How To Write a Musical by John Kenrick

Copyright 2000 (Revised 2009)

The Bad News
Compelling Need
What's It About?
Things to Keep in Mind
Nine Rules
Why You Should NOT Write Musicals
Why You SHOULD Write Musicals
The Bad News
Have you noticed that almost all the books on how to write
songs, lyrics or musicals are written by
teachers, not working professionals? Real writers,
composers and lyricists rarely try to explain how they
create, because the creative process is unique what
works for any one of them may not work for anyone else.
Teachers can offer theory and analysis of form, but that
doesn't shed any light on the act of artistic creation.
So let's settle this one right up front no one can tell you
how to create! A seasoned pro may offer pointers, and
people with a wide knowledge of the genre can tell you
what forms and approaches have worked up to now, but
the bad news is that no one can give you a method or road
map to creating a musical.
To see how intensely personal the creative process is, let's
compare the approaches used by four great lyricist-
librettists
William S. Gilbert wrote all his drafts in expensive
leather-bound journals, saving every idea and
deleted line for possible use in the future. These
meticulous notebooks are still preserved after
more than a century, providing a goldmine for
researchers. Gilbert always wrote a complete
version of the book and lyrics for a new comic
opera before submitting anything to composer
Arthur Sullivan -- then, as Sullivan composed,
Gilbert would make revisions as needed.
Rehearsals usually led to more revisions, and the
material might be edited or even re-written or
based on the reactions of audiences.
When lyricist Larry Hart worked with composer
Richard Rodgers, they would talk through a
potential project (frequently collaborating with a
co-librettist, such as Herb Fields), deciding where
the songs would go, which characters would sing
them, and what each song could do to develop
the characters & plot. Then Hart usually waited
for Rodgers to compose the melodies. Hart would
listen to a new tune once or twice, then dash off
the lyrics with amazing speed, scrawling on any
available scrap of paper -- sometimes just filling
the spare space in a magazine ad. The libretto
would be rewritten through the final weeks of
rehearsal, and was subject to major revisions right
up to its opening night on Broadway.
Oscar Hammerstein II also worked with Rodgers,
but in their collaborations the book and lyrics
were usually written first. After the two men
discussed the dramatic intention of a potential
song, Hammerstein retreated to his Pennsylvania
farm, where he curled into a chair and labored
over every lyric for days or weeks at a time, neatly
organizing his ideas on legal pads, then typing
them out himself. While the first drafts of scripts
were finished long before the first rehearsal, they
were subject to extensive revision during pre-
Broadway tryouts.
Alan Jay Lerner's habit of flying halfway around
the world to avoid writing commitments
frequently left his collaborators in a frustrating
state of limbo, sometimes for months on end.
Lerner was so crippled by nerves that he wore
white cotton gloves to avoid chewing his fingers
raw while working on a new project. The books
and lyrics for his musicals were usually completed
during high-pressure tryouts, adding tremendous
tension to the process. (After creating My Fair
Lady, Lerner had a recurring nightmare about a
group of friends coming into a hotel room to ask
what he had written after several days locked
inside. Surrounded by mounds of crumpled pages,
Lerner dreamt he would hold up a sheet and read,
'Loverly, loverly, loverly, loverly' whereupon his
friends would cart him off to an asylum.)
Each of these men had their share of hits and flops, so it is
impossible to define any method as right or wrong. Each
writer, composer or collaborative team must figure out
(usually by trial and error) what works best for them. The
point is that they go through the hell of creating no
matter how uncomfortable or terrifying that hell might be.
Compelling Need
If you are going to write a musical, you are setting out to
offer an audience a story. What makes a musical
compelling, what commands audience interest? Music? Oh
please! A musical must have characters who need or want
something desperately, and that need comes up against an
equally powerful obstacle. The resulting conflict forces
these characters to give their all, risk everything and this
is why audiences feel compelled to see how these stories
turn out. All successful book musicals involve characters
who have something or someone they are willing to put
everything on the line for. Some examples
Rent offers a small army of characters who are
willing to face miserable poverty in pursuit of
their creative dreams.
In Guys and Dolls, each major character is
eventually willing to radically redefine their life in
order to marry the person they love.
Sweeney Todd will stop at nothing to kill those
who sent him to prison on a trumped-up charge.
Audiences are fascinated to see Todd's need for
revenge consume everything he once loved.
Singin' In the Rain has movie star Don Lockwood
simultaneously trying to save his screen career
and win the love of Kathy Seldin, the girl he loves.
In Wicked, gifted witch Elphaba is willing to
abandon her dreams of respectable success in
order to stand up for what she believes to be
right.
