Tag Archives: Lauren Blackman

Creating “The Usual”

Now that the libretto for our musical “The Usual” has been published, I thought I’d tell you how it came to be. It happened because of the Raw Impressions Music Theatre. This was a wonderfully insane, low-budget project that would put together evenings of ten minute musicals written in 48 hours. Eight writers and eight composers who had never worked together before would show up on a Friday afternoon; ten performers would sing for a minute each; then eight musical-writing teams would form and be given the theme for that program. It was like, here’s your composer, these three performers will be yours, here’s your director, here’s your musical director, you have 48 hours, see you Sunday, GO!

One week later, they would put on a fully-staged, off-book evening of eight ten minute musicals. Our theme was “Love by Degrees.” “Math Anxiety,” with music by Michael Hunsaker, was my first publicly performed work. There were six performances, and I went to five of them and listened and watched as an audience of strangers laughed and cheered for our show. It was a blast.

I started thinking about what I would do if I could run one of these. I remembered seeing Paul Sills’ All-Star improv group when they came to NYC. [Can’t remember all of them, but Paul Dooley, Severn Darden, Gerrit Graham …] There was one format where they were given a first line and a last line, and had to improvise a scene that got from one to the other. [“Put down that chainsaw!” was the final one that night.] So, what if a group of random sentences were drawn from a hat and used to start musicals?

The phrase, “I knew you’d come back,” popped into my head. And within 90 seconds, I knew the characters, the entire plot, the songs, and that it had to be jazz-based. [Da DOO be do BOP!]

Well, fun idea, but I wasn’t in charge of anything. But I kept coming up with ideas for short musicals, and wondered what an evening of such would be like. Then I met the composer Mark Sutton-Smith. He had responded to a personal ad I had put up in a Yahoo newsgroup of musical theater writers [“Lonely lyricist seeks composer …”] We met by the Lincoln Center fountain [cue Gene Wilder screaming, “I’ll do it!” as the water erupts orgasmically.] At dinner, we each pitched an idea. Mine was for the program of one-act musicals; he then growled, “I want to write a show called, ‘Girl Detective.'” We ended up doing both.

The problem: We never quite finished the collection of one-acts, entitled, “This Happened To Someone I Know,” although writing it was a good learning process and way for us to get a sense of what each other could do. I wrote for an imaginary group of six performers I knew either through my BMI workshop or Raw Impressions: Jill Abramovitz, Karen Hyland, Kristin Maloney, Nick Cearley, Steve Routman, and my Raw Impressions collaborator, Michael Hunsaker. Of the one acts, only the one I initially thought of was completed: “Bad Reception,” which Kristin and Mike performed sensationally at the Emerging Artists Theater. [You can hear them singing “I Knew You’d Come Back” and “Enough” here. The latter is one of the most gorgeous melodies you’ll ever hear.] We got caught up in writing “Girl Detective,” but more importantly, the one-acts never quite connected with an overall theme. This particularly hit home when we put together a private reading, amazingly getting Kristin, Nick, Steve and Mike, two-thirds of the dream team, and added in Lauren Blackman and Russell Koplin in the other female roles. In the post-mortem, it was suggested that we’d be better off finding an overall through-line.

I thought about that, and actually came up with an idea for one — six characters, two side-by-side locations [a living room; a bar] — but the frustrations were creeping in, so we put the project aside.

In early autumn, 2010, Mark called me and said [this is verbatim], “Hey, my sister’s theater is looking for original musicals for two to three performers and one set. Let’s write one of those.” He proposed that we salvage what songs we could from the earlier project. I re-examined one of the one-acts, “Kaypro II,” in which a woman named Valerie rediscovers the clunky old computer from her teen years and plays a computer adventure game that she never finished. The demons she encounters in the game parallel the demons from her real life.

It seemed like a possible second act, albeit with much rewriting. I took my idea for the through-line and cut it in half. One set, a bar. A guy walks into the bar, starts talking to the bartender. Then Valerie enters. And stuff happens.

My wife, Judy and I, were taking an anniversary trip to Hawaii. I can never sleep on planes. I took a spiral notebook and started riffing an opening scene. It flowed [“like butter,” said Mark when he read it later].

We still needed songs. Lots of them, in fact, to fill up this full-length show. They started to come. Mark and I worked by sending things back and forth to each other. He described his composing process to me as “Walking around the house, muttering.” Three new songs happened. The Williamston Theatre liked the first draft. They even did the opening scene for a fund-raising gala. But there was much to be done. Eight more songs to go, and we wanted to put together a table read for August so that Tony Caselli, the director, could come to NYC and take a look at the completed show.

