A draft manifesto for A Play With Music

August 8, 2008 in Music, Theatre | 3 comments

Well, yesterday’s post provoked my first comments from someone I don’t know personally. Excellent. So, while my post was clearly the work of someone expressing an opinion, I’d like to think there were some reasonably objective points raised there. So today, to conclude the document I wrote in response to my hatred of Musical Theatre, here’s what I wrote as a proposed framework for something better…

• “A play with music” not “A musical”.

• We will not concern ourselves with a West End transfer, CD sales, how memorable the tunes are, our target demographic or whether people come away with a smile on their face.

• Specialised performers for specialised roles.

• The writing of music & sound design will happen at the same time as the writing of the narrative & dialogue.

• We will try to find a mode of performance in which the appearance of music is internally consistent with the narrative, characterisation and world of the play.

• Music will arise from something happening in the world of the play, not from an out-of-world decision.

• Music isn’t there to make an audience feel a particular emotion- it’s an expression of a situation in the world of the play, or of how a character’s emotional state.

• We won’t take any shortcuts to emotion by repeating something an audience has heard before.

• Music is not in the world of the play, in the same way that lighting changes are not in the world of the play- they are both there to illuminate the action on stage and show it to the audience.

• If the characters interact with the musicians or the music, then there must be a reason for them to recognise this intrusion into their world.

• If a character is going to sing, it should be as remarkable as when someone breaks into song in real life.

• We will try to portray the real world.

Discuss away, if you have thoughts…

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  1. Jaylenurph’s avatar

    Jaylenurph on August 9, 2008 at 10:53 pm

    Some of those are down-right Brechtian. But then again, some aren’t.

    It seems to me (probably because I’m a dramaturg and tend to break everything down dramaturgically) that you’re sort of tying yourself into an odd relationship with naturalism, like when you say, “Music will arise from something happening in the world of the play, not from an out-of-world decision.” Doesn’t that severely limit the sort of things you can pick as a plot, and as characters?*

    I mean, if anything, traditional musicals (and even Brechtian plays with music) make a virtue out the vice of doing the exact opposite: getting people who wouldn’t sing in naturalistic circumstances: the basic premise is that music communicates better the emotion behind the cause of singing. And that /is/ true. When it works. But because musicals are the direct off-spring of melodramas, they’re almost congenitally unable to do the sort of dramatic work necessary to /make/ songs work. (And I do apologise for that odd bit of anthropomorphizing a genre…)

    *I mean, not that constraints are ipso facto bad. Legitimate ones can be helpful and foster creativity.

  2. nick’s avatar

    nick on August 12, 2008 at 9:25 am

    Well, perhaps something I should have made clearer is that this is an approach I was hoping to adopt for a particular project, one that had been worked on already. With that in mind, these parameters were already sort-of suited to the work in mind, so maybe this is a bit of a cheat. It certainly wouldn’t be suitable for all narratives and character sets, but I’m pretty sure a form doesn’t exist that’s ideally suited to *all* narratives and characters.

    As to whether this particular framework will limit the characters and plot, I don’t think that’s true- I think it will certainly place restrictions on the *way* that the narrative & characters are presented, but it shouldn’t affect the stories that can be portrayed. I mean, it may well be that you end up with much less music than in a Musical, but something I value as the most important thing in all art is the unity of form and structure- less music, deployed with more precision and consideration, is exactly the sort of thing we should be aiming for.

    The only situation I can think of where I’ve seen a conventional musical form have any sort of consistency is the Robert Wilson production of Woyzek; the fact that the entire show is incredibly stylised in his particular way makes the breaks into music much more structurally consistent.

    From what you’re saying, though, it seems that you’re seeing the same central problem that I am- “[musicals are] unable to do the sort of dramatic work necessary to make songs work”. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not claiming that this framework of mine is a groundbreaking new way of doing things, or that everything it suggests is going to work- I think, though, that it could be a good beginning, and a good way to approach it.

    Thanks for commenting- it’s good to have someone to discuss all these things with. Keep it coming…

  3. Jaylemurph’s avatar

    Jaylemurph on August 15, 2008 at 3:06 am

    Well, the really wonderful things about Greek tragedy was the sort of artistic whole they represent, and the closest extant thing I can think of that sounds like what you first described. And the Chorus did nothing but sing and dance in them.

    Not that anybody since them has been able to reconstruct what they were actually like, and nobody since them has had the opportunity to create any sort of drama so free from the audience’s preconceived expectations.

    Because it strikes me that what you’re dealing with is sort of the core dramaturgical problem — clearly you’ve got a sound theoretical basis for what you’re writing and you know how (more or less) to create it, but that may or may not come into conflict with what audiences expect or want/be able to deal with. Once you’ve gone beyond the first couple of drafts and have a fair idea of the rough feel of the work, you should find a dramaturg and see what s/he makes of it.