Composer’s Pen–Day 20: The Writing Endgame
Posted by McCarter Theatre Center on April 18th, 2011
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/
We are in the endgame. We are shifting tiny puzzle pieces around in the last few minutes of the show, tweaking how things land, checking to make sure we like the tone, trying hard not to hold on to something just because we did a lot of work on it and only keeping it if it actually works and contributes to the whole.
Yesterday we ran the last ten minutes of the show many, many, many times, with Doug and Rebecca making fixes to staging each time, trying to iron out kinks in the tone. And while this is a musical COMEDY, there is a lot of emotional stuff in this piece. And much of the emotional stuff is at the end. And yesterday we rehearsed these emotional beats over and over and over, and after a while everyone was very, very, very wrung out. Kudos especially to Bob Stillman, Aspen Vincent, and Bryce Ryness for investing fully each and every time. After one run-through which left actors, director, stage managers, writers and assistant director in tears and reaching for kleenexes, Aspen burst the bubble of lingering sadness by quipping, “aw, this job sucks.”
This morning I will finish sheet music for the transitions in Act 2 and return my attention to Act 1, which we are going back to polish piece by piece today. After a week working Act 2, Act 1 feels like a foreign country where we were all raised as children and are returning to after forty years overseas.
