Category: life-story-crafting

This is the forty-third post from my NaNoWriMo Life Story Crafting project (find first post here). In the “12 Questions to Help Us Realize Our Potential”, it continues question seven: “Approach to the Inner-Most Cave”. Name a fear or doubt that arose as you got closer to attaining your skill or insight. The “transformation” I chose to write about was how I came up with the Well-Being Toolbox.

A Change in the Heir, a fractured fairy tale of a musical opened on Broadway at the Edison Theater, and though it officially closed before that week’s issue of Variety made it to my mailbox, I eagerly grabbed a copy of The New York Times to read the review by Stephen Holden that had slain it.

With lyrics by George H. Gorham, music by Dan Sticco and a book by both, ”A Change in the Heir” looks and sounds like a campy, nickel-and-dime burlesque of the Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine show ”Into the Woods.” Whole swatches of its score imitate Mr. Sondheim’s musical style with a fidelity that borders on appropriation…

Set in a low-rent district of fairyland where the royal garb resembles patterned bed sheets, ”A Change in the Heir” tells the story of how two competing branches of the same family, each hoping to inherit the crown, bring a son and a daughter up as the opposite sex. Don’t ask why. The conditions by which one or the other might become the monarch are as confusing as they are arbitrary…

”A Change in the Heir” is the kind of show that, were it cut by half and staged in a cabaret, might provide an hour’s trashy diversion. Heaven knows what it’s doing on Broadway.

I couldn’t have been more excited. A couple of years earlier, Lisa and I had ushered the opening night of the show’s World Premiere run at the New Tuners Theatre.

New Tuners Theatre was housed in The Theatre Building, a repurposed warehouse in the Lakeview neighborhood that housed three auditoriums, the largest of which had 150 seats. Lisa and I had seen several productions there. New Tuners as a production company leased the theaters for revenue and sometimes originated shows when not fully booked. And now one of those shows, which had enjoyed a decent Chicago run had moved to Broadway.

The Theatre Building was 4.5 miles from my apartment.

Sheila had directed Babes in Barns for New Tuners, so she knew the producers.

And since Sheila had introduced me to some “friends from New Tuners” at my Chicago Dramatists reading of Stage Kiss, it’s entirely possible that the producers knew me.

New Tuners had fallen off my radar because Ode was too big for their britches, as it had turned out to be for mine. But Dorian Gray, with a core cast of four, plus a small Greek Chorus of back up singers, was perfect for their space. I could totally picture it there.

I quickly put together a promotional package as I had for Ode and accepted a lunch invitation from my co-workers who were eager to get to Ann Sather’s, a popular Swedish restaurant just down the block from the Theatre Building. I dropped off the script before they were seated.

The next day at work, I got a call from Adam (not his real name) the New Tuners Dramaturge.

“I like it a lot,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said.

“How can we help you?”

This caught me by surprise.

“I don’t know. What’s your process? Readings, workshops. You know better than I do.”

“Yes,” he said. “Well, from what you sent, I gather that this show is finished and pretty much ready to go.”

“Well, that’s up to you.”

“I’ve only read what you sent, but it seems in pretty good shape. New Tuners likes to get involved much earlier. Have you heard of the Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop?”

It seemed like someone with my level of experience should have, so I said, “Of course.”

He seemed a little surprised. “Have you taken it already?”

Back pedal. “I’ve looked into it, but you know, with work and all.”

“Understood. Well, what you might not know is we offer the same workshop here at New Tuners and it’s run by John Sparks, the founder and co-director of the original.”

“Uh huh,” I said. The name rang a barely audible bell. “Didn’t John Sparks write Babes in Barns?”

Maggie blasted into my cubicle with a proof, saw me on the phone, sighed loudly and wrote “SEE ME!” on a post-it note.

“That’s right,” he said.

“And you guys workshopped that one from scratch?”

“Well, it originated at the Los Angeles workshop but same process, yes.”

“What about A Change in the Heir?”

“That was a little further along, but essentially the same.”

“Would you like to look at the full script and score of Portrait of Dorian Gray?”

He hesitated. “Sure, I’ll look at it. But what I really wanted to let you know was that we’re starting a new workshop series next month and and there’s one spot left. Is that something you’d be interested in? There’s a vetting process, but based on what you’ve sent, there’s a good chance John will accept you.”

Maggie was back. “What’s involved?” I asked.

“I’ll send you the application.”

“Great. I gotta go. I’m at work.”

“Okay. Bye now.”

This time I was actually happy to be interrupted by work.

One aspect of being a playwright and now book writer/lyricist/composer that always made me uneasy was the confidence game. I could never really know whether someone wanted to profit because they believed in my talent or because they believed I did. This uncertainty had begun in early childhood when, out of boredom, I had drawn Tippy the Turtle in the weekly Sun-Times TV Priview. Mom explained to me that it had nothing to do with how well I drew it, it was just a way to sell art lessons.

