Author Archives: weinberg

musicals

How do you write the lyrics for an entire new musical in three weeks with 25 authors?

Here’s how. I think.

We’re going to choose an over-arching narrative for our class-written musical, something with mass culture appeal that has not yet been made into a musical – Harry Potter…AVATAR…something… – and break it, roughly, into acts and scenes. Each student gets assigned to an act and a scene, and to the song from that scene.

They each (the students) only have to write one set of lyrics. One. But they have to revise it twice. They’ll be assigned (or can assign themselves, better) to particular topics or scenes from the over-arching story, and that topic becomes their song. They work on it for the entire course.

The students are going to be divided into 5 groups of 5 each, each assigned to a chunk of the narrative. I’ll try, based on the first day, to break it up so that folks with theater experience are divided fairly among the groups.

The other 4 members of the group become the chorus members for the lyricist’s song, if the song has a chorus. Everyone will, in this way, be in four choruses as well as writing their own song.

Any rehearsal time they get will have to occur outside of class – I think most of them won’t rehearse, but will just do a cold read.

And on the final day of the course, we’ll present all the lyrics, one after another, in narrative sequence, resulting in a mass-crafted musical. There won’t be music, but they can read them out loud.

I like it. A lot. I like it better for its many seeming impossibilities.

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musicals

the musical remains its driving force

The primary business that makes this clogged artery [Times Square] the tourist heart of the city is theater, and the musical remains its driving force.

Perhaps the most ominous detail I noted in assembling the list of the decade’s most important new musicals relates to this troubling phenomenon. Only one composer-lyricist on this list had more than one new show on Broadway during the decade. His name was Mel Brooks*.

– Charles Isherwood, “Cue The Chorus: The Musical Endures,” NYT

Isherwood provides a timely survey of the decade in musicals, days before the start of the intersession class I’m teaching. There is so much material on this topic. I am used to having my critical and academic interests be more marginal — this is as if** I suddenly decided to write a paper on the atomic bomb, or something. Sources? Websites? Lyrics online? Everything! At your fingertips! Constantly! I’m The musical is so popular!

*We are going to see the touring version of the Mel Brooks YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN musical on the 14th, as a class.

**You know you’ve been in graduate school too long (and only one semester!) when your California-honed habits of using the word “like” inappropriately are challenged. Makes me sad.

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musicals

a new low:

I am going out, in a wig and enormous sunglasses, to rent HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL. (In the interests of scholarship.) If I’m not back in an hour, call the taste police.

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poetry

spent the last thirty-five years of his life writing poetry

Although he had attempted to make his living exclusively from his writing since the publication of TYPEE, he was constantly struggling against poverty and debt, and increasingly against failing physical and mental health as well. […] Family life for the Melvilles was often tense and unhappy. By 1867, his wife and some of the family on both sides were convinced Melville was insane; that year, Elizabeth’s minister suggested a plan to remove her from the home and thus get her away from her husband, and the eldest child committed suicide at age eighteen.
Meanwhile, Melville had given up fiction and turned to publishing poetry…

From Elizabeth Renker’s introduction to the 1998 Signet Classic of Moby-Dick. Apart from my usual morbid interest in the deteriorating households of writers, this is the second time I’ve run across Melville’s poetry this year. I found this earlier in the semester, in the Concise Encyclopedia Of English & American Poets & Poetry, Donald Hall and Stephen Spender, eds., (1961):

MELVILLE, Herman (1819-91), the author of Moby-Dick, spent the last thirty-five years of his life writing poetry. His Collected Poems show qualities which remind one of Emily Dickinson, and Clarel is a kind of nineteenth-century Waste Land written, unfortunately, in Hudibrastics*.
* iambic tetrameter, rhymed AA BB CC DD, etc. After Samuel Butler’s Hudibras.

Interesting, eh? Here’s what Renker says about it:

His first two published volumes, BATTLE-PIECES AND ASPECTS OF THE WAR (1866) and CLAREL (1876) were both grandly ambitious. BATTLE-PIECES was a poetic record of the Civil War and CLAREL an epic account of a pilgrimage through the Holy Land. Both failed with the public.

MOBY-DICK was published in 1851. It is hard to imagine how someone who was capable of writing this novel could have written anything but a good epic poem, even in Hudibrastics. I’m going to find out, just as soon as I finish all the other things I’m supposed to be doing.

