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/
The muse receptor, the source of our orchestrational
mojo for this production
The Muse Receptor, the TV to show what’s happening
on stage, and various other rawk band accoutrements
Our Sound Designer, Leon Rothenberg, had to carefully design how the five-piece band would fit in this room behind and beneath the stage…
And what’s great about it is that if any band members happen to soil their clothing during the performance, there’s a washer and dryer area handy, as they’re in the Wardrobe Room
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.
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.
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/
At 12:20 pm yesterday, we turned in script pages for the end of the show, arguing (constructively!) about lyrics and stage directions until the last possible second.
As expected, I turned in sheet music only for the beginning of the end, a piece I titled “Typical Wretchedly Horrible World,” which is what the patients feel about their regular dreams when they’re back to their, well, typical wretchedly horrible nighttime routine.
Now I play catch-up in getting the rest of the finale on the page, and Val rewrites lyrics here and there in both acts, and we work from home.
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/
Never even made it to rehearsal today—long writing session in our apartment with Rachel. Our Orderly, Bryce Ryness, and his wife Meredith and daughter Mercy came by as I was winding down with Mose at the end of the day with some Paper Mario. They knocked on the door and Mercy’s happy 18-month-old face was grinning through at us. Mercy was saying “Mose! Mose! Mose!” and Mose came up to give her a hug at the doorway.
Bryce reported that the bridge of “Still Small Hours” has gone over like gangbusters with the patients, and they’re having a BLAST with it—and he seems to also really dig the new Patients’ bridge to “Ready For This,” the song that opens Act 2.
It’s funny how sometimes the things that come the most easily—like these two bits in the middle of pre-existing songs—are the parts that are the most effective. It’s a little like tricking yourself into doing a good job by getting your mind out of the way; if you think “this isn’t a big deal. I can see how to get this job done,” then you can simply do it. And these discrete pieces, where Val and I could see point A and point B and imagine a fun way to get between them—these pieces are the ones that are so easy to bring to life, and so fun. And it’s the vast, open expanses of open blank canvas that scare the crap out of us. (Or me, at least. I shouldn’t presume to say what scares the crap out of my wife, creatively. Though after nearly 17 years together I think I have some idea of what’s going on in her head.)
We wrote up a storm—Rachel re-did approximately 35 pages worth of Act 2, and I sent out piece after piece of updated sheet music in the direction of Emilia LaPenta, our wonderful Literary Intern who is in charge of changes to script and score, and making sure everyone who needs it gets a copy of same.
In addition, it was terrific to have us all in the room together—Rachel lounged on the couch with her macbook air, frowning at it for ages at a time, refusing my offers of hot beverages or snacks, and occasionally asking piercing questions about dialogue and character. Val would interrupt me every 10 minutes with another alternate version of a particularly tricky quatrain. And I would, maybe once an hour, ask them to come listen to a computer-generated playback of something while I pressed the “play” button in finale and they followed the bouncing ball of the on-screen sheet music. Whenever any of us had anything to present, the other two would have differing, strongly-held opinions, forcing all three of us to evaluate our own positions and frequently change sides. And by the end of each of these evaluating moments, we were all, at least tentatively, on the same path and the same side.
And that, my friends, is the end result of NINE YEARS OF WRITING TOGETHER. We’ve been lucky enough, since Val and I moved to LA, that McCarter has made it possible for Rachel to come out and stay either with us or in a nearby hotel for a week at a time three times in the past year and a half, and there’s really no question in any of our minds—we do better (and more) writing when we’re in the same building and can bounce ideas off each other immediately. We make so much more progress.
Tomorrow morning, we hire a sitter for Mose so we can hear the actors read through this two-thirds of Act 2 and see where we are. Wish us luck.
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/
Okay, I shouldn’t be writing this. I should be sleeping. But today was so great.
Firstly, we have a rehearsal pianist, Chris Ertelt. What this means is he can go over parts to the songs with the non-patients while I set up in another room and write with Val. This is heaven. Thank you, McCarter, for making it possible for Chris to be here while I write and write and write and write and write some more.
The green room in the Berlind, where I set up for good and where Val set up until she needed to get the heck away from me
Here’s where we set up at first: the green room. Nobody else was there yet, and we’d dropped Mose off at school—nothing to do but show up and actually do the work.
Then, stage management and interns of various stripes started showing up and unlocking doors, and Val set up in another room because it’s annoying being around me when I’m thwapping on a two-octave keyboard and humming and laughing when I come up with something I like.
