Well, dear readers, I did not sleep twelve hours yesterday. In fact, I didn’t fall asleep until almost five in the morning, I know not why and why I know not. I did sleep for eight hours after that, so that was good. I intended to spend a lazy Sunday and that is indeed exactly what I did. I uploaded stuff to You Tube for posting in these here notes, so why don’t we just get to that right now. First up, to get us all happy and energized, here’s LA Is – while the show is called Now and Then there’s more then than now, as you might imagine. But here we have one of the nows – the music is by our very own Grant Geissman and the lyric is by me and Grant. Get on your dancin’ shoes and see if you can do Cheryl Baxter’s wonderful choreography. I used to try in rehearsal but, you know, old Jews doing this stuff is, well, it just is.
Wasn’t that fun? That was student Lamont Oakley singing the lead. When he disappears from the video he’s out meeting folks in the audience (we turned the lights up for that) – these videos are all a bit too dark – we’ll fix that once they’re strung together into one video – that’s something my editor can do easily. What happened was the lights would come up and be bright and the video camera would automatically make it darker, which it shouldn’t have. Next, here’s my song C.C. Brown’s, my most missed place in Los Angeles. It’s sung by Robert Yacko, who does a beautiful job of it.
Next we have The Black Dahlia. This song was by far the hardest song to get right. It was my idea to have a song about the Dahlia and I assigned it to Adryan Russ for lyrics and a composer we work with for music. About a week later they came over and played it for me. The composer had gone down what I thought was an odd road – a tango, and not a slow one. The lyrics were in the third person. I didn’t really respond to the tune or the lyrics and I didn’t really know why other than knowing they weren’t right. I asked them to take another pass at the song, which they did. This time the tango remained, was a bit slower, and had a better tune. The lyric still didn’t work for me – it was very literal and had stuff about the police investigation and all this stuff. But I said we’d go with it and see how it felt and what I could do with the staging. At that point, I thought about having the singer singing, and two dancers in dim light in the background, doing some kind of tango macabre. Then we did the first of the private readings and no one in the room responded to the song – it was like a dead weight. Still, I kept it. Then we did the second reading and the same thing happened and at that point I really decided to be proactive because I really wanted the song in the show. I called Adryan and asked if she’d take another pass at the lyrics. This would have been the fourth or fifth version. She wasn’t that keen on it, but we talked for a long time and I explained the reasons the song wasn’t working for me – dispassionate narrator, too much stuff that wasn’t important, and not knowing exactly what story was being told. She asked me what I felt the story should be and I said, “An innocent, pretty gal comes to Hollywood, a dreamer, wanting stardom, like so many before her and after her. That, to me, was the story, and how that all went bad. I said I had no interest in the police, the bad investigation, none of that. She said she’d work on it. An hour later I had a new version and instead of the first word being a dispassionate “Her” the first word was “I” – we were in the first person and I was immediately drawn in because a dead girl was singing her story. THAT was good. It was too long, the form wasn’t quite right, but it was definitely on the right track.
At that point, I didn’t think the composer would have the time to write a new version, but I sat down at the piano to just record some chords in the style I wanted the music – no tango, but a noir fever dream. As I played the chords I heard in my head, and looked at the lyric to the second verse (don’t know why I went there instead of the first) a tune just came to – all of it, the entire verse, instantly. I went back to the first verse and it didn’t quite work because her lyric scan was slightly different in every verse. So, I rewrote a couple of lines to make it consistent. Then I wrote the bridge. Then I had three more verses and there was still stuff about the police and detectives, so I just took the bull by the horns, took all the stuff I liked from the three verses and turned it into one verse and a coda – got rid of the cops, rewrote one line in total, no investigation, and suddenly everything worked. I called Adryan and played it for her and she really liked it. She made two tiny adjustments to my adjustments and that was that. I knew how I wanted to stage it – with no movement whatsoever, I knew I wanted her in a blood-red dress, and I knew I wanted the red backlight. So, here’s what it ended up like, and I could not have been happier with it, and the audience absolutely loved it and Elle Willgues, who sings it, got cheers every performance. And that luscious orchestration is, of course, by Lanny Meyers.
Now I’ll tell you why I love actors. Elle came to me and asked if she could try something at the end of the song – putting her hands up so she looked like the dead woman when she was found (she’d researched and seen the photos). Being a smart director I said absolutely. I didn’t know if I’d like it, but the first time we ran it and she did it, there was such a chill in the room and it was just kind of perfect. Finally for today, I give you the entire act one finale, Every Wednesday Night. I have never had as much fun staging anything – I’ve been waiting to stage a wrestling match forEVER and when I came up with the idea of the LA show I knew from moment one I was going to end the act with this number. I thought it would either fail completely and have people just scratching their heads or that it would really work – thankfully it was the latter, but as I’ve said before, I didn’t care either way because it was exactly what I wanted.
When you have an act ender that lands like ours did, you can be sure no one leaves at intermission. I’ll have more videos tomorrow.
Other than that, I ate some sandwiches on bagels, and relaxed and, of course, sat on my couch like so much fish.
Last night, I watched a motion picture on Blu and Ray entitled Expresso Bongo, an English film from England and a region B Blu-ray. I’ve seen the film a few times and I quite like it. It stars Laurence Harvey as a pushy agent/manager trying to find success representing a rock-and-roller. He finds one (played by Cliff Richard). It’s colorful, it has songs, and it’s in beautiful black-and-white scope, directed by the very talented Val Guest. The entire cast is great, as is the pace. The story is based on the real-life rise to fame of the first UK rock-and-roll star – anyone know who that was? Tommy Steele. After that, I just relaxed some more.
Today, I’ll relax until four, when I have a ninety-minute work session with my musical director – he’s new to me and I’m hoping it will all go smoothly. Then I go directly to the Smoke House for dinner with Richard and Elizabeth Sherman – he’ll be doing the six signed musical quotes we gave as perks for the Indiegogo campaign.
Tomorrow we have our first Kritzerland rehearsal. Thursday morning I see a reading of a new musical, then come right home for our second Kritzerland rehearsal, then leave right after we’re finished to do the pick-up recording session at LACC. Saturday is our stumble-through, and Sunday is our sound check and show.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, relax, have a work session, and then sup with the Shermans. Today’s topic of discussion: What murder cases, solved or unsolved, fascinate you most? Let’s have loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, happy to be posting videos in the notes.