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books, fiction

I am pleased to report that

I finished reading MOBY-DICK yesterday, after twelve years of trying. Here are my two favorite parts. First, an warning from Ishmael against hiring dreamy young philosophers for lookouts:

And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness; and who offers to ship with the Phaedon instead of Bowditch in his head. Beware of such an one, I say: your whales must be seen before they can be killed, and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten wakes round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer.
(Chapter 35: The Mast-Head)

And, of course, this:

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though there be many who have tried it.
(Chapter 104: The Fossil Whale)

I don’t know how I have survived this long without having the ending spoiled for me. But I’m glad I have. It was a wonderful surprise.

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music, musicals, theater

he’s a what? he’s a what? he’s a…

…Music Man!

Long post here. For those of you who have asked me what the musical theatre lyrics course will include, here is a class-by-class breakdown. I am heavily indebted in this material to the website Musicals101.com, maintained by John Kenrick, and particularly his lengthy article on the connection between gay culture and musical theatre. He writes from a perspective that combines scholarly knowledge with personal opinion. It’s fun to read.

I am still making changes but things are starting to become more final. The first week is (mostly) about lyrics, the second week is more about history and representation, and the third week, which only has two classes, is an in-depth study of one lyricist: Howard Ashman. Hopefully we can use Ashman to sum up everything we’ve looked at before, and also address the idea of musicals and animation.

When I started working this up, I wanted it only to be about lyrics, but that turned rapidly into an all-white-men-fest, and a rehash of the first fifty years of the last century. So this version of the course is, hopefully, broader, and more relevant to contemporary practice.

Each week they have to write one set of lyrics, which receives a small-group workshop with five other students on the last day of the week. I am debating about having all of them work from the same source text (Harry Potter: The Musical? Star Wars: The Musical?) or letting them choose their own sources. I want them to come out of this thinking of themselves as lyricists in the Gilbert model – able to write the lyrics without the composer, and present something to the composer. They all have to write one chorus, one duet or solo, and one song which combines solo characters with choruses, I think. Either that, or they all have to write one ballad, one tells-a-story song, and one chorus or medley…
I’m still deciding.

Day One: (God help me.)
Introduction to the course.
I’m going to go around the room and ask everyone what their favorite / first musicals were, and favorite songs from those. We will then try to divide those songs into formal groups, including both thematic and structural categories;
– ballad (AABA)
– duet
– medley
– chorus
– dance number
– messenger speech / “Let me tell you how it happened…”
– dramatic monologue
– recitative
– patter song
and so forth.
I will explain that the goal I have for them, as writers, in this course, is to be able to critically analyze different types of song lyrics, identify what types of lyrics they are, and produce versions of those lyrics themselves. Secondly, I want them to have some more ideas about both the history of the form, and its political implications.

Terms: Lyricist, librettist, book, composer, orchestrator/arranger (Shall We Dance example) etc.

Then we will discuss what a musical is, the origins of the term, the first musicals, first musicals in the United States, etc.

Discuss: Why are musicals so popular? (John Kenrick) Why are people willing to pay five hundred dollars a ticket for them? What are some of the problems with musicals? Why do so many people hate them? What are the worst musicals? What makes them so bad? Introduce theme of representation in musicals, and of stereotypes. Introduce theme of queer culture and musicals. Discuss course’s bifurcated approach between New Criticism (focus on lyrics as lyrics) and historical / socioeconomic criticism. Best of both worlds.

We’ll do a “name some of-the-moment popular musicals” brainstorming. Contemporary manifestations of the musical: HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL(s), Urinetown, [title of show], Spring Awakening, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, Proposition 8:The Musical, Joss Whedon, and the musical episode of Buffy, among others. RENT and the problem with RENT. Andrew Lloyd Webber. Cats. The jukebox musical: Across The Universe, Abba. The take-songs-and-rewrite-lyrics musical: Moulin Rouge, John Gay…

Where do musicals come from? I will use this point to deliver a short but impassioned speech on the Greek chorus (surprise). We’ll look at some Greek choruses as “song lyrics” and talk about how they map onto contemporary song categories. Segue into a discussion of the form’s origins in operetta.

This leads us, of course, to Gilbert and Sullivan. We’ll listen to excerpts of PINAFORE and PIRATES and do some analysis of those lyrics. And then begin watching TOPSY-TURVY, the Mike Leigh film on the making of THE MIKADO. If, as I suspect, we do not get to TOPSY-TURVY on this day, we can at least catch up on day two.

