Musical Staged Reading
February 6th, 2010
In case you’ve been wondering what I’ve been up to, I’ve been busy putting the score and script together for an actual staged reading of Tell Me a Beautiful Lie - you can check out details at the updated website: http://www.tellmeabeautifullie.com.
It’s both exciting and intimidating all at the same time - auditions are next week at the Cambridge Public Library. It’ll be the first time I’ll have heard the show performed by actual actors/singers and a real pianist. There’s still plenty of details that have to come together for this to work, but we have a venue, an accompanist, and an audition space, so who knows? Maybe it’ll be as awesome as I think it’ll be!
The process has kind of devoured my free time, however, so I haven’t been blogging much or working much on RiftMaker. I know I still owe Z from It’s the Thought That Counts a response to her two postings to me - not sure when I’ll get to it, but I haven’t completely forgotten.
My friend who is helping me direct is moving to Texas in April, so it’s kind of now or never, as it stands.
Current projects: (1) proofreading the score/script, and (2) getting things organized for the auditions Thursday.
Hooray!
Nyx
November 16th, 2009
On a whim, I downloaded a demo (free!) for a WiiWare title called Nyx - it’s a basic platformer starring a winged goddess from a world out of Greek mythology. You fly with her by pushing the jump button repeatedly (to a limit of 5 jumps), and use the “hand of Zeus” (the Wiimote pointer) to drag objects around to solve puzzles. I played it for a bit - the graphics were pretty, and the music was evocative and beautiful (if not especially memorable, tuneful, or energetic) and then became overwhelmed with boredom. I remember having felt this way with another WiiWare title whose name I can’t remember - a platformer where you had to use the Wiimote pointer to generate wind to blow your character around and solve puzzles.
The game is clearly high quality, but it wasn’t… any fun. I’m trying to figure out why. After all, I still enjoy side scrolling platform games from the NES, even games I haven’t played before - so the “seen it before” aspect isn’t really at fault. There was a bit of a “storyline” introduction at the beginning of the game, but it wasn’t as bad as, say, Okami or Paper Mario. You got to the game itself pretty quickly. It introduced itself and its mechanics gradually, bit by bit - it felt rather like a neverending tutorial, but it didn’t say “tutorial,” so I had no expectation that I was about to get to the “real game.”
I think the real problem is the fact that your character, Nyx, has no weapon, and there are only a few little bad guys every so often - and the only thing you can do about them is to avoid them. I’m beginning to think that’s why the game was no fun. Mario, Mega Man, Simon Belmont, and Link all have ways of exerting power over their environment in a crisp and immediate fashion. Gracefully flying and laboriously dragging blocks around with your Wiimote are not crisp exertions of power. Tearing through limitless alien soldiers with an endless stream of bullets (Contra) is a crisp exertion of power - and therefore fun.
Now, perhaps this is a male thing - I couldn’t say. But the more I think about it, the more I think that a game has to have a real understanding of what its appeal is and make that available from the get-go. They say that a musical has to establish all its themes, its tone, and the fact that its a musical within 10 minutes or the audience zones out or gets confused. I think video games ought to be treated the same way. If the appeal of a game is exploration, then you better give the player freedom to explore within minutes of sticking that game in the machine and pushing Start. If the appeal of a game involves exerting power over enemies or objects, then give the player that power as quickly as you possibly can and get out of the way. If the appeal is solving puzzles, then don’t wait 10 levels in to add challenge and the need for thought - make the first puzzle interesting. Make it require as much thought as you can get away with, and don’t hold the player’s hand. If the appeal is the ability to collect things or customize a world, then give them that capability early without forcing them to go through a lengthy “tutorial land” or what not. Let your RPG hero buy whatever weapons or armor he/she wants in the very first town, at the very first available time - and give the player a choice. Figure out why people would ever want to play your game, and then focus on that.
A Willy Wonka Opera? Really?
November 1st, 2009
Is this cool? Or just really really strange? I can’t tell.
