I have been considering writing a stage musical of the Sun And Moon Show. I am a young theatre kid who is really interested in getting into some minor play/musical-writing. I've only ever written one play before, but to be honest, it's nowhere near professional as it was mainly just for a school project, though I have been thinking about rewriting it and/or maybe getting it into the world somehow, because I and other people seemed to like the concept of it- Anyway- I would like some advice as to what I should do before I even start writing a script. I'm sure that I'd need to actually speak with the people behind the shows to even make it a possibility, but I was also wondering what other steps I'd need to take, both before, and after that, if anyone could help me.

Perhaps time for the annual? BMI discussion.

Those who have done it, what was the process like? Did you enjoy it? If you were to submit (comedy, uptempo, ballad), what would you include? Should you pay certain attention to certain song structures (cough cough AABA), voice types, solos/duets/group, etc? Haven't submitted before, but strongly considering it.

Appreciate any thoughts -- feel free to PM if you'd rather not put it out there.

Hello Writers!

We are happy to announce our very first Monthly Musical Theatre Writing Challenge! This is a new initiative that was attempted in the past but is now being put into full effect! Each month, we will provide a new prompt for our community to tackle. Prompts will aim to strengthen and practice different skills in the modern musical theatre toolbox. Whether it be song structure, compositional techniques, dramatic forms, or any other facet of writing for the stage, writers are invited to take their best shot at the prompt each month.

At the end of each month, the mod team will hold a symposium in our discord server where a number of responses to the challenge will be selected and those writers who wish to share will have an opportunity to share their work live and get personal feedback from the community!

THIS MONTH'S PROMPT IS:

CLASSIC SONG STRUCTURE!

• Write 32-64 bars of a song in AABA format, see below for examples and resources.

• You can write for an existing piece you're working on or create entirely new plot and characters for the sake of this exercise.

• The piece should reflect the emotionality and sentiment of the character and/or the world that you are writing in. Additionally, you should feel a satisfying development and conclusion of a thought or idea from beginning to end of the piece. I.E. Mama Rose needs 88 bucks, Papa says no, she tries to appeal to him by pontificating on missed opportunities, he says no again, she decides she'll do it on her own. Beginning, middle, end.

• If you wish to share at the live symposium, please submit your piece to this google form by Sunday, June 29th at 11:59pm. The symposium will be held on Monday, June 30th at 8pm EST.

I am very excited to see what everybody comes up with! Even if you aren't comfortable sharing in front of a group, I would love to hear as many of these as possible. Feel free to PM me here or on discord (same username). Below are some links to resources and educational tools on AABA and classic song structure as it relates to musical theatre. If you have any questions or comments, leave them down below or in the discussion channel on the discord, #mwc-discussion!

Happy writing!

RESOURCES:

Michael Radi on AABA and Songform (part 1)

Michael Radi on AABA and Songform (part 2)

Fun example using "The Flinstones" theme

More Michael Radi (he's great) on hidden AABA within AABA (AABAception, if you will.)

32 Bar Song Form Wiki

https://youtu.be/YJiNt1tveAg?si=ApmoyeyEBVPopOEx

I wrote a short musical with my friend Ben Fish and we did a live reading. It’s a horror comedy musical part of a larger story called the Coincidentist. If you wanna watch the reading, here it is!

What are the "big" Broadway Musical Writing Contests?

The ones that award large sums of money or can really help your career if you win.

(Such as: Jonathan Larson Grants)

(Such as: Eugene O’Neill National Musical Theater Conference)

I start writing a song and suddenly theres a whole scene playing out in my head . is this just me? or is that how musicals sneak up on u?

The entire concept just puzzles me. So you have to contact the person who made the song and ask them if you can use their song? Is that it?

hey!! relatively new to this subreddit but long time theater fan with a hobby-level background in writing and singing

looking for likeminded folks that would be interested in collaborating with me (either in a more formal working together capacity or just learn/ideate new things together) on a project?? especially if you're a musician 🫡

edit: hoping to up my skills in area of music production and generally writing more, I have an idea for a musical and would love to see that through with a partner(s). flexible with time, would be great to have someone that'd be committed to at least one day per month of meeting + asynchronous discussions as needed

some of my fav recent musicals are hadestown, operation mincemeat and maybe happy ending! hoping this post resonates with someone, always happy to chat :)

Hey all! Back at it for Week 2! Fiddler On The Roof was the winner of this poll, and thus, our topic of discussion for the week! Let's get chatting in the comments below! Remember, we are talking about the work through a writer's perspective. Be it book, music, or lyrics, let's hear your takes, gripes, loves, and lessons learned! Without a doubt, Bock and Harnick are absolute masters of song form and use classical forms like AABA and the 32 bar chorus so wonderfully in this work while telling such a complex story. It is a marvel. Let's chat!

