first entry - general thoughts

alright, so the story is - we're writing this musical about singaporeans at penn, entitled "Sing, City."

terence, club singapore president and my roommate, suggested that i start this blog to drum up publicity for the upcoming musical and speaker series. as there are only two weeks to said musical, i doubt that significant publicity will be generated by my writing here - i'm hoping chiefly to detail the chaotic swirl at the center of a musical production coming slowly to life, both for my future reference and for those interested.

as some of you may know, this musical has been something floating around for a long, long time. you can check the diaspura website for the original story, but suffice it to say that it's been a good year and a half in the works. the first wave of auditions began in spring 2006 when i got back from my fall study abroad in china, and i set aside the people i had in mind. i was supposed to write it over the long summer, but... that didn't happen, and so we pushed it from fall 2006 to spring 2007. i was supposed to write it over winter break, but... that didn't happen either, but this time i had a pretty concrete deadline - i graduate may 2007, and i wanted to make this happen before then.

so we did a second wave of auditions, bringing a surprising spread of freshmen and seniors into the pool of talent we already had. most productions produce a script and music first, then proceed to audition, cast, and practice. in the proud yap tradition of procrastination, we auditioned a year in advanced, and actually evolved the music and script as we went along. the music has been chugging along - 2 to 4 songs a week since february. the script... well, the concepts have been bouncing around my mind for a long time, but the actual product itself only made its first appearance the week before spring break. and right now, with two weeks to the show, the script is still in a ... evolutionary stage.

part of the difficulty in writing the actual script came from locking in the songs first. it's possible to go back and change songs to fit the script, but difficult to scrap entire songs (sunk cost fallacy, yes.), and structurally certain songs directed the way the script began to flow. also, we chose deliberately in the beginning to try and showcase as many voices in the cast as we could - i could have very easily made the whole musical a love story about two people with about 3-4 supporting characters and a faceless ensemble of 10, but instead now i have - 3 short stories with 3 groups of 2-3 people, and a faceless ensemble of <5.

the music came first, and as such - the plot isn't much to speak of. no huge surprises, no dramatic turns - just familiar scenes, familiar feelings, familiar situations, juxtaposed against each other and the music. it is primarily about the music, after all. i will write more about the structure in the days to come, and also the process of songwriting, but for now i have a script to finish.

joshua.