In this module, my creative team wrote a relevant and empathetic show, which we called ‘After’. The key themes centred around the idea of familiar negative life events and how we deal with and face these issues as humans. As a creative team, we wanted to make this show personal to events we have been through, to understand the effect they can have on us, while also making it identifiable to an audience. Our original idea was developed through our writing process and differed greatly from the outcome of the show we performed at the end of our R&D, and I will discuss this more in this portfolio. 

Concept of our musical

Our original idea of this show stemmed from life experiences we as a group had been through and how, as individuals, we deal with these challenges. Hence, the musical name ‘After’, we wanted the show to highlight the acceptance and placidity that comes after these tricky life lessons. We started this process by meeting as a team and discussing our own lived experiences to clarify which hardships we wanted to touch on within our show. By December, we had established our characters and their names as well as a general story arc that could be developed into performable material. 

One of the biggest challenges we faced whilst developing the show was to ensure that it did justice to the heavy topics we were tackling and made sure they were sympathetic to an audience, while also making sure the show had humorous and lighter moments. We were very aware that the show had the possibility of being a very sad piece overall, which could potentially reduce its success, and so we aimed to include jocular and light-hearted material that would create a much more enjoyable and entertaining piece. One thing as a team that we kept coming back to was the idea that we aspired to create a piece that would make the audience both laugh and cry, and all the emotions in between. This improvement came after a few read-throughs, and when we started to get scenes up on their feet during the R&D process. We realised it had the potential to be much more comical and wittier, which influenced us to create new material based around this. For example, we materialised another song called ‘Sympathy Cards’ after the rest of the songs had been written, which was created to satirise and mock the things that people say to you during grief and loss. While I wasn’t the book writer for our musical, I also helped with writing new scenes that went hand in hand with this song to encourage the relaxed and playful mood we wanted. 

Budgeting and financing our musical

Despite not being assigned the role of business and finance manager during this project, I benefited from this process by learning a lesson in how to budget a show and the importance of bearing finance in mind during the writing process. While we knew the discussion of growth and profit was only hypothetical for this module, we made sure this was factored into the work we created. Like all businesses outside of the world of musical theatre, the most crucial element is survival. After a useful lesson with Matt Bugg on financing musicals, we were aware that the main focus in the early stages of creating was to be aware that all we needed was to break even, rather than focus on high profit. We knew from the beginning that the show would always have a small cast of 7-8 actors, as it was centred around a group of individuals, and so an ensemble was not necessary for our musical, which benefited us as we would have more money available to go towards other areas. Later on in the process, after developing the musical material, we concluded that the songs weren’t extremely physically taxing but could take a toll mentally, and so we discussed having understudies to ensure this wouldn’t be a problem. By not needing an ensemble, we were therefore able to budget for multiple actors if we felt necessary.

As the composer of our musical, I had to take into account the size of the band we would need when writing the musical. During R&D week, we worked solely with piano, and while this seemed quite effective, I decided it might be more impactful with a small band consisting of a few string instruments and maybe a small rhythm section to complement the work on stage. We were lucky that, within the actors we had chosen to work with during R&D week, we had a few who already played instruments. For example, Theo, who was playing the comedic character Quentin, plays the clarinet, and we were able to utilise this in a part of the scene. And so, if we were to develop the show further, one thing we would definitely consider for reducing the costs of the musical would be hiring Actor-Musicians to play the characters, so that when they weren’t performing in a scene, they could join in with the band on the sides of the stage. 

My role within our show

Since a young age, I have always been very musically inclined and have played multiple instruments. Therefore, it was crucial to me to be involved with the music writing of our musical, and so I decided to nominate myself as our team’s Composer and Musical Director.

I was lucky to work alongside Liv and Eve as our lyricists, which worked extremely well due to the fact that we all have similar music tastes. Consequently, we were able to establish which artists we enjoyed and how we wanted to create music in the style of their songs to complement our show. We took inspiration from artists such as Lizzy McAlpine, Billy Joel and Adele because we felt like their music and lyrics were particularly hard-hitting and fit the topics we were tackling within our show.

One of my original musical ideas was based on Adele’s song ‘Someone Like You’, utilising keys like A major, A flat major and C sharp major. I chose this song because I admired the fact that the chords were arguably quite simple and repetitive, but still managed to produce a song that stirs lots of emotions. Furthermore, I liked working around these chords as they could be altered to diminished and minor chords very easily. I adopted this in my writing process when I created reprises to songs we already had, which worked out to be very successful for us in our process. They allowed us to have more material to workshop and play with in R&D week, and as a result, we included both the original songs and their reprises in our final showing as we deemed them to be particularly powerful in enhancing our piece. 

