Well, dear readers, I happened to be driving yesterday, and I have my iPod thing hooked up in the car and on came Don’t Look at Me from Follies. I happen to absolutely love the song, just a perfect character piece that does exactly what it sets out to. To my ears, it’s just repeated A sections unless you wanted to be pedantic and break it down. It is also short (actual time of the complete song is about 1:50). It says what it has to say and it’s done. And you know what? I miss that. I am so bored with today’s musical theater writing, where every song has to be an epic and get thunderous applause, where every song has to last five or six minutes or get spread out over a ten-minute scene. There is something to be said for thirty-two bars, but no one these days is saying it very much. Now we get recitative masquerading as song, now we get endless arias of no importance. Think back on classic musical theater songs – how long do The Party’s Over and Long Before I Knew You last (2:43 and 3:50), Everything’s Coming Up Roses (3:06), Small World (2:16) and on and on. I suppose they really are still writing songs under four minutes, but they sure FEEL longer than that in the shows themselves and they certainly feel like they’re grandstanding for applause. Don’t Look at Me gets the applause it should get – it’s a song that serves a small purpose perfectly. Anyway, I went off on a tangent, did you notice that?
Yesterday was a day I didn’t care for all that much. I did get eight hours of sleep, then did stuff on the computer, then went and got a sandwich and no fries or onion rings. The helper met me there to pick up some stuff that had to be Xeroxed and shipped and then dropped the little bombshell on me that she’s going to England for three months from July to the beginning of October. I dreaded this news but knew it was inevitable. She’s been involved in a transatlantic romance. The guy has come here twice, and now she’s going there. She assures me she will find an interim helper and train her within an inch of her life, but the whole thing leaves me feeling I’m not an terra firma. And I don’t like that feeling and I don’t like change, but there’s nothing to be done about it and I’ll feel a bit more comfortable when I know she’s found the person and that the training has begun. It comes at a very bad time, I think, in that that’s exactly when we’ll be stepping up the CD releases, and dealing also with the organization of all the Indiegogo contributors, which is going to be complex. I suppose it will all be fine.
Then I looked at two rehearsal spaces. The first one I thought was fine and the second one would work but it’s in a really ratty neighborhood and I just don’t want to go anywhere near there. So, I narrowed it down to the first space and The Grove, where we did Inside Out. Whichever is the best deal is where we go.
After that, I stopped at Gelson’s and got some pasta sauce that was only eighty calories per 1/2 cup, so I made about six ounces of pasta, put a little sauce on it, and that was my evening snack. I wasn’t in the mood to watch anything due to feeling I wasn’t on terra firma, so I just sat at the computer and roamed around You Tube watching videos to cheer me up, like Poor Little Person from Henry, Sweet Henry, and some short Johnny Carson and David Letterman clips.
Today, I’ll mosey on over to Mystery and Imagination Books and give them their copies. Then I’ll hopefully pick up some packages (none yesterday) and come home and choose more songs – we’re still not fully cast, which is really irritating me big time right now. Then I’ll sup, then I’m seeing 13.
Tomorrow we have a work session for an hour or so, mostly to work out dance music for one number in Welcome to My World, but I also want to work out every tempo in the show to a metronome as we don’t seem to be able to lock them the way they should be. I need tempos to be very consistent – when I play the songs they are always the same tempo, so I’ll just have him do those markings and by the time we go into rehearsal he should have them down. Then I’ll relax. This coming week is all meetings and meals and errands and whatnot and prepping a new release that we’ll hopefully announce by the end of the week.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, drop off books, hopefully pick up packages, choose songs, sup and see a show. Today’s topic of discussion: What are your favorite talk show classic moments? Let’s have loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, after which I hope I shall arise feeling like I’m on firmer terra firma.