I had to believe in myself enough to write a show. I had to believe in myself enough to show someone the show I wrote. If they said, “Great work, here’s a million dollars advance. We’ve already booked a theater,” I’d love it. Odds of that happening? Has it ever happened in the history of the world? Did I have confidence that Adam, who I didn’t know from…well…recognized that I had talent and wanted to nurture it into something even better than Portrait of Dorian Gray, which New Tuners could then stage? Even then, would they be doing it for their cut of the profits if the show transferred to Broadway? Could I just use this workshop as a Trojan Horse to get them to stage Portrait? Did any of the kids who sent in their drawings become famous artists?

These were the questions swirling in my head (or more accurately, my stomach) as I filled out the application, wrote “Adam Already Has” when it came to work samples. When the money was due, I wrote the check. When the workshop started, I held my breath, walked through the door and hoped for the best.

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In honor of Earth Day, I’m going to share how I reduced, reused, and recycled my first “speech” after returning to Toastmasters as a “non-guest” on Monday, April 15.

Reduce

The assignment can be reduced to this. “Understanding Your Communication Style” (5:00-7:00 min) Share a communication style and its impact on professional and personal relationships; avoid reporting on the content of this project.

Reuse

The theme of the meeting, posted sometime Friday was: allergies.

There’s a lot I can say about allergies, but how does it connect to my topic?

In the chit-chat before the Secular Buddhism call last week, the topic of allergies came up. I suffer year-round, so it’s a fact of life. For many people it’s seasonal, and ’tis the season. When I shared my weekly observation on signlessness, I prefaced it by mentioning a bumper sticker I like. “I’m Allergic to Bullshit – Also Pollen.”

Recycle

I remembered a Toastmasters post I shared with you, “The Upside of Flakiness – Part 1″ where I transformed the ridiculous email chain I engaged in to claw back my dues from Toastmasters International when the local club stopped offering live meetings into a short play, “The Stakes are So Low.”

Since only three people in the current club were active when I left, I thought I would share it to explain my reasons for leaving. I already had the chance to share my reason for coming back. “The Upside of Flakiness – Part 2″ was the perfect speech to give on a night where someone signed up for speech evaluator but the person scheduled to give the speech flaked out.

For a Happier Earth

I arrived at the meeting to find two guests sitting quietly looking at their phones, and the only member in the room ignoring them. It looked like the word of the day was irritant. Easy to incorporate into the script.

I walked up to one of the guests and said, “Welcome to Toastmasters. Have you been here before?”

“This is my first time.”

“I’m Bruce.”

“I’m Gene.”

“Gene, would you like to be part of tonight’s second speech? It involves following along in the script and reading the lines in bold. There’s no acting required. It’s just a table read. You can stand up at your seat if you want to, but the professionals don’t, so don’t feel obligated.”

He laughed, I showed him the parts available. He took the part with fewer bold lines. “I’ll be TREASURER.”

He stopped engaging with his phone and started reading through the script.

I walked up to the second guest. Same drill. Carl. He accepted the role of WORLD HEADQUARTERS.

This was a meatier role, so I offered some motivation for the part. “You’re playing the worst customer service rep ever, you’ve got my money, and you’ll say or do anything not to give it back.”

He smiled. “Got it.”

I gave the other supporting role of PRESIDENT to Kay, the current VP of Membership, who was sitting next to me. Neither of us knew at the time she would be conscripted as timekeeper, which proved an amazing stroke of luck.

I knew that the play would run at least 10 minutes. My speech slot was 5-7 minutes. But I also knew that it matched my speech objective perfectly. In order not to get screwed over in my professional relationship (with WORLD HEADQUARTERS) I had to leverage my personal relationships with PRESIDENT and TREASURER. The long-winded non-responsive “professional communicators” at WORLD HEADQUARTERS impacted my ability to complete my “speech” in 5-7 minutes.

As a bonus, the webcam in the room was set for a five-foot-tall woman. So the only time I stepped in front of it was when I read these lines. Concerns. I don’t know if the Toastmasters meeting format or the skills Toastmasters seeks to develop work in a Zoom setting.

We’re also conditioned as a media culture to expect more from video than badly lit static shots of people and parts of their ceilings. Also, eye contact with a camera is a different skill.

What appeared on Zoom was my neck and chest until I bent over and stared at the camera.

Later in the evening, Gene, the first-timer who’d read TREASURER screwed up the courage to do a table topic (impromptu speech based on a prompt from the Table Topics Master).

When the online Table Topics Master froze, he was stuck in front of an audience with nothing to say.

