This is my first try at recording a podcast on writing musicals. Episode negative 1. It’s 25 minutes of me talking without a script to see how it feels and how it plays to the listener to gather feedback on whether this is doable and what we should consider to make it into a real thing we can post on Spotify and whatnot.
Transcription from AI:
Hi, this is Charlie, and thanks for coming in to listen to a podcast about writing musicals. And how do we ever do such a thing as writing a musical? What a task. But that’s the plan for this podcast, and this is the debut, the initial, the inaugural podcast. And the reason I want to make this podcast is just because I’m writing one, and I’ve written a few in the past. And I grew up with a love of musicals and friends of the family who were part of the musical, the American musical history and culture here. And so I wanted to just talk about it and explore it and hear other people’s takes on how to write musicals and why to write musicals. And how musicals have progressed and how we can make them new and fresh and how we can make them old and filled with tradition and history as well. But anything is open game, I think, in this podcast vision that I have. And I want to get it started, just get going. I hope that we’ll bring some valuable tips and tricks into the discussion as we go. And so, really, this is me learning as I go and trying to define these questions, answers these questions that I have, or find ways to explore these questions that I have about writing musicals, which I think is absolutely the most fascinating of arts, really. It’s so vast and has so much scope and needs so many collaborators that I just find it endlessly fascinating. So I hope you’ll sign up on the subscriber buttons there. You’ll click on the subscriber button, and I hope you’ll sign up on the email list so I can tell you when a new podcast is coming out, a new episode is coming out. And I hope you’ll join me in discussions with how to make these crazy things and what the challenges are and how we’re going to solve these challenges and what solutions we can find to creating musicals in real time and getting them staged, getting them finished, getting them written, getting them recorded. And I think it’ll be fun. So thanks for coming. Again, thanks very much for coming today.
I, like I said, I’ve been thinking a lot about writing musicals lately because I was in a play. I got cast in a play for the first time in quite some time, not because I was having problems with being cast. I just had been doing a thousand other things instead of acting. I was touring as a musician, playing 150 shows a year for a while, doing live acoustic music. And I’ve been a thousand other things in my lifetime that I can go into in depth later, I’m sure. But recently when I was casting this play, I got so excited to be in a room full of creative people again that I started to brainstorm, what is it here that I really love? And I’ve always identified myself as a writer, primarily a songwriter. And this podcast really could be about just writing songs. But I think the true fascination for me, in addition to the song itself, is the concept of building a story and staging a story with songs. And so in musical theater concepts, in that musical theater paradigm, the Great American Musical, you’ve got the book, you’ve got the lyrics, and you’ve got the music itself, composing music. And traditionally, those have all been three separate parts. So the giants of musicals separated those things into three different parts. So they’d start with a book, they’d find a composer, they’d find a lyricist, and they’d put them together.
And I think what’s happening now is that with the advent of do-it-yourself and that you can do everything, I think there’s this potential vision that we can write all three things by ourselves. And in a way, I think Hamilton has kind of made that specific idea that you can do it all yourself sort of a mythology. I really feel like Lin-Manuel Miranda is sort of like what the Beatles were in 62, where songwriting back then had traditionally been handled by songwriters, and then artists were given the songs to sing. And the Beatles turned that on its head. And I think there were other artists at that time as well, Buddy Holly for one, for sure, who had stripped songwriting down to just the basic elements that three or four people could do and perform songs and that any single person could write songs. And it didn’t require a team of songwriters. It didn’t require composers in advance. Unless anyone could write a song. And so they just did it to prove that it was true. And I really feel like Lin-Manuel Miranda has sort of taken that mantle here now with Hamilton. Hamilton, of course, being 10 years old now, so I apologize for using a slightly out-of-date example, but on all of the recordings and on the program, it always says, everything was written by Lin-Manuel Miranda. Hamilton is written by him. Music, lyrics, book. Now, he does admit, I think, that the original idea for the book came from a novel that he picked up in an airport on Hamilton and Burr. And he thought that it was a perfect story for a musical. And so he did base it on another piece of source material. But it’s widely accepted, or at least copyrighted, that Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote the book and the lyrics and the music. And I think when you dig deeper into it, you find out that, well, wait, actually, the whole team put the whole musical together. And he negotiated, possibly, to make himself listed as the book writer and the lyricist and the composer. And I’m not saying that it’s illegitimate that he has those three titles all in one. But I do think it’s a very collaborative medium. And I’m fascinated by this concept that one person could do all the things and create a musical that is then actually a hit, which Hamilton certainly was and still is. running for 10 years now with, you know, a live television broadcast and the whole bit. And marketing up the wazoo, right? The Broadway cast recording released on CD and streaming and et cetera, et cetera.
