If you are going to stage your own musical you need to find a venue before anything else. It’s counter-intuitive, scary and finite but it has to be done. All your time frames are based around the opening night and you cannot have an opening night without a venue.

If you are lucky enough to have a small theatre near you then you might be in luck as they will be more likely to give you their ear. The best venues to approach are the ones that host amateur dramatic productions and small tours because they will probably be friendly and affordable. Want you want is a venue that will take a percent rather than ask for a straight up fee because you are months from even thinking about fund raising.

It’s worth considering other types of venues for your musical as well. Theatres may have all the set up and lights and sound equipment but maybe your musical is a more black box affair. If that’s the case then you can find an above-the-pub theatre or school hall or church building that might be perfect. Probably a cheaper option.

So lets assume you have a venue in mind. If you only really have one venue in mind then take it, but if you have a couple to choose from then consider the technical facilities that either venue can offer. Do you want to have painted scenery that moves in and out? Will you need an audio mixer? Will you need an orchestra pit? All these questions begin and end with the venue and once you have the venue you are settled with their technical restrictions. This is a good thing. Now you can start thinking about scenery, and musicians, and space.

On Saturday my producer Alex and I went to Gorleston Pavillion Theatre to check out the venue for our musical Zombie Wedding that we have secured with the theatre to run in October. It is a magnificent little theatre. The first thing we did was get all the lights on in the house and stage and check out the technical capacity of the house.

Gorleston Pavillion is really well kitted out. It has those magic automated smartlights and a two level backstage against a false wall at the back. There are two flies on each side. It doesn’t have a very high flyspace, only about five foot, so that will influence the set design.

Taking note of the amount of space backstage will also affect the scenic design as well as the need for a stage manager. In smaller venues like black-box theatres, actors can pretty much take care of themselves. Our show will need a stage manager, probably a couple stage hands and a dressing assistant for the big uber-change at the end.

The theatre has all sorts of nooks and crannies to explore (as well as a false door in the stage for phantom-style theatrics) and three beautiful balconies with views of the summer gardens and Gorleston seafront (just visible in the background). Pictured is the clock tower where you can clearly see the distinctive art nouveau windows, the terra-cotta details and the gorgeous verdigris copper domes. The Pavillion Theatre, the venue for Zombie Wedding, is a magical theatre.

Once you have the venue you have begun your journey. Half of all the questions that you will need to answer will be answerable and you will have taken the first step towards producing your own musical. There is no going back after that point. There is a little pin of lime light at the end of the tunnel.

(Not being a particularly consistent, consistent or successful blogger this may turn out to be terrible. There’s your warning.)

This coming October I am having my musical Zombie Wedding staged in my local area. As I am just at the beginning of this journey I thought to myself “Hey Daniel, why don’t you blog it?”. Since I was in no mood to argue with myself I turned on my computer and stared typing. This is the fourth or fifth sentence of that session. Over the coming months I am going to try to document as much as I can all the whats, whys and wherefores of putting on a musical, in particular my own musical.

So Introduction.

Hello.

In case you are unaware my name is Daniel Sturman. I’m a composer of songs for the musical theatre stage. A couple of years ago I had an idea for a musical and got in touch with an American (I am British) lyricist and playwright called R.C. Staab. The following spring (must have been 2010) we had a read through in Los Angeles.

A year later (2011) we had a staged reading in San Francisco. That staged reading qualified us to enter into the New York Fringe Festival submission process. We were successful and in the summer of that year we staged a more-than-black-box production of Zombie Wedding with a cast of 6 Broadway actors, a great four piece band and terrific costume and makeup.

The reviews were all good and there was one that was so bad that I liked it in a campy silly way (the review trashed “shows like ours” so was more a ideological rant than a review of our show, which is surely bad reviewing?). At the end of the production R.C. and I promptly sketched out a couple rewrites including two news songs and a new dramatic device but besides that were both very proud of our little show.

A few days after the opening night of Zombie Wedding I was back in Norwich. Zombie Wedding’s five nights fairly spread apart over the festival so I was back on terra Britannia before the second performance, and back at work before number three. By which time I was hearing reports of people arriving in zombie costume to a show that was even tighter and better mixed than the show I had left a few days earlier.