I quickly jumped in. “If you could meet anyone in the world and engage in any activity, who would it be and what would you do?”

He made sure he got the prompt straight in his head and delivered his first Toastmasters speech like a pro.

Happier Earth.

Here’s the play if you’re interested.

This is the forty-second post from my NaNoWriMo Life Story Crafting project (find first post here). In the “12 Questions to Help Us Realize Our Potential”, it continues question seven: “Approach to the Inner-Most Cave”. Name a fear or doubt that arose as you got closer to attaining your skill or insight. The “transformation” I chose to write about was how I came up with the Well-Being Toolbox.

Dorian never struck me as a particularly masculine name, and it wasn’t a sin for a man to grow older in the music business.

But the focus on sexy album covers and, more recently, music videos was hard on women’s fading youth and beauty. An entire industry of anti-aging creams, cosmetics for facial touch-ups, infinite weight loss programs, liposuction, cosmetic surgery, and injecting the toxin Botox to induce facial paralysis all made the business proposition of outsourcing aging to a hidden photo appealing.

Changing Dorian’s sex made the Manager’s role as a domineering husband/Svengali easier to envision. And while I was at it, I could change the Photographer’s sex too to honor Wilde’s same-sex conundrum. I could empathize more with a woman’s unrequited love for a beautiful woman than a man’s love for a beautiful man. It didn’t hurt that this also balanced the cast of my four lead performers: two males, two females.

Rounding out the quartet is the man who inspires Dorian to break her contract with the photo. I modeled him after Bob Geldof.

Geldof was the lead singer of the Irish Band The Boomtown Rats whose fame in the United States was limited to not liking Mondays and his role as Pink in Alan Parker’s feature-length music video of Pink Floyd’s concept album The Wall until he was shaken by documentary footage of children starving in Ethiopia. He recorded a charity single, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” On July 13, 1985, that charity effort blossomed into a star-studded concert event broadcast live from packed stadiums in London and Philadelphia. Performers included Elvis Costello, Sting, Phil Collins, Branford Marsalis, U2, Dire Straits, Queen, David Bowie, The Who, Elton John, Paul McCartney, The Beach Boys, Pretenders, Santana, Madonna, Neil Young, Led Zeppelin, and Mick Jagger. They called it Live Aid. In the US, the ABC broadcast was hosted by, you guessed it, Dick Clark.

Like almost all celebrity fundraisers, this one had its critics. How much of your appearance was motivated by the career bump of performing before an audience thousands of times larger than you could draw on your own? One of the BBC co-hosts later described the event as “irritating, shallow, sanctimonious and self-satisfied.” For me, that was certainly true of the two songs it produced. I would pay money not to be subjected to “Do They Know It’s Christmas” or “We Are the World” again. It was this out-sized display of altruism and cynicism that made an event like this the perfect catalyst for my musical’s ending.

Though Dorian’s fool-proof beauty regimen is a ticket to eternal youth, it’s not redeemable for eternal fame. We see her Manager’s efforts to continue reinventing her for the times, but without the ability to write her own material, it’s harder and harder for her to hold her own against newcomers. She still records albums, even scores the occasional interview, but the questions never change. “You look amazing! How do you do it?”

When the Manager gets wind of the momentum behind a Live Aid-like charity event, he convinces her to seduce the organizer to land herself a primo spot. She does so reluctantly, the way she does everything these days. Instead of seducing him, though, he seduces her. She wants to experience the altruistic ambition that animates the thirty-year-old musician who already looks older and more haggard than she has on her worst day. She indeed secures her primo spot, the single he writes for her tops the charts, and the Manager congratulates her on her return to fame.

But this time she’s playing for an audience of one: the photograph. She hopes to find some acknowledgment in its expression of a good deed done. Instead, she finds a cynical smirk. She grabs a bucket of paint to deface the photo so she’ll never have to look at it again. As she does, though, she lets out a cry, covers her face, and runs from the stage.

When the Manager returns to search the house for clues to her disappearance, he comes upon the room, usually locked, where she hides the photo. No longer defaced, it has been restored to its youthful, pristine glory. He walks up to examine it closely, clearly as taken by it as when he first saw it. The lights dim on everything but the photograph and its admirer as the band reprises part of the opening number.

Having changed the story’s ending, I had to change the opening as well. It’s sung by the Musician inspired by Geldof: a song about an ageless singer who, after a decades-long career, suddenly disappeared from the public eye. “Whatever Happened to Dorian Gray?”

With the aid of my word processor, a MIDI sequencer, a full-sized keyboard, and a modular plug-in synthesizer, I knocked out the twenty-four songs that tell the story in a few months.

And instead of sending the marketing package to the UK, I found a musical producer much closer to home.

