Night of the Musical Blog

The theater is ours

2009-06-21T20:03:00.000-07:00

Today we took down the set of the previous show (The wonderful "Sordid Lives") and now we "own" the theater for the next two months. We got some of the walls for our set put up today as well and I think that'll give the cast a lot to think about when we run Act 1 for the first time tomorrow....yikes!

Rehearsals

2009-06-13T20:00:00.000-07:00

Rehearsals are coming along quite well. It's difficult to get everybody in the same room at the same time, but the show is really clicking most rehearsals.

First read through

2009-05-03T19:59:00.000-07:00

I'm thrilled with our first read-through this afternoon. We had almost the full cast there (a rarity in community theater!).

This show is gonna be a shitload of fun...I hope...Dear god, I hope it'll be fun.....

Auditions!!!!

2009-03-21T17:15:00.000-07:00

April 13th and 14th at the Hole in the Wall Theater.

Go to www.musicaldead.com/auditions.html for more info!!!

Studio time!

2009-03-09T20:01:00.000-07:00

I went and looked at Jim Chapdelaine's studio on Sunday. Jim and I had a great chat and since I'd recorded with him a million years ago, we had a very good rapport. So now, all I have to do is get a cast so I know what key songs are in and then rehearse a band so I'm not wasting studio time. (Oh yeah, and rehearse the damn show too!)

The first reading!

2009-01-24T10:10:00.000-08:00

A bunch of people came over last Saturday and we read through the script together. It went very well and there were things that got laughs that I really only thought were funny to me (but I was keeping them in anyway because I could!)

Scott gave me some excellent points to think about and I've started on a few changes.

Now if I'd only hear about the state grant for playwrighting.....

Vocal Demos Are Finished!

2008-12-21T07:44:00.000-08:00

Yikes, this has been a long process. The singers that came in were all so great with their time and talent, it was awe-inspiring. I tend to vacilate between thinking my songs are "teenage symphonies to God" and thinking that they're worse than the sound of a cat being neutered. But in the hands of a singer that knows their business, it's like the songs take on a whole new life.

I've put up samples of all the songs on the website www.musicaldead.com and hopefully these demos will be of some help when we start we rehearsing the show.

Now onto arranging the instruments...(sorry Kristen and Kit!)

16 down - 1 to go

2008-12-19T04:40:00.000-08:00

I've completed 16 demos of the 17 songs in the show as of last night. If the weather cooperates, I should be able to get the last one done on Saturday. I'm assuming, of course, that I'll have no such luck and that I'll be into the new year before I can finish that one song.

After that, I still need to work out arrangements and that's a little scary sometimes because while I can hear the instrument in my head, I find it difficult sometimes to translate that into actual notes.

On the other hand, when I opened the guitar book for "The Last 5 Years", one of the directions was "bluesy fill" in leiu of actual notes. So, if a Broadway show can get away with notation like that, maybe I can too!

Yeah, right.

By the way....

2008-12-14T16:45:00.000-08:00

I am THRILLED that some of the fans of Night of the Musical Dead on Facebook are people that I do not know at all.

I LOVES the internets....

Thirteen down: Four to go!

2008-12-14T16:42:00.000-08:00

Demos. I'm recording demos because when I did Lint! The Musical, the demos were all with my voice and while I struggled over the sheet music for each song, it turned out that most singers just wanted a CD to listen to and the lyrics to look at. I know that I'll still have to transcribe everything eventually, but for right now, it's been interesting figuring out the arrangements and harmonies without thinking about how it looks on the page. I've got 13 songs completed and there are just four more and then I'm done with demos! (Until I decide that the show needs even more songs, of course.)

Let's start at the very beginning. A very good place to start.

2008-12-05T04:34:00.000-08:00

Ooh, look at Bill, he's SO very high-tech. Blogging is SO cutting edge. (If this were 2000)

Alright, so I'm gonna talk about the process of creating a brand new musical. "Night of the Musical Dead" was begun pretty much the morning after I signed a contract with Heuer Publishing to publish my earlier musical, "Lint! The Musical" that I co-wrote with Scott Auden. I guess that once the mental anguish of haggling over contractual details was finished, my brain cleared up enough to think about new projects. Well, this is the piece of spaghetti that stuck to the wall out of the whole pot.