Day Two: Continuation of Gilbert unit. I am going to have to explain a lot about 1885-era Europe. I have friends who have seen this movie who were put off by it, early, by Leigh’s depiction of topless Parisian prostitutes with Sullivan, and stopped taking the rest of the film seriously — or who watched it but didn’t understand all the British history stuff. I’m either going to judiciously fast-forward so that we (mostly) watch only the production-related parts, or else pause a lot to discuss things.

Day Three: Sondheim. We’ll watch most of WEST SIDE STORY (which segues into the next class on race and ethnicity and the musical) and listen to lots of excerpts: definitely ASSASSINS, COMPANY, PACIFIC OVERTURES. Sondheim as the heir to Gilbert. Lyrics.

Day Four: Class “socioeconomic status groups,” race, ethnicity, representation, and the American musical. Vaudeville, minstrel shows. Musicals and war/jingoism. We’ll watch parts of SOUTH PACIFIC and FINIAN’S RAINBOW, THE WIZ, HAIR, CAROUSEL, THE SOUND OF MUSIC and PORGY & BESS.

Day Five: Gender, sexuality, queer culture, camp/cult/transgressive musicals. THE WIZARD OF OZ. Judy Garland. VICTOR/VICTORIA. ROCKY HORROR. HEDWIG. Since this is a Baltimore-themed class, the film we’re going to watch the most of is HAIRSPRAY: but this day is also going to cover the dance musical, including portions of GREASE and A CHORUS LINE, and address the issues with representation of queer people and AIDS in RENT. Sadly, this ties in to the upcoming Howard Ashman unit in a painful way, since he died of AIDS early in his career.

Day Six: Yiddish theater / Jewish culture and the American musical: briefly treating FIDDLER and the many Jewish lyricists of the genre, before spending most of the day on THE PRODUCERS and Mel Brooks and YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN in preparation for our field trip to see the YF musical.

Days Seven & Eight: The musical and animation. The Disney tradition. The move away from animated musicals with the move to 3D animation. Address puppets, Muppet Show, Jim Henson, AVENUE Q. Howard Ashman: LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, THE LITTLE MERMAID. Conclusion of course.

I’m having a lot of fun here, if you can’t tell.

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fiction

every night of every day it is an emptiness

Yes, thought I, it is evident enough that Bartleby has been making his home here, keeping bachelor’s hall all by himself. Immediately then the thought came sweeping across me, What miserable friendlessness and loneliness are here revealed! His poverty is great; but his solitude, how horrible! Think of it. Of a Sunday, Wall Street is as deserted as Petra; and every night of every day it is an emptiness. This building too, which of weekdays hums with industry and life, at nightfall echoes with sheer vacancy, and all through Sunday is forlorn. And here Bartleby makes his home; sole spectator of a solitude which he has seen all populous — a sort of innocent and transformed Marius brooding among the ruins of Carthage!

For the first time in my life a feeling of overpowering stinging melancholy seized me. Before, I had never experienced aught but a not-unpleasing sadness. The bond of a common humanity now drew me irresistibly to gloom. A fraternal melancholy! For both I and Bartleby were sons of Adam.

– Herman Melville, “Bartleby, The Scrivener”

I first read this short story in high school, and have not reread it since then. There are worse things to read on Christmas, if you don’t celebrate Christmas. The myth of Christ is intertwined with the story of Bartleby, and yet the entire thing is pleasantly subsumed in irony and nihilism. It’s a good way to think about what this omnipresent holiday means and has meant to our and other cultures, without actually engaging in it.

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film

a transporting experience to another reality

I do not intend to be restrained about this: AVATAR is awesome. I hope to see it at least three more times in the next two weeks, and after that, once every two weeks for the duration of its theatrical release. I had extremely high expectations for this film, and they were met. There is no one I know who would not enjoy it, and I know that I know some very particular people. I am addressing you, particular people. Go.

That’s what it is—it’s transport, you know? It’s a transporting experience to another reality, another world, and I think that people need that. You need it periodically in your life, and in your cinematic life. That’s what we set out to do with this movie.

– James Cameron interviewed in Vanity Fair

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Baltimore, gradschool, theater

and if I say to you tomorrow

Working on the intersession course on musical theater. We’re going to watch films and write lyrics and imitations: the lyricist is the lens for most of the interpretation. It starts on January 4th, and runs the 4th-22nd, before spring semester commences. My class is full. I’m very interested to see what kind of students have signed up for it.

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