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This is the forty-first post from my NaNoWriMo Life Story Crafting project (find first post here). In the “12 Questions to Help Us Realize Our Potential”, it continues question seven: “Approach to the Inner-Most Cave”. Name a fear or doubt that arose as you got closer to attaining your skill or insight. The “transformation” I chose to write about was how I came up with the Well-Being Toolbox.

I was right about the Brits being receptive to a Life of Shakespeare show. The artistic director of Theatre Royal Plymouth had produced one by another playwright two seasons ago. My instincts were good. My timing was bad.

He noted that a cast of sixteen was huge. I’d done a good job paring back from  The Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables: both with over thirty cast members. But Phantom had waited for one of the largest West End theaters to become available and Les Miz started life as an arena show. I read between the lines that it would be expensive to workshop a large-cast musical by an unknown.

He said that he had enjoyed the excerpt I’d sent, that the music was catchy, and he thanked me for my interest in the theater by sending me a brochure of next season’s offerings.

I was disappointed that the large envelope hadn’t contained a path forward, but the marketing materials I sent made it to a decision-maker at a major regional theater, so at least my salesmanship was improving. Even if the Shakespeare bio-play eclipsed this show’s chances, my package had worked as a calling card. If I came back with a smaller-scale show, I might be able to cut to the front of the slush pile.

I decided my next show needed a smaller cast and a shorter gestation period.

I couldn’t write a musical as quickly as I could write a play. But I could compose and record a song faster than I could write it down. Nobody had read the music score I’d painstakingly scratched out for Ode, and the scratching had taken up the bulk of my writing schedule. One piece that took three hours to record had taken me a month to transcribe!

Since I couldn’t depend on a producer calling me up and assigning me a well-known play or movie to adapt, I needed something in the public domain, and I needed it now.

Though I never participated in the insanity of driving to a New Year’s Party, I wasn’t beyond watching a good movie, having a beer or two, and a few minutes before 11:00 p.m. Central Time, tuning in to the chaos in Times Square.

ABC’s coverage was produced by a former Philadelphia disc jockey named Dick Clark. I’d stopped watching his American Bandstand ages ago, but ten or fifteen minutes of New Year’s Rockin’ Eve was still in my annual viewing rotation. This New Year’s Eve, I paid particular attention to the man at the center of it all.

Dick Clark’s nickname in the business was the world’s oldest teenager because the dancers on his show never got old. Neither did the music. And through a combination of favorable genetics, weight maintenance, pancake make-up, and having younger people select his wardrobe, neither did he. At least, not that I could tell on my 12″ Black & White TV.

That night I remembered a Tonight Show comedian joking that somewhere there was a picture of Dick Clark that looked like hell.

Of course! Dick Clark was Dorian Gray.

I took full advantage of my New Year’s Day off.

Dorian Gray is a pop music vocalist. The picture is a commission for his first album photographed by a close friend. The evil influence is now a Colonel Tom Parker-type manager who aims to possess and squeeze every last dollar out of his protégé’s youth and beauty.

The story begins in the 1950s, allowing me to play with musical styles from the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. The primary triangle is the Photographer friend, who continues to appeal to the Dorian he once knew and loved, and the Manager, who treats him like a none-too-prized possession.

The scene changes and time transitions are handled by an onstage band that serves as a Greek chorus while a montage of albums, magazine covers, and tabloid covers are projected. I recalled a short, live-action/animated film by Charles Braverman called Condensed Cream of Beatles covering the brief career of the Fab Four in under fifteen minutes and generating a sense of nostalgia for a time in my life that I’d lived through as a child. This type of montage would hold the audience’s attention while giving the principal players time for a quick backstage costume change.

The closing image to each montage is an update of the original photograph. It doesn’t depict the outward manifestation of a twisted soul. I don’t want to traffic in Victorian notions of moral depravity. But it does account for the ravages of age and drug use unchecked by physical discomfort. The Omar Khayam passage that closes the film, “I Myself am Heaven and Hell,” doesn’t appear in the novel, and I don’t use it, because then I’d be ripping off the film, but I keep it as a guiding theme for the adaptation, and…and crap. I still haven’t dealt with the homosexuality.

It takes another week at work and seeing an older woman art director changing into a sexier outfit and applying too much make-up in preparation for what she hopes to be a “hot date” to cure me of my homosexuality problem.

Someone said she looked like Marianne Faithfull, and I was just old enough to remember who Marianne Faithfull was.

While it was easy to make fun of the latest album title by her ex-boyfriend’s band, “Instead of Steel Wheels they should have called it Steel Wheelchairs,” Mick Jagger at 46 was still out there strutting his stuff, and only his ex-girlfriends got old.

Of course! I needed to perform a sex change operation.

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