So I’m fascinated by this concept of being able to write a whole musical by yourself. And that’s what I kind of challenged myself to do right now. And so, and I even wanted to take it one step farther and develop the source material just out of my head. And so, I wanted to come up with an idea that wasn’t based on La Boheme or a book of historical, you know, not necessarily fiction, but some other source. I didn’t want it to be based on a novel. I didn’t want it to be based on a movie. Today, I was listening to or watching a TV show from 1965 that was produced by CBS. And it was, it was cool because it was an interviewer interviewing Arthur Lorenz and Stephen Sondheim on the opening of a new show that they had written that was now opening on Broadway that year in 1965 called Do I Hear a Waltz? And that musical was based on a play that was written by Arthur Lorenz and then made into a film with a different title. and finally made into this musical. And so, I was just, and the reason I found it is because the name of the episode of this television show was called How to Write a Musical or On Writing a Musical with, and it then said Sondheim and I’m like, fantastic. So, I watched it and it was, it was fun to watch them, you know, dressed in suits, black and white TV, smoking cigarettes in a soundstage, television studio, discussing the musical and just hearing their thoughts on how it was written and how it came about. And after I watched this little 30-minute episode, I went back to, researched a little more and, you know, googled the show and I wanted to know how long it ran because at the end of the show, the interviewer said, well, I certainly hope that you’ll come back in a year. I hope that it’ll be a grand success. You’ll come back in a year and we’ll be able to talk about the show again. So, then I was immediately fascinated with the idea, well, did it last a year? So, I googled it and, no, it only ran for, like, 220 performances and then closed and was wildly acknowledged as a flop. And, you know, Sondheim and Lorenz are, you know, titans of the industry. And so, then, I got to read all this background story about how much of a disaster the whole production was working with Rogers doing the music who was, at that point, acknowledged drunk and very insecure. Hammerstein had recently died and had bequeathed the mantle of lyrics to Sondheim and encouraged Sondheim to work with Rogers. But, the collaboration was widely seen as a failure and the first thing I thought when the TV show came on was like, well, where’s Rogers? Why isn’t he here? And they had a set designer from Italy instead. interesting stuff that he talked about for sure and a very cool set which brings a whole another layer of complexity to musicals again is not only are you writing a book and then writing the lyrics and writing music but then you also have to stage it. You have to build the sets and you have to have great singers and actors and dancers. I find musicals just to be astonishing.
The hubris of thinking you can write one of these on your own I think is enormous. But also like, well, why can’t I? I’ve got all the skills. Like I said, I’ve written a few musicals before and we had one full-length one staged in Manhattan at the International Fringe Festival. I’ve also written a couple short ones what I considered like the first one I wrote was called A Ten Minute Tuner and it was put together with three other musicals so it was a night of short musicals in Chicago and I did a very similar thing years later with a different theater where we wrote our rock and roll musicals in a week and we wrote four musicals and so I wrote one of those again so it was about 10 minutes again or 15 minutes maybe and three songs in each and we had a book writer and a musician and then a group of actors who did you know a book writer and a musician would collaborate to write one of the four musicals short musicals and then a team of five actors I think maybe six actors would then perform all of them all four musicals in the one hour time span or maybe an hour and a half time span so I’ve written those musicals and had them produced staged and I’ve also written other bits of musicals just as exercises kind of or you know to amuse myself really because it’s fun I just really enjoy the act of coming up with a story and then and hopefully the more absurd the better for me.
