Last night, one of the set-ups I wrote was for a song Paul Gordon wrote called The 1962 Dodgers. Very pretty and touching, but when we did the read-through it just didn't work and I was ready to cut it, along with the other two songs that weren't working. One of those two I wasn't willing to go to bat for because it was just too diffuse, didn't make its points clearly and was seven minutes long - at seven minutes you'd better be writing a three-act play - my seven-minute song, which is the final song in the show, is just that - a three-act play. I was able to get the author of the second song to tell me why she wrote it, because the title of the song is more of a metaphor than literal, but because our show is about LA the audience would immediately think it was literal - so I was able to write a set-up based on her personal experience that caused her to write it, and now it works fine.
So I asked Paul how his song functioned in the unproduced musical it was written for. When he explained it, then it made sense to me, especially two lines toward the end that no one could understand the meaning of. So, again I wrote a set-up based on the ideas in the original set-up, but making it different for our purposes, and taking out the entire reason the song functions in the show. But the two lines that no one understood were specifically about how the song functions in the show, i.e. a writer trying to come up with the hook to a story he's trying to write. So, I asked Paul if he'd rewrite those two lines and this morning he did and now the song really works well.
