Fall Project

I’m finally back! Let me explain a few things real quick:

1.) I’ve been pretty busy this summer with work and everything, so I haven’t gotten to work on writing a show lately.

2.) I started editing White Lies and realized that it would take some serious rewriting on not just the show but the concept itself to make the story work. It just didn’t seem to be going anywhere, so I’ve decided to shelve it for the moment. I might work on it again someday, but for now it’s going to be put away.

Now, onto the good news. I’m currently working on the outline for a new musical that I’ll be starting to work on this month! The project is currently titled “edge” and is about 7 New Yorkers who have to try and rebuild their lives after 9/11.

I’ve been wanting to work on a 9/11 musical for many years now, but I’ve never been able to figure out the right way to approach it. It only hit me a few days ago that I didn’t want to work on a show about the events that occurred during the attacks, I wanted to write about how people coped and picked themselves up from it.

So far, the outline is coming along really well. I just completed Act 1 today, and I’ve only been working on it for a couple of days. I’m really looking forward to working on a project outside of Script Frenzy for the first time in a long time, and I’m so excited about finally finding a way to work on this concept!

Project Ideas

Okay, so I haven’t worked at all on words unspoken since the last time I posted, but I have realized that the show just doesn’t have much potential. It’s just not that great, and I don’t want to waste my creative energy on something that’s not going to go anywhere.

Since then, I’ve come up with several ideas for shows and am looking to start working on them one by one:

broken:

“broken” is a rock musical about a man who has repressed four years of his teenage life because of the events they threw at him. However, now that he’s older, he realizes that he needs to come to terms with those memories so that he can get on with his life. This revelation is triggered when he meets his on/off girlfriend from those four years, who persuades him to go to therapy. He tells his therapist that “It’s not memory loss, it’s just paying the cost of the childhood I endured.”

The show ultimately follows two story lines: that of the man’s struggle to remember his life, and that of his younger self and the hardships he faced, which are revealed as his memory is unblocked.

Eternity:

“Eternity” is still an inkling of an idea. It’s about a young man, fresh out of college, who is attacked one night in an alley and turned into a vampire. The show would focus on him having to deal with being forced to leave his family and friends, his discovery of this new life, and his resistance of being a monster. As I said before, this idea just popped up in my head and needs some work.

The Good Son:

Yet another inkling of an idea, and this one is even newer than Eternity. “The Good Son” would follow a seventeen year old boy’s life as he deals with his mother leaving him and his father. His father begins to grieve heavily and is upset whenever he sees his son grieve. This forces the son into hiding his emotions and he becomes isolated from the rest of the world. Trying to cope with everything, he begins to go clubbing and do drugs, which causes his life to spiral out of control. The story also follows the father’s emotional journey of having to live, for the first time, on his own while dealing with his son’s strange new behavior.

Overall, I think these all have incredible possibilities. I feel like every single one of them is gripping and dramatic, and each really pushes the boundary on what has and hasn’t been done in musical theatre before. That’s what I like: I like shows that are different, powerful, and maybe even a little bit off the beaten path. These are all going to be incredible, and I’m sure they’ll be fun to write, as well!

The Perfect Concept

I was thinking about Heartland today, and the more I thought about it, the less it sounded like a musical. I know, I know, you can do straight plays with Script Frenzy, but I really wanted to do a good, solid dramatic musical this year, so I dredged up a concept that I had never gotten into writing, even though I had thought out a good portion of the plot.

The musical is titled Sunrise on the Shore and it follows the story of four teenagers, Matt (a soccer player), Lucas (Matt’s older brother), Emma (a rebel), and Eric (the geek). They meet at Gulf Shores and they quickly become friends, which is fairly easy since their beach houses are all located next to each other. Matt and Eric develop crushes on Emma, and Matt is the first one to tell her, leaving Eric heartbroken. Meanwhile, their parents struggle with their own issues. However, when tragedy hits, everyone must reevaluate their lives.

That’s all I’m going to reveal, but I think this is the project I’m going to follow through with for Script Frenzy. How do I know this? Well, 60 days now seems too long to wait, that’s how!

Closer to April Every Day

It’s almost time for Script Frenzy! Well, if you call an event that’s a whole 3 months away close! WONDERLAND is going to be a lot of fun to write, I think. Especially since it has to be written in 30 days!

On more of a general note, January is apparently the month of the Angel of Death for Broadway. Last night, 13, Grease, Hairspray, Liza, among many others, closed. It’s hard to believe that Hairspray closed with it’s cult follwing, but t did, along with Grease.

Anyway, I just wanted to post, since I hadn’t posted in a little while. I promise, posting will pick up when Script Frenzy begins. Right now, I just don’t have much to post about. Maybe the next few months of the New Year will have me posting more on here!

The First Note

Welcome to my all new blog, Before the Overture. Some of you may have read my other blog, One Writer’s Terrors, which is my blog that follows my novel writing adventures. Before the Overture will be a venture in the same vein as One Writer’s Terrors, as it will follow my adventures in writing plays and musicals. I’m very excited to begin working on this blog, and I’m sure that this blog will follow much more of the development of shows as opposed to the sister site (One Writer’s Terrors) where I simply find an idea and post about it. My goal with Before the Overture is to include this blog’s audience in the developmental process of my writing.

That being said, today’s post will be a venture off that path. I’m currently preparing myself to begin working on Script Frenzy, which will go into its third year in 2009. Script Frenzy is a competition that takes place in April every year and challenges people to write 100 pages of a script in 30 days. I have participated and won the Frenzy both times and wrote two complete stageplays that are now collecting dust on my computer’s hard drive. This year will be no different, as far as the stageplay writing aspect goes. I have decided to pursue a project that will be not a remake of the Alice in Wonderland stories, but rather a reimagining. In my Script Frenzy project, currently titled WONDERLAND, Wonderland will be a darker place, filled with differet creatures than in the original stories. The show will be a musical, set to a score that is a mix of electronica, rock, and epic fantasy music. The overall tone of the show’s music will be somewhat reflective of PARADISE LOST: Shadows and Wings, a show that combined sounds of traditional musical theatre with opera and electronica. WONDERLAND will not be a copying of their idea of the music, but more of a continuation of the revoloution of musical theatre that they began.  I have a lot of planning to do for the show and a lot of time to do it. The note must be made, though, that although WONDERLAND is a reimagining of the Wonderland stories, it will not follow the exact same plot as the stories. The main elements of the stories will be evident in many of the characters and in the world itself. There will be as many allusions to its Lewis Carroll roots as possible, but the plot will be original. I guess you could compare WONDERLAND to the Sci-Fi channel’s mini-series Tin Man, in the aspect of reimagining the world and plot. Tin Man had many characters and places to serve as allusions to the original Oz tales, and that is exactly the sort of thing that WONDERLAND will do.

I’m rambling on, though, I should really stop. I am excited about doing WONDERLAND, mainly because it seems like such a solid concept. Of course, the whole thing is, really, a house of cards (no pun intended), because if one minor detail is screwed up, the entire show will come crumbling down. I feel it might be a difficult show to get produced, but workshops and production happen after the writing. Anyway, I need to go. I have a lot of work today, but I will be back. I have too much of a story to tell.