My name is Nicole Dieker Finley, and I am writing a musical theater adaptation of E. Nesbit’s short story “Melisande: or Long and Short Division.”
What you need to understand about me is that I am both ambitious and tenacious. I ship, even when I’m the only person to wave the handkerchief at launch. This musical will get written even if none of its grant proposals get funded, for example, because I’ve already decided to do it — and because Larry Finley, the great love of my life, has decided with me that it’s worth including in our Art Lab.
(Larry and I met at our local community theater in the 1990s. He was the theater’s musical director for ten years; I spent three years as his accompanist and assistant. Later, when I was entering middle age and he was exiting it, we reconnected and were married. We call our home the Art Lab because we use it as a space for us to complete projects and test ideas. In the five years since we launched the Art Lab, it has become a small-scale gathering space for other artists and creative thinkers; the local chamber choir rehearses in our conservatory, for example, and we have an open cocktail hour where people can stop in and share what they’re working on.)
I am trained as a pianist, a vocalist, a composer, a teacher, a theater director, and a writer. The latter proved the most effective towards income maximization, and so I built a freelance writing career along two metrics: hours worked and money earned. Every week I would try to decrease the former and increase the latter, and after twelve years I’m earning a steady $70K in annual pretax income for 90 minutes per day of applied work and 30 minutes of batched email management.
There were three years in which I earned well over $100,000, if you’re curious — and the biggest reason I’m not currently pushing myself towards that same income goal is because it would get in the way of the various incremental growth projects Larry and I are working on in the Lab, including a piano studio in which we teach the Faber method with an emphasis on active recall, practice sessions in which we document our processes and how we are improving them, and an analysis of masterworks such as Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 12 in F major, K. 332, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and Sondheim’s Into the Woods, all of which cohere into an ongoing study of pedagogy, practice, and cognition.
(The other reason, which you might have already inferred, is that our marriage doubled our financial resources, giving us the possibility to make high-value guaranteed investments and reducing our individual dependency on any specific income.)
The musical is not an incremental growth project. It is, as the source material indicates, an exponential growth project.
I’ve written two musicals already (book, music, lyrics, piano accompaniment), one of which was produced as an undergraduate student production. I am writing Melisande to be workshopped first in the Art Lab and then with the student theater program at our local community theater (Quincy Community Theatre [QCT]), and am specifically crafting the piece to meet the needs of a group that is actively looking for smart chamber musicals that allow teenagers who want serious theater training to build their skills alongside more experienced adults.
The orchestration, for example, is for two pianos. The parts are deliberately structured so that they might be performed by talented high school students, and the two pianists also play (and sing) significant roles in the show. Many of today’s most interesting musical theater pieces require collaborators who are not just singer-dancer-actors but also instrumentalists — quadruple threats, if you will — and so I want to ensure that Melisande sets students up for success in contemporary works like Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, not to mention the many actor-as-orchestra revivals of classic musicals.
Right now I have an Act I book and am working on the Act I score. By Q1 2025 we should be ready to workshop Act I in the Art Lab while I write and score Act II. I’ll need to finish the Act II draft by the end of Q2 2025, because Larry and I have been invited to musical direct a student production at QCT in Q3 2025 and I’d like to accept that opportunity. Working with this particular group of students as a musical director will not only help them — trust me, I have the skills — but also help me prepare Melisande to address this group’s specific strengths and weaknesses.
This means we’ll aim towards workshopping Act II in the Art Lab in Q4 2025, although the holidays may slow things down. The entire musical could get a revision pass in the first half of 2026, with the goal of workshopping with QCT’s student theater program in the summer and doing another round of revisions in the fall.
By the end of 2026 I should have a student theater musical that is ready for a fully-realized production. I’ve given QCT the first right of refusal, and I’ll start reaching out to other community theaters with similar missions. (It goes without saying that my freelance career positions me well to identify and pitch potential clients.) By the end of 2027 we’re pitching to regional theaters with student-centered programs, connecting to the high school market, and requesting consideration for awards.
I’ll also begin drafting the next musical theater project, which I’m hoping will be a piece about Robert and Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms titled Piano Four Hands, while applying for additional funding and professional development opportunities like the MacDowell Fellowship. My workday in 2028 is likely to include musical theater writing and composition, continued outreach to theaters with strong educational programs, a practical and demonstrated understanding of the piano and vocal repertoire of both Schumanns and Brahms, and an expanded group of piano, voice, writing, and theater students.
Every year after that, I’ll continue to improve my work — and a new group of young people will use my work to improve their own.