As a member of that next generation, I want to share with you all what my take away from the afternoon was.