How I am adapting E. Nesbit's "Melisande"

Now that I have written about what happens when adaptation goes wrong, I might as well start writing about how to get it right.

Which means it is finally time to tell you about MELISANDE.

I am turning E. Nesbit's short story "Melisande: or, Long and Short Division" into a full-length chamber musical ("chamber" in this case implies that the entire thing can be performed in a black-box theater with two pianos, rather than an enormous proscenium with an orchestra that is half synthesizer). I have wanted to do this for years, and only decided to do it after Larry and I went on a cruise, by which I specifically mean that one morning I got up early and went for a long barefoot walk on a beach by myself, and by the time I got back I had written the first song.

This gives you at least one reason to go on vacation.

"Melisande" was first published in 1901 in a collection of short stories titled Nine Unlikely Tales. It is a fairy tale, in the sense that it includes fairies that can give curses and grant wishes and so on, but the characters are firmly set in what would have been the present era at the time – the transition from Victoria to Edward VII – and they are completely aware of every fairy story that might have been printed in Grimm or Lang or Perrault. These are not presented as fantasies, but as histories; the King is Briar Rose's great-grandson, for example, which implies that the Sleeping Beauty story literally took place when the Grimms first published it in 1812 (even though Rose must have gone to sleep in 1712, and wouldn't that be an interesting variation on the piece).

Anyway, and I do go on, but the point is that there were two things that captivated me about this piece when I first read it as a child – one being the mathematics, of course, and the other being these characters' attempts to rationalize themselves out of the mistakes their predecessors had made.

So the first big conflict in the piece is the one that Nesbit gives us in her opening paragraphs: static, calculated rationalism vs. generative, creative humanism.

The Queen, in the opening number, calls this "heart vs. mind" because she doesn't have any better words for it – and the King, correctly, reminds her that the heart is mindless (to which she responds "your mind is heartless," and then they kiss [because wordplay is foreplay]).

By the time we time-jump sixteen years and meet their daughter Melisande, the conflict has a new and slightly more specific name.