How I (accidentally) wrote a musical*
In May this year I will travel to Auckland to attend the world premiere of a musical I created with brilliant composer Andrew Perkins. It is a musical re-telling of The Birds, a classical Greek play by Aristophanes. The original play is witty, biting and has themes that are more relevant today than ever.
An abbreviated concert version of the full musical will be performed by Bach Musica at the Auckland Town Hall, in a double bill with Beethoven, which is some pretty cool company. To be honest, I can’t believe I’m going to see my work performed live with an orchestra, soloists and a full choir. It will definitely be a night to treasure. And it feels somewhat surreal. You see, the musical was written around the edges of my life. So it almost feels like I completed it by accident.
Would you like to write a musical?
I began working on this musical just after I finished my PhD. It was a very welcome distraction from the post-PhD slump that hits many people. Like any big project, when you finish a PhD it can leave you exhausted, both physically and emotionally. Having something to move on to helped me drag my way out of the slump. The idea for the musical was Andrew’s. He approached me and asked if I’d be interested in writing the book and lyrics for a work based on an ancient Greek play. The idea was an exciting one and I jumped at the opportunity. I particularly loved Andrew’s aim, which was to create something schools could perform that had great educational underpinnings. The Birds gives schools the scope to explore classical Greek theatre, complex musical forms and socio-historical issues.
We began by reviewing classical plays. Some plays quickly dropped off our list as they were… rather inappropriate for a high school production. Once we had a shortlist of possibilities we soon decided on The Birds, because it encompassed so many of the social and political issues we currently face. The story is about building a wall to keep out undesirable visitors, an event with particular resonance now. But The Birds also tackles themes of environmental degradation and the untrustworthiness of politicians and other power-brokers.
What’s it all About?
To begin the process I went through the play and created an extensive synopsis, which gave us our structure. Andrew then went through and suggested where songs might go. We also discussed key themes and which ones we wanted to highlight. I think we were both staggered by how relevant the themes remain now. The synopsis was my scaffolding and from that point I worked my way through it, fleshing out dialogue and actions.
Writing the Book
Although Aristophane’s play was first performed in 414BC, so you would think it would be out of copyright, some recent translations do have copyright over them. This meant I had to be careful which version to select as the basis for the book. My aim was to rewrite all the dialogue, but adaptations are always tricky – some phrase might slip through by accident. For this reason I chose the Project Gutenberg version as my starting point, checking the copyright restrictions carefully.
I followed the structure of the original, which is dialogue interspersed with songs. The original play is full of witty in-jokes, but many don’t work if the audience isn’t from ancient Athens. So I searched for new ways of playing old jokes. For example, I brought in plays-on-words related to 20th century pop culture, such as referencing the Beatles. Andrew and I also worked out how to update the characters so they were more recognisable to a current audience. One of the characters had a bit of a Trumpian makeover. I used linguistic elements such as repetition and non-sequiturs to create a speech for them that would feel familiar to anyone following US news.
Writing for Schools
I have an extensive background in theatre, so I’m very aware of the gender imbalance that usually exists. For most productions you can guarantee there’ll be a lot more females wanting to be involved. At the same time the majority of plays and, to a lesser extent, musicals, are written with more male roles. I really wanted to address this, especially as we aimed for The Birds to be suitable for all schools, whether co-educational or single sex. Andrew and I agreed that the best way to approach this was to write as many roles as possible gender neutral.
Since many of the characters in the play are birds, this was actually very easy to achieve. Even the two leads, both male humans in the original, could be played by anyone, regardless of gender.
Andrew also wanted the musical to offer a different kind of challenge to students than traditional Broadway shows do. Whilst he kept the orchestration simple as schools don’t often have access to a lot of instruments and performers, he didn’t shy away from complexity in the music. The Birds draws on both ancient and modern musical forms, including Arabic modes, jazz, Greek and Latin American danceforms and church music.
Words and Music
When it came to writing lyrics for the songs, Andrew went through the synopsis and the play, pulling out keywords that he thought encapsulated the message or meaning of each song. He also identified the sort of music he wanted for that song. These varied greatly, from liturgical chants to a tango. At times he would provide me with a song in the style he wanted to write so I had music in my head to help me capture the write rhythms and style.
Writing the lyrics was a real challenge. Each song had to have its own clear scan, an internal rhythm that would work musically. But it also needed to explore the key themes we wanted to bring out, and capture the wittiness of the original play. It was an amazing process though – I would send what was essentially a poem to Andrew, and it would come back to me with a full musical background, as a song. Most of the time the process worked really well. The liturgical chant required a number of revisions as I had different music playing in my head than Andrew did in his. But the Latin American songs practically wrote themselves and were a lot of fun.
Setting The Birds Free
To paraphrase John Lennon, a musical is what happens while you’re busy doing other things. Much of The Birds was written around the edges of a severe attack of real life due to a major health issue for a family member. It was almost an accidental surprise to discover we had a full musical at the end of the process. But retreating into the witty, fantastical world of Aristophanes was not only a great adventure, it also let me play with words and music, which is always therapeutic. And now, in a few months, I will get to see it come to life.
*or, why my writing is going to the birds….
MORE ABOUT WHO IS INVOLVED:
Andrew Perkins, composer, has written many works, including symphonies, choral works and solo pieces. You can find out about him on Wikipedia or on his personal website.
Bach Musica is an Auckland-based choir and professional orchestra who perform four concerts a year.
Research at the 
Artists rarely make a living wage from their art. If you look at the figures, it’s a fairly depressing picture. The average Australian yearly wage 2 years ago was $84,032. The average yearly earnings for an Australian author from their books is $12,900. And given that’s the average, it includes all the top-selling authors, whose books are the default purchases for many readers. That means there are many, many authors earning far less than that figure. So why write?
Yet every time I ask myself whether I should keep writing, a tiny voice inside me still answers ‘yes’. Some of the reason for that I’ve written about before. Making art is food for the creative soul. Sharing art is sending a message in a bottle to the world*. You may never know who will find it, or how it will change their life. Or you might. If you’re lucky.
Artists, whether writers, painters, sculptors or any other medium, are generally not paid well. This has been true throughout history. We know the image of the struggling writer starving in a garret so well it is almost a cliche. And the painterly genius who died in poverty. It’s part of the story we tell about artists. To create true art, the idea goes, we need suffering. Hunger is apparently a great motivator.
There have always been gatekeepers to the creative arts. These were once known as patrons. Now they have many different titles but they are always the ones who decide whether artists will be paid for their work or not. And since the ‘economy’ narrative places a low value on art, the gatekeepers don’t feel the need to pay them very much. In fact, the unspoken argument is often that artists do what they do for the love of it, so reimbursement doesn’t need to be that high. Their reward is the joy of creating. There is a growing trend of asking creatives to produce something for ‘exposure’ or so they can ‘put it on their CV’.
Then, in the final book, I had to draw it all together. That’s been an interesting process. In the end I made myself a list with lots of instructions. “Make sure you …” “This has to happen …” I needed resolutions not just for the overall story, but for things like romances and individual character arcs. And even working from that list, I’m pretty sure I’ve missed something. So my next step will be to read all three books from beginning to end, making notes as I go. Finding all the threads that I think need resolving. It won’t end there either. After the rewrites, I’ll give the Pierrot’s Song to beta-readers, and I’m sure they’ll tell me if I’ve missed something that needs resolution that I’ve missed.