How do you know if your story is compelling? Well, how
compelled are you to tell it? Do you care deeply about it,
so deeply that you must tell this story or die? Believe it or
not, that's a very good sign. If you are writing because you
think you have a hot topic others will go for, please double
check your motives. It is impossible to judge in advance
what critics and audiences will applaud for -- all the
greatest talents have miscalculated at one time or another.
Your best bet is always to go with material you care about
deeply, a story and characters that you believe in.
Moss Hart once told Alan Jay Lerner that nobody knows
the secret to writing a hit musical . . .but the secret to
writing a flop is "to say yes when you mean no."
Those are the truest words ever spoken about musicals! If
every fiber of your being says "Yes!" to a potential project,
it improves the odds that others will care about it too.
What's It Really About?
When Jerome Robbins agreed to direct the original Fiddler
On The Roof, he asked the authors a crucial question:
"What is your show about?" They answered that it was
about a Russian Jewish milkman and his family, and
Robbins told them to think again. He wanted to know what
the show was really about at its emotional core what was
the main internal force that would drive the action and
touch audiences both intellectually and emotionally?
(Many academics call this core the premise of a story.)
Eventually, the authors realized that the show was really
about the importance of family and tradition, and about
what happens when a way of life faces extinction. This not
only gave them the idea for a magnificent opening number
("Tradition") it also gave what could have been a very
parochial show irresistible universal appeal. This is why the
fable of Tevya the Russian-Jewish milkman has moved
audiences all over the world.
When writing a musical, you must eventually figure out
your premise, what your show is really about at its core.
Then you must make sure that every element of your
material serves that premise every character, every
scene, every line, every song. Anything that does not serve
the premise is extraneous and should be cut. That may
sound ruthless, but it is the secret to building a really good
show.
A good premise gives your musical project wide ranging (if
not universal) appeal. This does not mean you should limit
yourself to common characters facing common challenges
far from it! For example, Sweeney Todd tells the story of
a Victorian barber out to kill the vile men who stole his
beloved wife and sent him off to rot in prison on false
charges. But at its core, the show is really about the
terrifying cost of revenge, how past resentment can cost
everything our past, our present and even our future.
This premise makes Sweeney's story the audience's story.
Today, even a revue can have a premise. When Pig's
Fly was a set of hilarious songs and skits built around one
gay man's obsession with succeeding in the theatre --
despite everyone warning that he would succeed only
"when pig's fly." But the show's premise was that the more
outrageous or "over the top" a dream is, the more it is
worth pursuing. That theme resonated with gays and
straights alike, and When Pig's Fly enjoyed a long and
profitable off-Broadway run.
Things to Keep in Mind
Consider these key questions posed by the original
producer of 1776 and Pippin --
"The greatest question musical dramatists must answer is:
does the story I am telling sing? Is the subject sufficiently
off the ground to compel the Ened emotion of bursting
into song? Will a song add a deeper understanding of
character or situation?"
- Stuart Ostrow, A Producer's Broadway Journey (Praeger:
Westport, CT. 1999), p. 96.
If all songwriters and librettists answered those questions
diligently, audiences would be spared innumerable hours
of boredom. Dissect the worst musical you have ever seen
(I am serious about this; pick the one you hate the most),
and odds are you will find that the story does not really
"sing," does not call for the Ened emotion of characters
bursting into song.
Beyond that basic issue, there are other pointers worth
remembering. In the course of my production career on
and off Broadway, I have worked with dozens of
songwriters and librettists, from gifted unknowns to Tony
and Academy Award winners. Based on that experience,
there are several things I would recommend if you want to
write musicals
See as many musicals as you can, on stage or
screen.
Study the musicals you like and figure out what
makes them tick.
Study the musicals you don't like and figure out
what prevents them from ticking. You can
sometimes learn far more by studying a flop than
a flawless hit -- at the very least, look at flops as
practical lessons in what not to do!
Since musicals are a collaborative art form, do
your best to find collaborators you can work with
comfortably.
Find or invent a story idea that gets you so excited
you can spend five or more years of your life
working on it with no promise (or even a
reasonable hope) of it earning you a penny.
Structure your life in such a way that it leaves you
daily time to write and/or compose.
Be sure this life structure provides a way for you
to keep the bills paid.
Work only on projects you are passionate about
never take on a musical based solely on its
commercial possibilities. This year's "hot" idea
often proves to be next year's embarrassment.
Make sure your work has a genuine sense of
humor. Too many new writers and composers
tend to concoct "serious" musicals
that bore audiences.
Don't waste time being afraid of messing up
every creative talent in history has written a
clunker. Better yet, every great musical had
started as a clunky first draft. It takes determined
effort and revision to bring out the best in any
project. If you treat every project you work on as
a learning experience, I'll make you a promise;
you will find that even a "failed" scene or song
can be a very creative place.
Eight Rules For Writing Musicals
While no one can tell you how to write a musical, (is there
an echo in here?), there are a few basic rules that may help
aspiring authors and composers along the road to their
first opening night. But don't take my word on any of them
-- prove them yourself. They will apply to any great musical
currently in existence. The first four rules apply to good
writing of any kind
1. Show, Don't Tell This is job one for all writers, now
and forever. Don't tell us what your characters are let
their actions show us! Drama is expressed in action, not
description. No one has to tell us that Seymour in Little
Shop of Horrors is a gullible nerd; his every action screams
it out. Peggy Sawyer never has to declare that she is a
naive newcomer to 42nd Street's hard-edged world of
show business -- her wide-eyed behavior makes that clear
from her first scene.
There is another aspect to "show, don't tell." Since theater
and film are visual as well as literary mediums, musicals
are not limited to words and music. Many a great musicals
uses the power of visual images to communicate key
information. (Plays are called "shows," no?) The waiters
in Hello Dolly never have to tell us that they love Dolly
their visible reaction to her presence shows it all. And no
one in My Fair Lady has to announce when Liza Doolittle
becomes a lady her wordless, elegant descent down the
stairs before leaving for the Embassy Ball shows that the
transformation has occurred.
2. Cut everything that is not essential Some call this the
"kill your darlings" rule. Every character, song, word and
gesture has to serve a clear dramatic purpose. If not, the
whole structure of your show can suffer. If something does
not develop character, establish setting or advance the
plot, you must cut it -- even if it is a moment that you love.
The next time you see a musical that seems to be losing
steam, odds are that the writers did not have the heart to
cut non-essential material. Never show your audiences
such a lack of respect ruthlessly cut everything that does
not serve a clear and vital purpose to your premise.
3. Know the basics of good storytelling Musicals are just
another form of telling stories, an art humans have been
practicing since the invention of speech. Can you tell me
what your show is really about (the premise), and define
the essential dramatic purpose of each character? And
does every scene offer a character with deep desire
confronting a powerful obstacle?
Learning the art of storytelling does not mean getting a
masters degree good news, friend: the basic tools of
storytelling are already in you. Reading a few good books
can get you thinking in the right direction. For starters,
try Jerry Cleaver's Immediate Fiction: A Complete Writing
Course (NY: St. Martin's Griffin, 2002). It will open your
eyes to the unseen elements that make a great story
absorbing, and a great story is the best starting point for
any book musical. If you need to go deeper, read Robert
Olen Butler's From Where You Dream: The Process of
Writing Fiction (NY: Grove Press, 2005). Both of these
books are ground breaking, and both can save you years of
misguided effort.
On the specific subject of writing original musicals, Making
Musicals (NY: Limelight Editions, 1998) by Tom Jones is
the only book on the subject written by a bona fide creator
of musical hits (The Fantasticks, etc.). He offers no magic
formulas, but his gentle wisdom can enrich anyone facing
the creative process.
4. Your first duty in writing a musical is to tell a good
story in a fresh, entertaining way NEVER to teach or
preach. If you make one or more intelligent points along
the way, that's fantastic, but it won't matter much if your
audience has lost interest, or simply stayed away. Dance a
Little Closer condemned war and homophobia, and closed
on its opening night. On the other
hand, Hairspray skewered bigotry and ran for years. And
while some critics dismiss The Sound of Music as fluff, it
has probably done more harm to the ongoing threat of
Nazism than all the World War II documentaries ever
made.
If you always put the story and characters first, you won't
have to hit anyone over the head with a lesson or
message. A well-told story lives in the memory long after
any sermon or lecture. I beg you: if you want to preach,
build a pulpit. When you are really lucky, the one who will
learn something from your writing is you.
Now, some rules that apply specifically to the musical form

5. Find the Song Posts - Song placement in a musical is not
arbitrary! Irving Berlin said that he evaluated potential
projects by looking for the "posts" points in the story
that demand a song. Call these key moments whatever you
like, but they are the places where characters have some
emotional justification for singing. Think about your
favorite musical; the songs all have something to say,
expressing important feelings or concerns of the
characters. Joy, confusion, heartbreak, love, rage at the
points or posts where these life-defining feelings break
through, characters can sing.
6. Open With a Kick-Ass Song Every now and then, a
successful musical (My Fair Lady, The King and I) opens
with a few pages of dialogue before the opening number,
but these are the exceptions. In most cases, the quickest
way to touch a musical theatre audience is through song.
An effective number or musical scene sets the tone for the
show to come and also allows swift plot exposition &
character development. By the end of the opening
number, audiences should know where the story is set,
what sort of people are in it, and what the basic tone of
the show (comic, satiric, serious, etc.) will be. This is why
the opening number ought to be one of the strongest in
the score. A great opening number reassures audiences
that there more good things to come. Think ofRagtime's
title song, which handily introduces audiences to an army
of characters and the distant era they lived in! Other
examples: Oklahoma ("Oh, What a Beautiful
Morning"), Les Miserables ("At the End of the
Day"), Urinetown ("Too Much Exposition"),
and Hairspray ("Good Morning, Baltimore").
7. Book, Score and Staging MUST Speak as One In
contemporary musical theater, the score, libretto and
staging (both direction and choreography) share the job of
storytelling. This results in frequent passages of sung
dialogue, as well as scenes where characters move
seamlessly between spoken word, dance and song. Think
of the hilarious "Keep It Gay" in The Producers, the
achingly beautiful "If I Loved You" bench scene inCarousel,
or the powerful dances ignited by the songs in Moving
Out the dialogue, lyrics and staging form a single fabric.
The trick is to keep the content smooth and varied. A hint
if your libretto goes on for pages and pages between
isolated musical numbers, something is probably wrong.
And if your score has a stretch of ballad after ballad, give
your audiences a break and vary the tone. In other words,
lighten up!
8. Songs Are Not Enough When you turn an existing
story into a musical, you need a fresh vision. Just adding
songs won't give you an effective musical. You have to tell
the story with a fresh dose of energy, of re-
inspiration. Annie took the characters from a classic comic
strip, added some new faces and placed them all in an
entirely new story. Some of the best moments in My Fair
Lady did not come from Shaw's Pygmalion -- including the
crux of the pivotal "Rain in Spain" scene. When you add
songs, you must also re-ignite the material at hand.
9. Sing It or Say It; NEVER Both Rouben Mamoulian, the
original director of Porgy & Bess, Oklahoma & Carousel put
it this way: "It's the basic law that the music and dancing
must extend the dialogue. If you say the same thing in a
song you already have said in the speeches, it's without
point. . . a song must lift the spoken scene to greater S
than it was before, or the song must be cut no matter how
beautiful is the melody. The song must not merely repeat
in musical terms what has already been put across by the
dialogue and actions." (Maurice Zoltow, NY Times,
1/29/1950, "Mamoulian Directs a Musical," section 2, p.1)
Why You SHOULD NOT Write A Musical
Yes, I mean you. Working in the professional theatre can
be hell yes, hell. hat is why several wise people have
been credited with saying that the worst thing they could
wish on Hitler was that he "be stuck out of town working
on a new musical!"
Can you stand the merciless judgment of producers,
potential backers, fellow creators, press critics, anonymous
internet chatroom snipers, and (gulp!) paying audiences?
Can you handle years (and I mean years) of anonymous,
unpaid struggle? Are you ready to work your butt off eight
hours or more at a demanding day job and then somehow
find the energy to write on the side? Can you handle the
fact that most people will have no idea who you are or
what you do even if you win a Tony or an Oscar? Finally,
can you handle doing all this for no more than 2% of a
show's profits? (That's the percentage the
authors share under the present standard contract, so if
you collaborate, you only get a piece of that!) This is not a
career for the dilettante -- or for the feint of heart:
"This is a tough business, a cruel business. The
competition, especially in New York and especially in the
musical theatre, is fierce. Not without reason is there the
saying: "It is not enough that I succeed, my friends have
also to fail." There is a tendency after you have been in the
rat race for a while to open the Times and slowly relish the
roasting given to some competitor, possibly even to some
friend."
- Tom Jones, Making Musicals: An Informal Introduction
to the World of Musical Theatre (New York: Limelight
Editions, 1998), pp. 188.
Why You SHOULD Write A Musical
You should write musicals only if there is no possible way
for you not to. If all the negatives cannot dissuade you, go
for it! You might be crazy enough to succeed in this snake
pit. Just be sure that you always have a solid means of
paying your bills and recharging your spirits. And while
talent and luck are valuable to any aspiring composer,
lyricist or librettist, there are three things that matter even
more patience, determination, and guts. One of the
worlds greatest musical comediennes said the following
about acting in an interview, but it applies to writers and
composers too
"I'll give you a tip it's risk. Once you're willing to risk
everything, you can accomplish anything."
- Patricia Routledge, Tony-winning actress
There are as many ways to write a musical as there are
musicals. If you do decide to venture forth into this
daunting field, know that my best wishes and the best
wishes of millions of ticket-buying theatre lovers hungering
for something new and wonderful will go with you.