By October of 2011 I had finished the new songs for Zombie Wedding and R.C. and I had begun getting ideas for our next musical. But what of Zombie Wedding?  I wanted to do a production locally. I had sent a few mail outs to London producers but didn’t expect to hear anything for months (at best) or never (at worse).

I was researching local amateur dramatics societies and when I couldn’t find on the internet a contact for a certain one I went to twitter and asked there. Among the useful responses was Tom from work who told me I should just ask Alex at work. And so I did.

(A note to people who want to find things out: twitter likes to feel useful. If you were to tweet say, a superbly crafted smear at the Prime Minster or a hilariously altered song lyric you will probably not get a congratulatory response. Ask twitter where I can buy grenadine “at this hour” and people will be falling over themselves to help you out.

Alex.

I work at a place that does internet things. I am a designer there. Someone else works there. A man called Alex, who is a developer there. Alex and I have a history together. Not like that, naughty. \

When I was a young warthog I was part of a young people’s drama society called Dustmagrik which was based in Gorleston-On-Sea, near Great Yarmouth. My nan used to take me. Twice a year or so we would do productions at Gorleston’s finest theatre, the Gorleston Pavilion. Over the course of a year we might spend a total of three straight weeks made up of evenings and holiday time in the theatre . Dustmagrik would bring in it’s own directors and costuming people but relied on the theatre’s technical staff when it came to staging productions. Alex was part of that technical staff. Although he is my age (19) (26) and was my age at the time (13-16) he was operating lighting and sound equipment at the theatre.

Today Alex is a big cheese at the stronger-than-ever Gorleston Pavillion and is in truth the technical director, although he is far to modest a character to let on.

Alex agreed whole heartedly to produce Zombie Wedding at the Gorleston Pavilion. A week after we agreed to go ahead with it he had booked a week in the schedule in October.

So as for putting on a musical I would say the first thing to do is

1. Get a producer.

A producer is a knows-everyone who can pull things together. They have contacts, good relations and organisational skills.

2. Get a venue.

Because you cannot start until you know when it all has to end.

My next addition will be about the Gorleston Pavilion theatre herself and getting your head around technical limitations.

Dougal Irvine is an actor and writer for musical theatre. He is the lyricist for Stratford East’s Britain’s Got Bhangra! and his first musical Departure Lounge won the MTM Award for Best Musical and was by all accounts a good show.  To add to his continuing successes he has just released an album of his own material, some from shows and some new. Ladies and gentlemen it gives me great pleasure to finally say “This week I are been mostly been listening to Dougal Irvine’s debut* album”

*I’m not sure what if an album made up of selections from various musicals and some originals, all sung by various musical theatre singers and Dougal himself really qualifies as, is it a debut for all the composer or songs or what? But I prattle on.

I had not heard an awful lot of Dougal’s (Mr Irvine’s) output before this week. I had heard a couple of songs from Departure Lounge on the MusicalTalk podcast roundup of the Edinburgh Fringe festival a couple of years ago, when it was making a big splash up there. I believe that one of the songs was about Spain as it had a wink to the likely line in My Fair Lady (more on this later) and another in which one of the characters asked if a statement had made him “sound like a twat?”. It was nice and it was on acoustic guitar. One or more of the actors sang with a trumped up Essex-y accent which I always feel is a lazy way so sing and still sound manly. So apart from that, and a rap that Dougal performed with his musical superviser and his producer (more on this later) I had not heard much, although what I had heard was good stuff.

If you would like to understand the musical content of the songs and you, like me, downloaded the song from iTunes rather than buying a hard CD, then check this out. I was kindly sent it by Dougal’s people.

Anyhoo, here are the songs and guest artistes:

1.  Mr Musical – Amy Pemberton who currently in Rock Of Ages.
2. Clean Cut Rapper – Dougal Irvine.
3. Two Faces – Ashleigh Gray.
4. Silence And The Rain – Cassie McIvor and Daniel Boys.
5. The Morning After You Do It – Ross Hunter who as I write this is playing Warner in Legally Blonde.
6. Megan’s Hero – Lauren Samuels of Television and We Will Rock You.
7. Tir Na N’og – Samantha Barks and Dougal Irvine who both give a stella performance.
8. Simple – Michael Jibson who doesn’t even have the common decent to make his tweets public so whatever, right?
9. Do You Want A Baby Baby? – Julie Atherton who is one class act I have to say.
10.  Mermaids – Annalene Beechey and Rebecca Lock. Annalene is sleeping to the producer, I’ve heard.
11.  We Need Love – Sarah Earnshaw, Sarah Lark, Stuart Matthew Price and George Ure, who is not above doing panto in Perth.
12. Song For Friends – Dougal Irvine