Then I stopped hearing from Mark. No e-mails with music attached, no calls, no picking up on his end. We had lined up three performers [Tara Novie and Gil Brady from “Girl Detective,” and Kristin Maloney, who had inspired the original Valerie]. I was getting increasingly frantic, wondering what was going on.

Then things got worse. Much worse.

It turned out that Mark had been diagnosed with lymphoma. He finally called me and filled me in. I was stunned, needless to say. Horrified for him, and wondering if we’d be able to finish what we started.

We postponed the reading. On the other end of the life event scale, Kristin had become pregnant, and the new date was past her due date. She recommended a woman she had recently worked with who she said could do everything she could do even better, and that’s how I first met Jillian Louis.

Mark started chemo, which laid him out. We went ahead with the reading, which was encouraging and pointed out what needed to be rewritten. Then I received the first piece of music from Mark. Then another. Then another.

He ended up writing eight new songs in between bouts of chemo. They were wonderful. It was one of the most incredible things I had ever seen. To create while that ill takes courage beyond anything I’ve ever had. We completed the show in time to get it to Williamston.

The Williamston Theatre is a small theater, with 99 seats surrounding a small square stage on three sides. It was founded by four people, including Tony Caselli, our director, and Emily Sutton-Smith, Mark’s sister and our leading lady. The theater is an Equity house that also draws on the nearby Michigan State theater students. Our leading man, Kip, was played by Joseph Zettelmaier, an award-winning playwright long associated with the theater. Sam, the bartender, was played by Emily Hull, a graduate student at the time. Tony also had the clever idea of incorporating the two student  assistant stage managers, Brandon Piper and Carolyne Rex, as an onstage chorus when they weren’t changing scenery or operating demons. [When Mark heard about that, he said, “Five voices are going to sound like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in that space.”] The set, costumes, lighting and props were all beautifully done, and the musical director improvised cocktail piano for the underscoring that Mark couldn’t complete.

I was up for the last two weeks of rehearsal, rewriting in my hotel room by day. The layout of that room had the television mounted over the desk. The bottom of framework had padding on it. I remember thinking, “What kind of idiot is going to hit his head standing up from the desk?” The answer was me. Twice.

We had our first preview. The laughs were huge. So was the gasp of shock and dismay at the last twist of the final scene. [Joe came running up to me after, crowing, “Did you hear that?”]

And Mark made it to the premiere to hear his little sister sing his music for the first, and only, time in his life.

We got great reviews from the Michigan media, nominations for different awards. It was a blast, one of the great experiences of my life.

And the performance after the premiere would be the last time that I would see Mark in person.

He lived another year, composing to the end. We spoke on the phone. He gave me his blessing when the possibility arose for me to work with someone else, which we understood would be until he was well enough to work again on another musical. About a year after the premiere, we lost him.

A month or so after that, I received a call informing me that I had won the Kleban Prize for Most Promising Librettist for this little show. The ceremony was at the ASCAP building, and Mark’s music was played by Joy Son, my new collaborator, on Harold Arlen’s Steinway grand. She told me that she had never practiced so hard.

Oh, the title. The working title had been “These Two Walked Into A Bar.” Sometime in the rehearsal process, Tony suggested, “The Usual.” And we said, “Yeah. That’s it.”


					

About Casting

In my previous post, I wrote about visualizing actors for characters. I don’t do that for fiction, but when it comes to writing for musical theater, that changes. The reason is that the voice, specifically the singing voice, matters. Whereas a written character’s voice could be anything [and the few audio versions that I’ve heard of my work sound nothing like I hear the characters], when it comes to musicals, you have to be thinking, “She’s a soprano, not legit, with a theater belt and the ability to rock out when we need her to.” And once you do, you start remembering performers who meet those criteria.

Which means that you are essentially casting the show in your head while you’re writing it, and I have found that to be a useful thing. You’re moving the imaginary characters around an imaginary stage anyway to make sure that the scenes work and that people have enough time to change costumes, so you might as well have specific people for your templates rather than a SimRep group [and wouldn’t that be a fun game to have?]

The more I’ve gotten to work in theater, the more performers I have met. Every one of them is in my mental database, waiting to leap out and sing their imaginary little hearts out. And I don’t typecast them — the ingenue in one show becomes a biker chick bartender in another; the straight high school senior segués into a gay, thirty-something editor. It all comes down to the voice and, to a lesser extent, the age.

In the year after I had been in the BMI Musical Theater Workshop, I was looking for a compatible composer to work with. I had come up with an idea for a show to be made up of thematically-related musical sketches and one-acts. I had been influenced by my experiences both watching and participating in the Raw Impressions Theater Company, who put together evenings of eight ten minute musicals written in forty-eight hours by eight pairs of writers and composers who had never worked together before. They usually had a cast of ten covering the whole set, and the performers were seriously good.

