Brendan Milburn is the composer of Sleeping Beauty Wakes and a member of GrooveLily, a pop/rock band. The post below is published with permission from Brendan, and courtesy of GrooveLily’s website. For details, visit:
http://www.groovelily.com/

Another read-through of Act 2 yesterday, now that they’ve learned the music at the end. Everyone feels we’ve got the overall structure for Act 2 down now, but we’re missing crucial pieces that we couldn’t see when we were down in the trees, missing the forest.

Today, Rachel is coming back to our apartment and we’ll spend the day—and only this one day—rewriting the last 10 minutes again, and trying to find a satisfying thread for the Doctor/Bad Fairy, whose fairy tale parallel we have kinda let drop without meaning to. Now everyone has a satisfying finish *except* the Doctor. While her parallel to the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale has always been a bit more tenuous, it’s now our job to make it more concrete and satisfying.

Lest you think that working on this musical is all wrestling with plot and character and sheet music software, I’d like to share a little about last night’s Company Dinner. One of my favorite memories from working on Midsummer here in 2006 was a full cast and creative team dinner at Mara Isaacs’s house (Mara being the producing director at McCarter, and the main impetus behind getting SBW to where it is today).

It seems so simple when you think about it, but when you’re in the thick of rehearsing and writing and analyzing and burying your head in the text and trying to find your way out, it can be very valuable to meet in another place with your co-laborators and break bread and have fun for a minute. And that’s exactly what we did last night. Mara cooked up a storm for what felt like thirty people, and everybody showed up with husbands, wives, kids, and a splendid time was had by all. And somehow I was able to breathe a sigh of relief and get a little perspective—we don’t have the ending perfect yet, but we will keep working towards it.

For the full text of this blog post, visit www.groovelily.com

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 12th, 2011 at 12:29 pm and is filed under 2010-2011 Theater, General, Playwright's Pen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.