I have included here demo tracks that were recorded during our R&D process, ‘Kinder to Us’ and ‘Kinder to Us reprise’, which highlight how we employed the same melody and chorded accompaniment but utilised different lyrics. We modulate the melody slightly in the reprise as the two songs were sung by different characters, and even added a third harmony within the reprise to provide for the three characters on stage singing it.

This is the chorus of our song ‘Kinder to Us’ :

This is the song’s reprise later on in the show:

At the beginning of the process, we managed to write our first song very quickly, which we later called ‘In My Arms’. As the process continued and our schedules got increasingly busier, we began to write lyrics and music separately from one another. While this was useful in getting material down on paper and providing us with ideas, we very quickly realised that we worked best when we sat down in a room together as a team and worked on it together. This way, we could bounce ideas off each other, and we were able to create lyrics alongside melodies we envisioned, and we could change what we had in mind based on what the other was coming up with. Once we established our process, we were able to work effectively, and during the R&D week were even able to write three songs in one day.

I have included Appendix 1 that shows how we adapted our lyrics within two separate songs, ‘Without You by my side’ and ‘In our arms’, sung by our character Archie and his boyfriend’s sister, Olive.

Appendix 1

We wanted the melody and rhyming scheme to be practically the same, but our lyrics to be similar but different to reflect how they are feeling different emotions and are in completely different situations, but how those feelings can manifest to be quite similar. You will see that Olive’s first verse and Archie’s second verse have lyrics that repeat with words such as ‘belong’ and ‘on’ being different but rhyming with our repeated word ‘wrong’.

Utilising other skills:

Although my official role for this project was Composer/MD, I thoroughly enjoyed being involved in other elements of the process, such as providing opinions on how scenes were flowing. Despite working somewhat separately for the R&D group with the music writers in one room and the directors/producers working in another, we also came together as a group when we started to work with our actors to work collectively. This was extremely helpful for me when it came to underscoring because it allowed me to experiment with what sounded fitting depending on what was going on within a scene, and through rehearsing, I was able to try out different musical ideas and get the rest of the team’s input on my material. Likewise, I also enjoyed inputting some directorial ideas for Finn, who was our director.

Ive included Appendix 2 and 3 that were taken within the rehearsal room of R&D week, and you can see that despite all focusing on different roles, we very much worked together as a creative team to produce our show.

Appendix 2 and 3

I believe the main lesson I’ve taken from this process is the ability to adapt and compromise work even when you don’t think it should be. Our group differed in ages from 18 to 24, and therefore, we had different interpretations of how scenes and songs should manifest. One particular example of this was in the use of language within our script. Due to the approachable style of our piece, we knew from the start that swearing would be something we used; we learned that we had varying opinions of the extent to which it should be used. While we were able to communicate our feelings towards this effectively in our group, we discovered that we all struggled as individuals with letting go of material we’d written. I know that my other creatives and I would refer to ourselves as stubborn and prideful, and so adapting material that we were personally quite fond of was something we all needed to work on.

For me, I struggled when it came to a song I’d written called ‘In Your Arms’. When we wrote this as three female mezzo-sopranos, we didn’t factor in the challenge of a male voice singing it. We were really happy with the melody we’d written, but after workshopping it with our actors playing the roles who were singing it, we realised it had to be changed.

Here is a demo from this song, and while it sits perfectly within a female-identifying voice, it didn’t necessarily fit that of a male-identifying voice. We were lucky that Theo, who was playing the character of Archie, was a high tenor, and so in the end we were able to adapt the song where he sang in different octaves for the two choruses, so we didn’t have to change the melody too much.

This specifically was a learning curve of mine throughout this process, as it not only improved my ability to adapt and change, but also improved my teamwork and communication skills moving forward into future projects. 

Conclusion

This module has improved my skills massively and provided me with a great insight into how I fit into a creative team to apply to both the rest of my training and future projects after I graduate. I found the R&D process particularly useful as I was able to step away from the performer mindset and take on a more logistical and practical side of putting a show together. I learnt things that improved my knowledge of musical theatre, such as the budgeting and finance side of producing a musical, alongside the importance of using social media as a marketing tool and how beneficial that can be in our day and age. 

To conclude, I would say the main thing I took away from this module is how it encouraged me to continue to write new material, both musically and not. After the R&D showing, we received many positive reviews, particularly regarding the beauty of the music, which reassured me in my music-writing ability. Our musical ‘After’ has motivated and enlightened me on how to continue to practice bettering myself to improve both as a performer and as a creative.