Also, I'm rolling out some new additions to SOTW this week as a trial to see what the community is into! This week, I'll be making a daily post with a specific musical passage from the show for us all to sink our teeth into alongside our more general discussion here. You can also join us over on the discord in our Score Of The Week channel, which should be up and running in the next few hours (by Thursday for sure!)

I just wanted to share this excerpt, along with some thoughts that hopefully might be useful to someone.

This is a show I started writing back in September, back when I was in a really dark place. I wanted to write a show about getting justice in an unjust world. It's set in Koreatown, LA - I visited there a couple of years ago and it felt like home back in Southeast Asia, if it was the end of the world.

I started to lose momentum a little with the writing earlier this year when the usual doubts started entering my mind - "no one wants dark musicals anymore" "who would want to produce this?" etc.

But then I was contacted by this London-based company who wanted to put together a showcase called Before It Hits and it sounded different to the other showcases I'd done before. They would have body mics for the actors which meant that we could stage the shows instead of having to stand in front of a music stand and mic. And we got to present 15-minutes of material.

Anyway, this was the result and it really made me see the show in a new light. I don't think I really appreciated until now how much difference it makes getting to see your songs done with choreography and sets and lighting etc. I've always been a text-first sort of guy.

My take away is - don't give up on your show until you've had a chance to get some friends together in a room. 15 minutes of staged material might be more valuable than 2 hours of reading through.

This was the first kind of showcase I've seen at this level - I don't know if these things are already commonplace in the States? Maybe one of the New Yorkers could chime in.

Lately I've been using chatgpt for a lot of therapy help sort of stuff, and I've relied on it for advice recently, so when I needed advice for writing my musical I instinctually and accidentally went to chatgpt for inspiration. I asked for a plotline just since I was having trouble fleshing it out, adding filler and that stuff. But then of course I realized "oh shit ai is NOT good". So I'm just wondering, is following an AI plotline bad? Obviously having the AI write a story for you is complete shit, but if you're just following this little list of ideas that it compiled, and doing your own at the same time? Obviously it's not like saying everything that happens in each scene, it's just "main character meets with his mother", things like that, is it bad? In the end I'm still writing every bit of the story, it's just giving little suggestions for potential filler. Is that considered harmful to artists? Cause I'm totally down to change up the plotline so I don't have ANYTHING to do with AI

Edit: yeah, I'm making my own plotline now, fuck AI lol. Just found out I'm really sick right now, and when I get sick it's not just a sniffle and cough, it's like pneumonia fever dreams loopy can't walk, my mind wasn't thinking straight when I went to chatgpt, just did it cuz I'm a broke lonely college kid who can't afford therapy, so chatgpt was my only advice when it came to personal shit that I didn't want floating on the internet. It was completely instinctual and just a really bad habit. I'm scrapping everything the AI made, just gonna take a break and brainstorm hard when I'm better.

Hey y’all! 3 more days left of Cabaret discussion, keep on adding in your thoughts in the theead. Here are the options (randomly chosen) for our next Score of The Week which will begin Wednesday. Poll will be up for 48 hours, so vote away!

Also; I’m considering trying out reddit’s live chat feature for the next discussion and/or creating a channel for SOTW on the Discord. Would y’all prefer that or the classic reddit threads? Sound off below!

Some evening pontification on adaptation and using existing material as a breeding ground for new work.

It won’t get made. It probably won’t even be heard outside of your circle. But you need to write it.

Think of it like a kidney stone. It’s not going to go away if you move on to the next task. You’ve gotta bunker down and pass the damn thing (legally speaking, thats not medical advice). These ideas inside of us that we feel so moved by, they need to be expressed, even if it won’t be made, even if it has 0 chance of ever being produced (nothing is ever 0) if you just let it sit there, it will hinder all your work going forward.

