I’ve often wanted to get a time machine and at the very least, send a message to my former self. If I could, it would go something like this: Dear 16-year-old Brendan, Congratulations. You’ve written your first song for a musical. You’ve recognized that pop songs in and of themselves are too limiting for you, [...]
The night before last was a dress rehearsal where everything seemed to be so far from good that we’d never fix it and we were doomed. “People will laugh at us,” we said. “Critics will excoriate us. Audiences will say to each other ‘Bwa-ha-ha-ha-haa. What a stinker that was.’” And then last night, an invited [...]
Things are happening fast here during some very long work days, and I haven’t had time to write. But here are a few highlights: On the day before our sitzprobe, the band was rehearsing downstairs in the converted laundry room, with sound piped into the theater, while Leon (sound designer) and Val and I listened [...]
April 24, 2011 – 12:45 pm
The McCarter Theatre has created a Sleeping Beauty Wakes-specific website for the production, and they’ve posted some photos from rehearsal.
April 23, 2011 – 11:35 am
A nice thing to wake up to this morning: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/24/arts/april-24-30.html He writes, “This might be just the thing to perk me up after a long, restorative doze.” I hope he’s right–he certainly enjoyed Striking 12 back in 2006. Fingers crossed!
Today we freeze the script and score. No more lyric changes, no more melody changes, no more line changes. They learn exactly what’s there as our window before tech rehearsals dwindles down and down. It is tempting, as we watch a run-through, or a work-through of a scene, to come up with text- or music-based [...]
Our musical director and orchestrator is James Sampliner. I have long admired his incredible piano playing, which is WAY better than mine; his incredible arranging skills; his boundless joy at the keyboard which emanates all through the room. I am pitching in in the rehearsal room, composing incidental/transitional music on the fly and playing for [...]