I like crazy stories like I wrote one about a sausage empire two two families who were kings of the bratwurst in Wisconsin and they were warring families and then the son of one family and the daughter of the other family fell in love of course but that was the easy part that the whole thing was staged with a galactic space war when when the sausage people came back from outer space that had been sent away 500 years earlier by Leonardo da Vinci you see that’s what came to that it’s like I wrote that whole piece in a day and I had so much fun doing it because it was just so crazy and so silly and so fun you know with a intergalactic space battle directly over Coney Island during the hot dog eating contest I just love the whole just everything about it and I’ve loved it since I was little when I was a really little kid like four years old we used to go see a family friend well my mother was friends with a woman she had met in college named Tory Harburg and we would go and spend like summers or you know a week in summer visiting them the Harburgs and Tori was married to Ernie Harburg and Ernie is the son of Yip Harburg so from a very young age I was sort of put into this world where writing musicals was as natural a thing as you could do because I knew people who knew people who had or were related to people who had written some of the biggest musicals in the world you know the most famous ones of all time and Yip of course being the lyricist for The Wizard of Oz.
So like, I think from a very young age I thought oh yeah I could do that and it was never there was never any doubt in my mind that that was something that I could do so I’ve been fascinated by writing musicals ever since I was little or just made compellingly aware that it was something that was possible for someone like me to do and then I learned to write songs I remember in freshman year in high school I wrote my first song I’ve been playing banjo and guitar and then I met a friend and we were learning to play guitar together and we were learning songs together rock songs and popular music songs and then suddenly one came to me in my head and I started to sing it out loud as I played guitar and then I started to write it down and then I played it for my friend a little later and he goes how did you do that and I’m like I don’t know I just opened my mouth and started singing I started playing guitar and then I opened my mouth and started singing and I don’t know I just started doing it and I I think that that all came from those initial impulses when I was four years old and in the presence of people who had made Broadway musicals happen or been you know a part of Broadway musicals happening from the beginning and I thought I don’t know I’ve just always thought I could do it and it took me years to finally write one but once I had written one I was like oh yeah this is the coolest thing ever I want to do this all the time and I’ve got to figure out more ways to do it.
So then I you know searched out workshops to get into like the New Tuners Theater in Chicago which had a musical writing workshop called New Tuners of course and it was taught by a man and a few assistants and basically it was just a workshop we’re going to write a musical now we’re going to write a 10 minute musical right now let’s do it and you here’s your partner and here we go it’s got to be ready in six weeks that type thing .
So I think what I’m getting at here is like I am so excited about this podcast I just think this can be so fun and I’m so excited to interview other people who are writing I have another friend who’s writing a musical or has recently done a staged reading in London Jonathan Spottiswood I’m hoping to interview him I’m hoping to talk with other people who are interested in writing musicals I’m interested in building a community to help each other write and produce musicals and take on all of these crazy elements sort of one by one so we can not be overwhelmed by writing and let go of our insecurities and our desire for perfection and get ourselves writing and completing things whether they’re good or not and I want to talk a lot about that which I’ve learned a lot of in songwriting is that you know just writing songs not worrying about whether it’s good enough or whether it’s good or not at all and simply letting yourself write and letting yourself think creatively and act and that’s what I want this to be about I’m really excited about like I said before I’m really grateful that you decided to listen in and I hope again that I can provide some tools here or at least I can find some research some tools online that we can all use together and create a space kind of a safe space where we can all work together and talk together about this crazy wonderful medium and I hope you’ll sign up I hope you’ll subscribe to the podcast now I hope you’ll sign up on the email list I’m going to put together a short sort of resource list of things that I’ve found recently that I for example the the Sondham interview and I’ve been reading a book on writing dialogue that I think is a great book so I’m going to make a list and post that and so if you sign up on the email list I’ll definitely send you a link for that when it’s ready and I hope to build an area where we can just post a lot of resources for each other and start to start to just make stuff let’s make stuff all right thank you so much for stopping by today and I look forward to talking to you next time. Thanks bye.