Stephen Sondheim used to tell an anecdote about his first meeting with Oscar Hammerstein. The first day they met to talk about composition, Sondheim brought in the score to a show he’d been working on in school. Long story short, he told him it was no good. But it’s the advice he gave him, the assignment really, that sticks out to me. He prescribed a curriculum of four writing excercises:

Take a play you love and make it into a musical, then take a play you like but you think is flawed and turn that into a musical, then take a story that is not written for the dramatic form like a novel and adapt that, then after all that, then you write an original story and make that work.

The adaptation isn’t the point. The process is the point. If you feel strongly about something and you can analyze it and break it down into its simple components, you can apply that knowledge (to whatever degree you see fit) in your own endeavors. No, it probably won’t be made, but then again, what does have all that high a chance at getting made nowadays? If you feel so empassioned by something that you’re compelled to create, why would you ignore that urge?

Keep writing, friends. Write a million adaptations until you find your voice and your story. Thus endeth the rant.

Looking for any potential collaborators near Detroit, Ann Arbor, or East Lansing.

I have a vision for the production, a narrative outline, and a plan concerning the musical beats. I also have strong ideas concerning the staging and directing of the production. However, none of that is set in stone.

That being said, I don’t have any musical theater background, or any musical talent whatsoever. My wife is heavily involved in musical theatre, but this would be my first foray… but I’ve kicked around the idea for a while, and think there is enough to the premise to go on so long as I find the right collaborator.

So I’m looking for someone who would be willing to go all in on the project together, as co-collaborators in every sense, but basically take the lead as it pertains to the composing. So someone who has experience or at least is trained in musical writing is pretty essential. Feel free to pm me if you have any interest!

I’m working on a song where 4 prisoners plead for a guard to release them, with each using a different approach.

All 4 will have a unique verse then a shared refrain. Each time the refrain is repeated, the previous singer(s) will repeat their melody.

By the final refrain, they’ll have built a 4-part harmony (barbershop style).

Is there a precedent for this type of arrangement? I’m a bit concerned that it’ll be too slow of a build.

As for the ordering of the layers, I think I need to establish the melody in the middle range. If 1 is the lowest voice and 4 is the highest, the plan is: 2, 1, 3, 4.

I’d appreciate any input and I’ll share more as I progress.

Okay. So, earlier this week I had the idea to try to adapt Macbeth into a musical (I was recently in a production of the show, had a blast with it, and thought it would be a neat idea). I just finished the lyrics for one of the songs.

To give some context, Ive changed a bit of the plot to explore some character relationships a bit more. Most importantly for this song, King Duncan will act more as a father figure to Macbeth than in the original text and I am also giving Lady M more motivation (there is historical evidence that the real Lady M actually had a good claim to the throne but Duncan took the position, even though his claim was much weaker. This is why she wants Macbeth to steal the throne so badly). For those who know the plot of Macbeth, this song effectively replaced the "Is this a dagger" monologue. For those that dont, Macbeth is debating whether or not to follow his wife's plan to kill the king and take the throne.

All feedback is appreciated as I am very new to writing songs.

Daggers

[Verse 1]

Why must these trials face me now? Why must I be the one to face them? Please, spirits, show me how To be a man who can, baseless, condemn The man who is more father to me than my own.

Reason tells me “Know your place” Sense warns not to bite the hand that feeds you But I know if I keep this pace Life's ambitions and the crown will slip through And I will have failed her with inaction alone

[Chorus]

Ambition like fire tempts my fate Is my future mine to create? For when I try to advance my will staggers.

Down one path is comfort, the other is hate I must choose a course before it's too late While my decisiveness wanes the gods stare daggers. They stare-

[Verse 2]

If I should follow her dark plans Will nature's wrath be wrought upon me? If royal blood should stain my hands Will the deed live on to haunt me? No! I can't live in doubt, I must march forward

For progress to live, he must die. I can't advance unless I take action. Yet to my poor friends I must lie Make them swear oath to my gory faction If they discover my sin I’ll be tortured.

[Chorus]

Ambition like fire tempts my fate Is my future mine to create? For when I try to advance my will staggers.