New Lyrics for “Harbor from the Storm”
October 31st, 2009
It has been a long, nagging thing for me - I love the song “Harbor from the Storm.” It’s been in Tell Me a Beautiful Lie since very early drafts, and I feel like the story has always needed a big romantic number to let the audience understand Roman and Katya’s relationship, make Roman more human, etc. The trouble is that, since I’ve changed the show’s timeline, “Harbor from the Storm” no longer works dramatically in the place I’ve got it - the idea of promising to protect Katya from coming troubles (that he’s also excited about) just isn’t that pertinent to what’s going on at that point - which is, Katya is distraught that her worldview is no longer so simple as it was, and Roman has just rebuffed advances from another girl, and is fuming that the world doesn’t seem to share the ideals that he and Katya do.
So I’m brainstorming new titles for the song - I feel like a big romantic number is still required, and the tune works well enough, but maybe a new set of lyrics would do a world of good toward helping us feel Roman’s faithfulness to Katya, and perhaps set up a useful dramatic contrast with Katya’s newfound doubt. That is to say - Roman is principally convinced that he and Katya are soulmates because of their shared worldview. Her doubt, as such, is a little like cheating on him. That conflict could be mined I think.
I’ll keep you posted. (I say that a lot - but do I?)
The Lord Has a Will
October 25th, 2009
I threw together a little (but melancholy) arrangement of one of my favorite devo songs, as I feel like I need a little discernment of God’s will at the moment:
Driving the Plot Forward
September 26th, 2009
In the world of musical theater, it’s often stated that songs have to move the plot forward - something has to happen in the song. That is, if you left out the song, the play should have big holes in it that confuse people. I’m not so sure this is right. Or, at least, it often misses the real problem.
I suspect that the main problem this trope is trying to solve is a feeling that we’ve all had: during a show, you find yourself pretty caught up in the story, but then the music starts, a character turns to the audience, and you groan and sink back in your chair, prepared to wait out the oncoming boredom so you can get back to the plot. I know I’ve felt it - among other times, at a local performance of Into the Woods. I didn’t like the feeling much, so I appreciate the efforts of musical theater folks to minimize it.
However, I don’t think that tying songs to the plot more strongly really gets at the problem. I mean, think about the evidence.
1) People - even young people inclined to vast quantities of boredom - will sit through hours of music at a concert without the slightest thread of story or dramatic tension.
2) Several successful musicals feature songs that don’t forward the plot at all. Sometimes these are the best songs (”All That Jazz” and “Nowadays” from Chicago, “Ladies Who Lunch” from Company, many of the numbers from Cabaret, “Chim Chimeree,” “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” “Step in Time,” and others from Mary Poppins, “Circle of Life” and “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” from Lion King, the entire score to Spring Awakening, etc etc etc)
3) Some musicals have “plots” but no one actually cares, as the songs and dances are enough to keep everyone entertained throughout - Joseph and his Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, Cats.
4) Some songs from musicals technically “do something” plot-wise, but they don’t really have to. Consider “If I Were a Rich Man” from Fiddler on the Roof. The song does do some character development for Tevye, but the play is not really “about” Tevye’s quest to get rich. Our interest in the song is not really related to its role in the plot. Likewise, a number of the great Disney songs, like “Be Our Guest” and “Under the Sea,” do advance the story in an emotional way, but in a very simple way that could just as easily be conveyed with a sentence or two - “Welcome to the castle!” or “Look at how good you’ve got it!”
All these things suggest to me that the principal source of that “not another song” feeling isn’t the song’s relationship to the plot - it’s that the music itself is boring or not worth listening to. Good songs can happily insert themselves into a show without slowing things down, if done properly - the song “Little Bird” from Man of La Mancha is a pretty song that doesn’t need to fit into the plot until it’s almost over. It can just be a pretty song strummed by a guy with a guitar for the first verse or so. Of course, the best scenario is when music and story enhance each other in a beautiful synthesis - but if the story has to carry the music all the time, something’s wrong.
I think that this tendency to overemphasize plotline in musicals has led to problems with new shows. If you head over to nymf.org and listen to the samples for the new shows the festival is showcasing, you’ll often hear a lot of songs that sound the same - like someone took a wordy passage of dialog, rewrote it with some measure of rhyme and meter, added some uninteresting piano noodling underneath it, and called it a book song. Not that there aren’t some good songs to be heard, or that the songs on display are necessarily bad. But they don’t really work for me as music. I’m not even slightly tempted to download the mp3 to listen to on my iPod. I can’t imagine ever buying the cast album. Perhaps they’re clever or emotionally satisfying in the context of the show, but I’d like a little more out of my show music.