Val, deep into it
Before rehearsal began, Michele Sammarco, Prop Master (mistress? master.) and a friendly guy whose name I didn’t catch maneuvered a big spinning wheel into the rehearsal room. I got all excited and had to start snapping pictures.
Michele and friend loading the spinning wheel into the rehearsal room. McCarter note: Production crew member pictured is Mark Gill.
And then the actors started arriving and we had to buckle down. And buckle down we did. For the full text of this blog post, visit www.groovelily.com
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:
I shouldn’t even be writing this. I’m so behind with my part of the rewrites of our show. But I can’t help myself: today, after four years of readings and work at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, NJ, we had our FIRST REHEARSAL with ACTORS and EVERYBODY all in the SAME ROOM. And it’s a PRODUCTION. And it’s REALLY HAPPENING. One of the great things about McCarter is that they have a big staff, and a big facility, and a very big, beautiful room in which to rehearse:
Emily Mann is briefly interrupted by me getting all excited and taking pictures
Mose keeping himself amused while grownups talk a lot about Sleeping Beauty Wakes
Our last first day of rehearsal here was for the Midsummer Night’s Dream we did with Tina Landau—and it was an equally auspicious first day then as today, so my hopes are high that this is going to be a wonderful ride in addition to a wonderful show.
Our 5 1/2-year old son, Mose, is on a six-week leave from his school in Glendale, CA—and a terrific school out here in Princeton has agreed to take him on. He’s very excited about the new school, his new classmates, his new coat hook and cubby, all labelled with his name. Despite his excitement, his new teachers thought it would be best if he came in later today for just a short time, to ramp up into the new school process. Consequently he attended the first hour or two of our first rehearsal, which mostly consisted of people talking about stuff he wasn’t particularly interested in, so he amused himself with Angry Birds on my phone.
Miranda Hoffman’s costume sketches, about which we are very psyched
There was one moment which was particularly memorable and enjoyable for him, which I just need to share: it’s tradition at McCarter for everyone in the room to stand and introduce themselves: name, job. I’m Cheryl Mintz, Production Stage Manager. I’m Valerie Vigoda, Lyricist. I’m Brendan Milburn, Composer.
Peter Nigrini’s idea for the staging of “You Make Me Feel Awake
Mose stood up when it was his turn, climbed up on his chair, and announced in a big theatrical voice, in front of the assembled crowd of about 50 people, “I’M MOSE, THE CAPED AVENGER!”
The design presentation by projection desinger Peter Nigrini was pretty terrific-this was the first chance we’d had to see some of his visions of how the set would transform from a sterile sleep disorder clinic into a wild, otherworldly dreamland.
The model of the set by Riccardo Hernandez
After a break for lunch and a discussion of how best to organize rehearsals, Musical Director James Sampliner and I split off into separate rooms with pianos in them to teach the music to the actors. James got the patients-who used to be the ensemble, but are now more individuated, and they sing my favorite music in the show, so we’re calling them the patients. I haven’t gotten to hear them rehearse yet, because I was busy with the other actors…
I got the non-patients-the King, Sleeping Beauty, The Doctor, and The Orderly. We headed off to dressing room #8 in the Mathews part of the building (which incidentally was my shared dressing room during Midsummer back in 2006) to grind through it amidst the extremely bright lights:
Bryce Ryness, Kecia Lewis-Evans and Bob Stillman on a break in dressing room #8
These people sound great. Kecia Lewis-Evans is our Doctor, and she’s got a really powerful presence (and a very powerful set of pipes).
Bryce Ryness is just silly—he can sing anything, and I’m astounded at his range. It’s going to be a wonderful problem deciding what kind of a voice the Orderly should have, because this guy is a baritone who can belt a high C. It’s crazy.
Bob Stillman is an old friend whose beautiful, James Taylory voice is kinda exactly what I’d always hoped for for the character of the King, and he needed only a little brushing up today because he pretty much remembered the whole score from when he learned his songs for the reading at Playwrights Horizons last December.
And Aspen Vincent is, well, Aspen Vincent. I don’t want to sound like a gushy fan, but I think I’m becoming a gushy fan. She’s got exactly the sound I was hoping for when we wrote these songs-she can do rock belting, she can do musical theatery mixing, and she can pick and choose-but mostly she just sounds like what I always heard in my head, and it’s a gas.
It’s really happening. It’s finally happening. I MUST go to bed now so I can wake up at four a.m. and finish these interstitial recitative bits for Act 1, but I’m just too excited.
Fetch Clay, Make Man playwright Will Power is also a genius performer—see these videos to get just a small taste of what he’s like in performance—as “Old School Rapper”!
Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre
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:
