An easy target.

Second day, second post. These things need attention.

I'm currently dividing my writing time between two plays. They're nothing like one another (I think), which is good, because when I start feeling overwhelmed and/or stymied by one, I can pick up the other. (I also do this with Dragon Age and Baldur's Gate II. Don't tell anybody.)

One of them is a musical. It doesn't have a name yet, but it's actually a collaborative effort, and as such, I feel a bit more pressure to make progress, since there's more than just my pride on the line. This is actually a Good Thing, as I tend to work better and more steadily when I know someone else is waiting on the product.

I've been trying to familiarize myself with the plots of more musicals, so I won't unwittingly commit any ripoffs. Unfortunately, this frequently reminds me that I really dislike most musicals. It baffles me sometimes that people will sing the praises of a script that mostly exists to tell the director how big a spectacle to create. I get impatient during the industry-standard slow first acts, which tend to take forever to pump their exposition fluid into the show, but my #1 object of genre hatred is the over-production that seems to come with the territory, smoothing every potentially interesting point into a friendly paste. This actually has less to do with scripts than companies, design teams, and money, but I get to hate it all the same. (Thank goodness for the plays of Rodgers and Hammerstein, whose bizarre, outdated, and often offensive values can never quite get beaten out.)

However, I will fight one common criticism: that, in the process of creating a musical, many songs are just "stuck" into the show, not developed for it specifically. My counterexample is Singin' in the Rain, which I think is just about the best movie musical there is. As I understand it, that was indeed a throw-together, but they took the time to make it work anyway. Sometimes connecting the dots isn't so bad, if you can arrange the dots just so, and draw the lines carefully, and let's end this sentence before the metaphor breaks down. Anyway, part of the process needs to be continually bending the script toward the music, and the music toward the script. In fact, I'd wager that most of the musicals I hate were conceived originally as musicals, head to toe. Maybe I hate musicals that act like musicals.

This might seem like a negative and/or grumpy place to start from, but honestly, I've been trying to focus more on what to do than what to avoid. After all, it's easy to criticize, but there's always the question of whether I think I can actually do better. Well, I believe I can write something that will meet my own standards, and more importantly, I'm striving to meet and exceed the expectations of the folks I'm working with. That works for now.

Eventually, I'll post more specifics, when I'm not in a phase where so many elements can change at a moment's notice.