It seems like a lot of the people now producing new musicals aren’t really “music” people. What I mean by this is not that they’re not talented musicians - I’m sure I don’t hold a candle to most of them in terms of composition knowledge - it’s that their focus is more on theater than on music. At least, that’s how it comes across from their work. Theater-focused songs tend to be on the characters and on the dialog and on attempts to be clever or dramatic, often at the expense of satisfying song structure, strong melody, or powerful harmonies. The music is not really used to its emotionally fullest extent. It’s a light color wash added to witty or thoughtful (but often extraordinarily wordy and meandering) text.
To contrast, music-focused songs can sound like they were made for an album, perhaps even to the detriment of theatrical plausibility. They’re not afraid to employ melismas (multiple notes sung for one syllable, as in “I-ee-I-ee-I-ee-I will always lo-ove yoo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo,” etc.), use scat singing or non-words like “ahh” and “ooh,” or even have extended portions of music without words at all. These things don’t necessarily mean that the music is good, but they do mean that the music had a focus in the writer’s mind, so the odds are better. Sometimes a show like this still crops up, but they’re fewer and farther between. Also, their plots are often tragically less compelling.
Nonetheless, most of the best musical theater songs of the last few decades have come out of the pop music world (or composers with pop music ambitions), rather than the theater music world (Sondheim and Kander/Ebb being some notable exceptions). Consider Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, who, being all British and such, started out with pretensions to Beatle-dom. Joseph, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Evita are all three more albums than they are shows. Or consider Stephen Schwartz, who worked popular music into his shows and even now puts out albums of original music without a show context. And now, dominating Broadway, you have folks directly from the popular music world - Elton John, Duncan Sheik, Phil Collins, even Dolly Parton.
Not that all the stuff these folks produce is great and wonderful (I’m not so much an Elton John fan) - but it’s often better than what we get from folks out of the theater tradition, who seem to be both clinging to song styles that have long since lost their luster and reaching for some nebulous novelty that no one’s really grasped yet.
Somehow, the world of musical theater and popular music need to come together and draw on each other in a more productive fashion. Any ideas?
Forest Song
August 8th, 2009
It’s not a really great song or anything, but it’s sufficiently moody and dour for my purposes - behold, evidence that I’m still working on RiftMaker, slowly! A new song, intended for mysterious dungeons like forests and mountains. Hope you enjoy it, or, at least, find it sufficiently moody and dour.
A Useful Map
August 7th, 2009
In case you were wondering where one Massachusetts town begins and another ends in a sort of puzzle-piece like way, you can always consult this handy map!
Currently, town names sort of exist as blobs to me, and I’m sometimes surprised when I learn that I’m somehow in the actual city limits of Weymouth, when I thought the blob was over there somewhere. Towns just don’t stay in their blobs.
Consider Cambridge, where I work. The part of Cambridge everyone knows - the dense part with MIT and Harvard, is the east part along the river. But Cambridge actually extends out to the west, almost into suburbia. So even though I work at the end of the Red Line, I’m still, somehow, in Cambridge.
A Western MMO
August 5th, 2009
It’s frustrated me that the Massively Multiplayer Online genre is so fixated around the Fantasy genre - gaining levels, amassing gear, fighting dragons. Even MMOs that aren’t superficially fantasy still follow the same general pattern - aliens instead of dragons, etc. And, on top of that, I think this “nobody can break the mold” thing is preventing anyone from effectively competing with Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, which still dominates the market (even though I’ve long since stopped playing - didn’t Blizzard get my memo that the game isn’t interesting anymore?).
I think that if the MMO world is to survive, someone’s going to have to come up with a way of doing it that’s sufficiently different from the normal fantasy level-building, treasure-gathering same-old same-old.
I have an idea.
