Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Musicals

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Musicals

The time is close at hand for the new semester to begin here at New Horizon’s Academy. I can’t wait to get started.

Last night I was thinking about some of the spin-offs of Greek Drama and thought about the Screen Play and Musical. Screen Plays are a different subject and something I might get more involved in in the future. It was Musicals that really caught my interest as I pondered in bed between articles in my Hot Rod Magazines.

Have you ever wondered where the songs come from in a musical. You have. I thought so… what a smart group this is. Yes they come from the monologues. Someone takes a monologue and turns it into a song. However, why do you suppose that monologues lend themselves to song writing? The answer to me appears to be that great monologues have a rhythm, a musicality, a poetry and they flow along. In Shakespeare’s time many were written in Iambic Pentameter. To take this thought further, when a person thinks out loud, as in a monologue, those thoughts tend to be expressed poetically more than dialogues that tend to be more crisp and prosy. This is something to keep in mind as you write a drama… that the monologues need to have more of a poetic quality.

So how does that work….I mean how does the playwright shape the development of a monologue and how is that process different from the process of exposition or dialogue. It all starts out as a clump of words designed to deliver a message. The difference is that in a monologue the clump is directed down the poetic conveyor of the writers mind. Words are hugely important to the audience of a drama and the way they sound is a trademark of the quality of the work. If the actor says “These lines suck,“ that is not a good sign. The actors might not even realize in an initial reading or sense why they like the words but you can bet it has something to do with the musicality. In a screen play lines are also important but the visualization is what captures the audiences attention. In a stage play both the words and the sound are important but in a movie you can’t close your eyes and see the drama unfolding where in a good drama the words alone can illuminate your imagination. In a screen play the magic of the resonating words is lost to the wonder of seeing, while in a stage play the poetry remains a central part of the auditory aspect of the drama. In a musical this is particularly evident but musicals are basically dramas taken to the next level of poetic expression. It is more than just the music which is nice, it is the lyrical expression of the words.

In Shakesphere’s day standing room was sold in the courtyard of the Globe Theater where the less affluent theater goes could only listen and had no way of actually seeing what was happening on the stage. That is the power of the “WORD.” We forget that sometimes but it should come as no surprise…after all in the beginning that was where it is all supposed to have started.

Tomorrow, I think I’ll discuss the process of converting a monologue into what I term poetic prose. It is fun to do and I enjoy thinking about how the actor must feel to suddenly realize that the prose he thinks he/she’s reciting is actually poetry in disguise.