So, as I began thinking about what I would write, I also thought about the practicalities. I wanted to use six performers, three men and three women, all versatile. And thinking about the characters in the pieces became mixed with thinking about who would play them. The characters suggested the performers, the performers suggested more characters, and in my head, where I was director, designer and audience, I was having a great time enjoying the show.

Of course, if you get to the point where you actually can have a reading or, if you’re lucky, an actual staging of the show, the actors you dreamed of may not be available because they selfishly have their own lives and needs. In the case of “This Happened To Someone I Know,” the anthology musical which I ultimately wrote with composer Mark Sutton-Smith, I did get four of the six to record some demos. I later got a different four of the six to do a reading, and it was sweet hearing their actual voices doing what the voices in my head had done [no medication needed here, folks. Relax.]

But, if you can’t get the performers you dreamed of getting, here’s the wonderful thing about living in NYC: There are a lot of performers here, and many will happily come in to read or sing for you, either because they hope that this will lead to work for them if you ever strike gold, or because they realize that all of us in this community [and I am willing at this point to include myself] need to have this symbiosis continue if musical theater is going to be created.

So, what happens when a performer you craved is unavailable? You network. You find others, and they know others, and before you know it, your imaginary repertory company is legion. And someone will come in who was nothing like the person in your head and put an entirely new spin on the character, and you, the writer, sit there and think, “Oh! This character can do that!” For example, when Mark and I wrote “Girl Detective,” we recruited Kimmy Brownell for the table reading. We had met Kimmy when she learned four songs at the last second for some demos when our original singer came down with a cold. Right before the table reading, Kimmy had a family emergency. She sent me a list of possible replacements, with a notation next to one of them, “She rules!”

Her name was Lauren Blackman. She looked nothing like Kimmy, and we didn’t know how good she was. Turned out she was real good. When we later did a staged reading in NYC, she came back for the role and came up with a reading of the line, “Like what?” that sent both Mark and me into hysterics. Too long to explain, but the point is, I wrote that line, and I had no idea it contained what she found in it.

Sometimes you get even luckier. We wanted a young voice for Casey Ames, Girl Detective. I remembered that the older sister of one of my son’s friends had gone to the Performing Arts High School in NYC, and then on to study musical theater at Pace University. I contacted her, and had her learn one of Casey’s songs. And that’s how I started working with Tara Novie.

Tara has become one of the mainstays of my imaginary repertory company. She’s not merely a great singer. She’s a great musician [not every singer is]. So good, that she allowed Mark and me to take musical risks, knowing that she had the capability to take them and run with them. There was a moment in “Girl Detective” where Casey, self-styled high school detective, comes across a murdered man, and breaks dow because things suddenly got real. Mark and I independently arrived at the idea of using musical fragments to create the theater equivalent of an operatic mad scene. The structure was unconventional, the meters shifted into some less standard rhythms, and we ended up writing a piece that I love to this day because Tara had come into this role and we knew she could do it [and she did]. Unfortunately, it’s not up on the website, but you can hear Tara [and Lauren and many other good folks] here.

So, when I began writing “The Usual,” which had its basis in one of the one-acts from the unfinished “This Happened …” musical, Tara took over in my mind from the actress who was part of the original six. “The Usual” was a three person show: two women, one man. For the visuals, I had Tara, the fabulous Kristin Maloney, who had done demos for “This Happened …” and performed the one-act “Bad Reception” from that show, and Gil Brady, who Mark had recruited for “Girl Detective” from his imaginary repertory company.

See how this works? Only when we got to the table reading and recording for “The Usual,” real life intervened in good and bad ways. The bad: Mark was diagnosed with lymphoma, the treatment of which naturally slowed down his composing. The good: Kristin was pregnant. The delay in the completion of the score pushed things past her due date. She recommended Jillian Louis, who was incredible, and a completely different type than Kristin. [Go to the Musical Theater page to hear Jillian, Tara and Gil on those songs.]

And then “The Usual” was done at the Williamston Theatre in Michigan, and that cast, Joseph Zettelmaier, Emily Sutton-Smith and Leslie Hull, was nothing like Gil, Jillian and Tara. Their takes were different; Tony Caselli, the genius director, found beats and notes that I didn’t know were there, and it was all brilliant.

So, what I have learned: I can cast as much as I like in my head, and, if I’m lucky, I’ll get those people. But if I don’t, I can’t wait to see what these characters of mine will turn into when the new folks arrive. I will keep writing for Tara, and Jillian, and Nick Cearley and David Perlman and so many others, because they help me imagine who these people are. Theater characters are meant to be played by actors, and by more than one if you want the show to live on.

And the other great thing about it is that you keep making new friends.