And here’s what I think of them, in order of terriblity

No, that’s not going to happen. They are all good and I don’t feel like anyone (especially me) can give verdicts of any quality about music. What I can do is to write about a handful of the songs that I feel define some of what makes Dougal’s music something to cherish and he someone to look out for in the future. If you are unsure about buying the album just buy a couple of these for 79p a pop (roughly the same price as a grab bag of Cool/Original Doritos) as they are for my money the songs that you need to hear to “get” Dougal.

Mr Musical

The first is the opening song, Mr Musical, which one has to assume was always written to be the opening to this album. It is probably the most definitive song on that album. By that I mean that it has the most of, and as much of, what makes the album good inside its 2 minutes 49 seconds. Musically its like nothing else you are going to hear from any other musical theatre composer’s outing this year. Its funky. It has wah-wah rhythm guitar, muted acoustics (more of this later), harmonics, Rhodes pianos (or some kind of flange**) and ends on a unresolved broken seventh.

Its performed by Mrs Pemberton (who at the time of writing doesn’t seem to have a twitter account) with so much class that it makes the wordy smugness and near-fatal cheesiness (that must fall only on Dougal himself) dissipate, leaving us with a proper song. The Buena Vista Social Club “Dun-da-na-na” from the boys at the end are also necessary cheese-cutting mechanism, and a prelude to the silliness that is to come.

It tells you that whatever happens from here on in, you are not laughing alone.

Its the perfect introduction into the composer-lyricist’s world. Sure the self-referential insider-y-ness of quoting the titles of as many musicals as you can in a song endows the songe with a lack of lyrical cohesion but hey, shut up.

Clean Cut Rapper

For my money this is the best song on the album, it might very well have the finest chorus on the album but good choruses are cheap and easy for Dougal. The verse lyrics are what this song really throws at you. Conversational and human, funny and real, and the composer performs them himself brilliantly.

Make this the second song you listen to (if you are buying them individually) and you should be sold on the whole album. The production values on this song are something you are just not going to hear on any other musical theatre album.

Tir Na N’og

Possibly the most precious performance on the album, its a pretty little story in a song and it is so very delicately arranged and produced. This is one of the songs that will make it onto your “play often” playlist Its not a song written by that cheeky Dougal, its more like a Mr Irvine piece. If I said this song was a pearl would you get what I meant?

Mermaids

I think that its important that you listen to Mermaids, which is sung by Annalene Beechey and Rebecca Lock. I listen to it and wonder what is happening to these girls. The song gathers a lyrical power that is descriptive and potent and abstract and rich. Its the only song on the album that meanders in that undecided way that the likes of Sondheim manages in his Pacific Overtures. Its lovely, and while its not my favourite I include it in my definitive list for the album because of its contrast. Also the voices and cello do something to me and I don’t suppose they fail to do something to you too. Well done ladies.

Song For Friends

Dougal finishes his album with a big shout out to all his friends, old and new, and his lady wife. Its a campfire song. Its very warming. Don’t worry if you feel you are not invited to listen in though, as Dougal assures us that it is not voyeuristic to listen in on this personal gift of affection because we, that’s right, those who bought the album are also his friends. Yes folk don’t come cheaper than that Dougal Irvine.

Just kidding.

Only a person as nice as Dougal Irvine would write a song like Songs For Friends at all. Nice one… mate (I type sheepishly).

What does Sell it! mean?

I say sell it because to raise the funds to create this album Dougal Irvine and his musical supervisor Pete White? and producer Simon Grieff did a rap, and no Dad, I’m not spelling that with a silent “c”. They used a crowd sourcing website that helps people who need funding find people who want to find new projects. Naturally this performance took them far and beyond their target.

Wrap Up

There are two things I love about Dougal Irvine that you do not get enough of in Musical Theatre.

One of those things is that Dougal’s songs are fun. Fun is not the same as funny, although they are that. Fun is his attitude to songs, their instrumentation, their lyrical invention and for what purpose he is using those songs. Fun means joyful and silly and British and ridiculous and, well, this is an album full of fun songs.

The other thing that makes Dougal and his album good in general is that he has written his songs on an acoustic guitar. Most musical theatre composers write at the piano. Lets put that number up at about 95%.

Writing from guitar means that you have a different way of constructing chords and a totally different attitude towards rhythm. Guitarists don’t tend to accompany the singer in the voicing of their chords for example. Guitarists also develop a different ear for timbre than pianists as they have more voicing options at their disposal. Wider chords, harmonics and all of the different pedals out their mean that the guitar is a far more dynamic instrument than the piano in its vocal shading.

Guitarists also learn pop music when they start to learn guitar. The first thing a budding guitar toddler will learn is How Many Roads? and Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. The first song I could play on the piano was God Save the Queen or something rotten like that. I suppose Dougal and his kind are predisposed to write a new musical theatre. I hope so, he certainly writes with heart.

Go listen to Dougal Irvine’s Acoustic Overtures.

Ithankyou.

**Love that word

PS. Penis.

After writing this blog, Dougal’s people were nice enough to send me a pdf of the CD that I might get to back a little into what I was missing. I asked if I could post it up on my blog for all to see and they said that would be fine. So here you go Ratfans, in pdf form for those on a desktop, and hosted for those on mobiles.

So here goes…

So… on writing ballads.

For those who think its clever to point out the etymological routes of words far outside of their common usage, this site is not yours. Go away. When I say ballads I mean the slow, almost always romantic songs in musicals.

Zombie Wedding really only has one true ballad, and perhaps two half-ballads that are really slow rock songs and I would not utter them here. That song is called “Today Was A Good Day”. It’s nice enough I suppose. It was a very late addition that I threw together for the New York Fringe production. You can listen to it if you like. But I’ve written other ballads too, and I’ve even rewritten as I gradually hone my ballad writing ability.

So some “Ons”…

Oh here’s one… I mean, No. 1 “Length”

Don’t make your ballads too long. Nobody and I mean nobody wants a six minute ballad. They might clap at the end all the same, but come on, you know its boring.

No. 2 “Minor Considerations”

Use minor chord sequences sparingly, for a ‘B’ section its okay, but a whole ballad in minor sounds so clunky and dense. The only good thing I learned from Stephen Schwartz is to not be afraid of not using minor chords so much. So many great songs have no minor chords. This point can probably be expanded into…

No. 3 “Here’s three chords. Now form a band.”

Ballads are not the time for harmonic self indulgence. Ignore all the essays you have read about Stephen Sondheim, they are retrospective. Don’t worry if your song gravitates towards the same three chords, it sounds great. And if you are successful then no doubt in twenty years time some “contextual studies” moron will be writing tomes devoted to your mastery of the understated elegance.

No. 4 “Easy Time”

Don’t fixate on a tempo. Let the melody speak for itself and the actors will tell you the speed of the song. I think that this might be a fairly definitive rule for ballads; that they are about the melody. I differentiate ”Today Was A Good Day” from Zombie Wedding with the other slow songs by the fact that they are not set to a strict tempo. That tempo is usually a musical, or more accurately a rhythmical representation of the atmosphere of the scene. In ballads that can all stop. Ballads are the dream sequences of the musical landscape.

So that’s all I can think of right now but don’t worry kids, I’m back now, and me and your mother are going to give it a real go this time.

before we start I will introduce the nature of my instrumentation for this particular job. I am not necessarily writing full instrumental parts. This is a fringe production and there will not be the time for the musicians to learn (that’s right, pit musicians learn as well as read) concise instrument parts. To that end I am writing band parts that are as bare as possible while still keeping that music as close to the piano score.

So let’s start with bass, this should be easy I suppose. Fortunately I tend to write bass-lines in my piano parts anyway so that’s just a case of copy-and-pasting piano bass parts into the Bass cleff (*bass* and *Bass*?). Then its just a case of making sure the notes never go below bottom E (E1).

If you don’t tend to write Bass parts or have them in mind then consider that the Bass is where the song gets its rhythmic foundation. While its true that drums keep the rhythm, drummers like to break into half beats and do clever stuff, and the lead guitar will tend to play against the rhythm. So keep the Bass the most steady instrument in the song in terms of rhythm. Unless it’s exactly EXACTLY what you are after, do not experiment with the Bass by giving it melodic phrases or deviating from the root or 3rd of the chord outside of passing notes. I make a distinction between riffs and melodic phrases here.

Keep in mind that the Bass is a transposing instrument, sounding one octave lower than read. Transposing instruments that sound an octave above or below what is read are in my opinion the best type of transposing instrument. I’m writing rock so I will be using the low register of the bass pretty much all the time, but for some music is would be inappropriate to use such low notes so if you are just cut-and-pasting the bass parts consider putting it up an octave. The Bass’ high register is one of my favorite voices. Love it. And Bass harmonics? Oh forget about it.

The ZW score is authentic 80s pop music so the Bass is clean throughout, with occasional chorus and reverb in ballads and slap for the angry songs. When there are times in the score where you imagine the Bassist might come up with something more natural and Bassy than you can, say for example, blue runs or general a funky fill, then its acceptable to put a text note and leave the chords. As a matter of fact is wouldn’t be a bad idea to give the bassists all the chords in text form anyway. They like to know what’s going on.

So in summation

• Bass is an octave-down transposing instrument
• Bass carried the rhythm so keep it steady
• Bass sounds good high
• Range is E1 all the way up into the squeaky 6s
• Give Basses chords
• Bassists can come up with *Bassy* stuff better than you can

Earlier this year R.C. staged a public reading of our musical Zombie Wedding in San Francisco. That public reading gave us the elbow-nudging power to submit ZW to some of the big American musical theater festivals, namely the “Chicago one” and the New York Fringe Festival. We got selected for the New York. Was not expecting that I have to say.

Because of that big shot-in-the-arm we took a long hard look at the show. We cut a song. Wrote four new ones. Took out some themes and polished the lyrics up a little. It was a lot of work and the months flew by, fast becoming weeks and then days. And right now I find myself  re-introducing myself with blogging so I can properly document this once-in-a-young-lifetime experience of having a fringe show opening in the heartland of musicals. That’s right, its just around the corner.

In four days time I am boarding a plane that will whisk me away from the quiet humdrum of Heathrow Airport and into the buzz of mid-afternoon Sunday in New Jersey. That’s where the plane arrives. I’m actually staying with ZW’s lyricist in Manhattan for the last week-and-a-bit of the rehearsals and the opening night. There are five performances of ZW spread over a couple of weeks so It would be a major upheaval to stick around in Manhattan for more than one performance in addition to the rehearsals.

Now I’ve never been to the United States before, let alone New York, so the whole experience is going to be fantastic. Fortunately ZW is opening in New York for my trip so I don’t have to break my self-imposed rule of never visiting a city unless I have had a musical performed there. So far it’s been an inexpensive doctrine to adhere to, but that looks all about to change…

Piano scores need to be set out to be as simple to read, navigate and interpret as is possible. This is because when you are in workshopping stages, every minute matters. You cannot afford to have actors mull on about the pages not being numbered or the lyrics being on the wrong side of the stave. Actors will pick at everything, they are hounds for detail.

I’d like to invite everybody to contribute in this, as I’m certain there is no concise school of how piano scores should be laid out. I will put down my own bullet point list and the points raised on the ANMT screen cast, and then I will add new ones from the comments (if I like them).

• Page numbers – Write them on the piano score and in the libretto.
• Table of contents – For easy song-finding
• Chord symbols – For easy(ish) transposing and for less gifted pianists (like myself) to sight read.
• Treble Clef for all vocal parts – No bass clef for voices in musical theatre. Not never.
• Tempo and Expression – Use common tempo descriptions, you are not Mahler. Never just have a bpm number. Likewise your pianist might not be a doctorate of obscurantist popular music, so just write Light Swing, not 50′s Revival 80′s Trip-Bebop

These last bullets might just be crackpotisms of my own, but try them on for size…

• Break up your song – If a song has an underscore-laden introduction, then make that a different musical cue to the song itself. Then have the song proper beginning on the first bar of the vocal melody.
• “Song” Page Numbers – So along with being on page 120 of the score, you are reading page 9 of the song.
• Favour long notes – We are not in the classical era anymore. Do not write “busy” music at 60 bpm in semi-demi-quavers when you could more easily write it at 120 bpm in semi-quavers. It’s looks intimidating for sight-singers and can catch players out. Some of the Les Mis piano score score has this popping up. The orchestral score does not.

I can’t think of any more right now. What do you think?