I’ve been thinking that there’s never really been an epic, awesome game set in the Old West - fantasy, pirates, science fiction, gothic horror, etc. have all gotten their games, but not westerns, and I feel like the West is a perfect setting for some sort of MMO, even if not the traditional type. The west offers a number of thematic advantages:
1) Absolute freedom
Consider that the main feature of any successful video game is a sense of control - that your actions have an impact. Otherwise, you have no game. An MMO appeals as a place for people to sort of make a world their own - whether by establishing an identity and gaining fame by beating people in combat, amassing treasure, or simply having a space that is theirs. As untamed wilderness, the Wild West thematically matches what an MMO really is - a largely empty expanse that can be made into whatever you want.
2) Rich history and film tradition
Depending on how much the game makers want to do with it, there are numerous possibilities for ideas to be mined from actual American history and the mythic American films. A sense of depth and authenticity to the world is readily achievable - but:
3) A mythic quality
While obviously not as extravagantly bizarre as, say, the wacky-purple Outland from World of Warcraft, there’s just enough of a mythology to the Wild West (and even a sense of magic) to enable the game makers to make allowances for gaming realities. World of Warcraft makes absolutely no sense as a functioning fantasy world, populated as it is entirely by superpowerful lone wolf adventurers jumping around with the same facial expression. Blizzard had to “fix” reality to make the game actually fun, even if the result is goofy. With a few references to a made up Native American tribe heavily into mysticism, and some simple “close your eyes and get lost in the Western-ness of it,” I think the game makers could do what’s necessary to make the game fun without making the world nonsensical and bizarre.
4) Trains are cool
The most exciting thing about the possibility, though, is what the game would have to be. A Western simply can’t be about gaining levels, amassing weapons and armor, and banding together to take out monsters. The Dungeons and Dragons model just doesn’t work. So a new model must be invented, or, better yet, borrowed. From, say, Second Life.
People in World of Warcraft whined constantly about the need for “guild housing” - that is, a place that you could call your own, that you could decorate and show off as you fill it with trophies of your conquest. Some people have a need to build or create in a permanent fantasy world. The Wild West works perfectly for this, because that’s what the West was all about - making something out of nothing!
Consider a game where each “realm” is called, say, a “frontier,” and it starts out barren, with only a railroad and a few isolated, tiny towns with only a few amenities apiece. Perhaps you can choose to be a black hat or a white hat as you set out on a train to make your living in an exciting frontier - find gold, rob someone else of their gold, or start a legitimate business to build the community and make a little (or a lot) of that gold for yourself? Heck, maybe you could even start a church. Maybe you could:
- Design your own storefront for your main street establishment - saloon, bank, mercenaries-for-hire, general store, casino, hotel, printing press, drug store, mystical Native American apothecary - or maybe roll your own?
- Duel other players in the street
- Burn other players’ establishments? (Maybe not to the ground?)
- Raid trains
- Pan for gold
- Be deputized by the sheriff
- Acquire horses, six-shooters, coaches, cabins, houses - designed by you (tasteful, thematic limits enforced)
- Participate in some narrative and exploratory content by agreeing to retrieve stolen treasure from NPC bandits, negotating with local tribespeople, and other general “quests” (a concept that might travel well from fantasy to western)
- Explore an assortment of American West landscapes - there is quite an assortment
- Form guilds, er, posses? You gotta have them, or something like them, but what would you call them?
There would be, of course, a huge assortment of issues to be resolved. How can the violence that would necessarily play a role in such a game be reconciled with the stability required to pursue financial or building-type goals? (Of course, this was also the problem with the actual Wild West) Arbitrary safe areas? Like a fort or two? Safe servers for PvE “care bears” like me? Rely on “good guy” lovers of violence to win over the bad guys (that’s what they’re there for, right)? Make death more costly than the traditional fantasy MMO would have it? Maybe black hats are more vulnerable in that they have no NPC guarded vault in which to stash their ill-gotten gains?
At any rate, I doubt it will ever happen, as MMOs are huge, expensive, and impossible to get right. But it’s fun to fantasize about.
The “Golden Age” of Gaming?
August 2nd, 2009
While researching how exactly the Super Nintendo console generates sounds (essentially 8 instrument midi + reverb of some kind, I think), I happened upon the Wikipedia entry which stated (at the time I found it at least), that the SNES represented the “Golden Age” of video games. So, evidently, it’s not just me who thinks that. And Wikipedia never lies, right?