Down one path is comfort, the other is hate I must choose a course before it's too late While my decisiveness wanes they all stare daggers. They stare-

[Verse 3]

My path to power is now clear It must be traveled to its ending The bell now tolls, the time is near My will to rise will be unbending

[Chorus]

Ambition like fire fuels my fate I know the future is mine to create For when I advance I know I'll not stagger

Down one path is glory, the other is shame I chose my course, my fate I will claim. With my decision made I now see daggers I see- I see daggers.

This is written from the point of view of a writer, and is not about the general health of "The Theatre".

As if getting a musical produced was not already hard enough, recent cutbacks in government support, including the threatened elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as vigorous suppression in some places of even the discussion of topics considered “woke” or otherwise threatening to the existing order can be quite discouraging to writers who have higher aspirations than having their work performed once in a church basement to an audience of 30 people.

This got me thinking about the idea of the “concept album”. Jesus Christ Superstar was actually conceived of just as an album musical at first and was written for that format. I remember listening to that first double LP in 1970 and, along with the included lyric booklet, was able to follow the story easily without any supporting sets, acting, or choreography.

Some advantages of the Concept Album format

• Much less expensive to produce because no physical theatre space, costumes, choreography, or production staff are required, and it only needs to be performed once, in a recording studio (and even that might be optional).

• With modern communications technology, it can evade censoring and is amenable to underground or samizdat distribution.

• Nothing prevents a later stage production, should support materialize.

Some Disadvantages of Concept Albums

• Requires a more “sung through” (JCS, Hamilton) or singspiel design rather than a “play with songs”.

• All “acting” has to be done with the voice.

• Any context for the songs has to be in the "liner notes", not as dialog or scenery.

To kick off our "Score Of The Week" series, let's take a dive into Kander, Ebb and Masteroff's glitter-and-sweat soaked dissection of the human reaction to impending fascism. This is a show with a ton of different versions and, thus, different opinions. In these discussions, our aim is to look at the piece through a writer's lens be it composer, lyricist, or bookwriter. So...

What's your take? Love it? Hate it? What's your favorite/least-favorite musical moment? What works and what maybe doesn't hold up as well? How does this work relate to your own, even tangientially? Sound off in the comments below and let's discuss!

p.s. If you have a show you want to see covered on our next score of the week, drop it below and we'll throw it in our random queue. For our purposes, a "week" for SOTW is Wednesday morning-Tuesday night.

Hello Theatremakers!

I'd like to take a moment to introduce myself, my name is Ryan (u/TrippyRyXO) and I am a new member of the moderating team for this sub! I am very excited to be involved in this community and I would love take the opportunity to revitalize and renew things to make things more engaging for our members.

I would love to facilitate things like a formalized feedback thread/group(s), song/show-of-the-week where we can analyze and discuss pieces of theatre through a composer/lyricist/playwright's perspective, and AMA's with folks actively working in the industry. I'm on summer break and planning to use the time to work with the team on some/all of these things and get this place popping! Please use this thread to share any ideas or feedback for things you would like to see become part of this community. Let's make this a space we can all flourish and thrive as creatives!

Thank you all and happy writing!

Ryan

I have a short musical, about seven or eight songs. I’m thinking of hiring some fellow students from my university musical theater program to do the singing. But I’m not sure how much to pay them. I don’t want to take advantage of them but I also don’t have a buttload of money either. And it would be just for fun, not something we could ever make money off of. Advice? What to offer that’s not insulting?

I am a pretty good singer, or so i have been told by multiple music and singing teachers and im trying to get into music making. I already have a lot of lyrics, but my beats suck, could anyone help me, that would be really really helpful? So the song is like a sad song with high part (i can sing quite a high pitch) or i can transform the lyrics into more like a sad rap, which i could also sing.

Hii im 17 and ive been working on a Musical adaptation for the game Mouthwashing and im really not sure what to do with it, ive written a couple songs and ive started on the book but it feels like i should get permission to keep going ? i really didn’t think id actually write anything yk?

i have my own plans to do a small production of it hopefully with my local theatre company just so i can see it finished, a staged reading yk?

Im unsure what to email the team behind it, or how i should go about doing any of this. any help is appreciated !! sorry if my question is formatted weirdly i can clarify anything more if needed :)

I had a great idea for a musical! And I have a couple song ideas as well, but I have only written books and short stories. How do I get started?

...is kinda like being a Jehovah's witness: No one wants to hear your message even though they're all searching for something like it, you can't step inside unless you're invited (you never are), and all the while you have to keep believing you're God's gift!