"musical openings are like chess openings, they set the conditions of the board"

Okay.

So.

You might ask, if you were of an inquisitive frame of mind, why theater gets nary a mention in WHAT IT IS and WHAT TO DO NEXT. If that book was all about biography and cognition and the process of problem-solving (problems are ultimately solved by love, they are penultimately solved by the process of going from guessing to knowing), where is the thing I theoretically love more than anything else in the world?

The answer is that I burned it.

This is what I mean by "burned." It's also one of the better songs I've ever written.

We will not go into why I burned it because I find the entire story extremely dull, but the point is that I have since un-burned it, there is always a phoenix to come out of the ashes, and here we are.

But let's go back to that song, because it's a good example of the kind of music I trend towards writing, and yesterday afternoon I was listening to IN THE HEIGHTS while I was street-teaming a bunch of flyers for our local community theater and I was thinking, to myself, "my show is never going to sound that good."

Thank goodness I immediately rephrased it as "my show is never going to sound like that."

And then I asked myself specifically what I meant, and my mind provided "well, it's never going to have the kind of Latin-pop orchestration that we get in the Club/Blackout sequences, that's just amazing," and then I thought "well, Lin-Manuel Miranda probably didn't write his own orchestrations, wasn't it Alex Lacamoire?" and so if I want my show to sound like that I need to find an orchestrator and/or learn how to orchestrate myself, and right now I am a pianist and so I am not only writing for piano but also seating two characters at two grand pianos and having their accompaniment comment on what's happening onstage.

And then I thought "Didn't Lin-Manuel Miranda create this show in college? Why didn't the show I wrote in college get the kind of attention that his did?" This could be a legitimate question, since I did in fact write a full-length musical in college (with piano accompaniment, naturally) and it didn't get the attention I was hoping for.

I mean, they let me stage it, by which I mean they let a group of us stage it in a classroom, but what I wanted was to be taken seriously and what I got was a situation in which – okay, so it was a musical version of James Thurber's The Thirteen Clocks, which I didn't have the rights to do but I imagined that if the musical were good enough someone would help me get the rights, and there's this bit in The Thirteen Clocks where a character sings "A Wandering Minstrel, I," which is written in the text as verse and which I set diagetically to an original melody.

Because I assumed Thurber had written the verse, or perhaps the character singing the verse had improvised it, but the salient point here is that I had no idea it had once been a very famous song.

And then THE PRODUCERS dropped, and everyone was listening to the album, and I was in the room when my roommate said "Hey, isn't that your song? Why is the tune different?"

(One of the characters in THE PRODUCERS sings "A Wandering Minstrel, I" as their audition piece, and then Nathan Lane's character makes fun of it in his big "Betrayed" number.)

And this was before the internet could have provided the answer on demand, so it took me a day or two to figure out that "A Wandering Minstrel, I" was from The Mikado (if I recall correctly, I was compelled to ask the music librarian to help me solve this problem, also this is why we need librarians), and the next time I saw the faculty member who had looked at my musical and given us permission to stage it I said "um, did you know that 'A Wandering Minstrel, I' is from The Mikado?" and they said "of course," as if I were asking them something that had no connection to anything we had ever discussed previously, and I realized they hadn't actually read my musical draft before signing off on the production.

Or if they had, they hadn't taken it seriously.

That said – and this is important – at the end of the year I wrote a secular choral benediction because our women's choir was about to commission one and I was on the committee to discuss the commission, and we were talking about what it might sound like, and I was at the piano and I said "maybe it should sound like this," and then the committee said "..." and then they said "why don't you just write that one up" and then the music faculty worked to get it published, legitimately, I still get the occasional royalty check, and this is why when you look up my name in Google it reads "American composer" even before it reads "personal finance freelance writer" or anything like that.

So that's the difference between taking a creative project seriously and, you know, not, and maybe it was just that my musical wasn't good enough and my choral benediction was.

At this point I should pause the essay to let you think about all of that, if it is the kind of thing you want to think about, but what I really want to think about is the opening to IN THE HEIGHTS and so that's where we're going to go next.

It occurred to me that a musical theater opening is like a chess opening, in the sense that it sets up the condition of the board. In many cases, it uses memes or patterns that people are already familiar with, e.g. Usnavi explaining who he is and where he lives (or Ponyboy explaining who he is and where he lives, or the Jellicle Cats explaining who they are and where they live, or the teens at Skater Planet explaining where they live but kind of failing to explain who they are because they haven't figured that out yet).

The opening to MELISANDE is a different kind of opening, in the sense that it gives us two characters in argument, outlining what will be the primary conflict of the show. FUN HOME has an opening like this, and its second number is the "who we are and where we live" number. LITTLE WOMEN has an opening like this, ditto second number.

It also occurred to me that the success of a musical theater opening may depend on how well the audience can sing it after the show is over. If information must be mimetic to be replicable without effort, then – well, okay, how much of "In the Heights" from IN THE HEIGHTS can I remember right now, without looking it up?

Lights up on Washington Heights up at the break of day

And I wake up, and I've got this little punk I've got to chase away

(It is "chase away" even though "shake away" would have been the better rhyme, right?)

Cross the stage at the crack of dawn yawning

As I hike up the awning

Hey, y'all, good morning

And then there's the conversation with Abuela Claudia, which I have difficulty understanding on the cast recording but might be more easily understood staged. This is where we get "I've got café but no con leche," and "One can of condensed milk!", right? And prior to that there's information about a power outage or a power surge or something, the refrigerator is out, and I remember not understanding any of this until I went to the plot summary on Wikipedia.

That's my abuela

She's not really my abuela

But she practically raised me, this corner is her escuela

(I love this lyric because you know exactly what he means even if you don't speak Spanish.)

And then my brain wants to jump ahead to You're probably thinking, you're up shit creek! but there's another piece of information in here that I'm forgetting.

So.

Why?

First I get to look up what it is.

Then I get to think about it.

And so do you, if you want to.

❤️

(p.s. the criticism that Usnavi wouldn't know "you must take the A train" or "too darn hot" or "merry christmas you old building and loan" or any of the other references he pops into his lyrics is MY LEAST FAVORITE KIND OF CRITICISM EVER, these phrases are pure mematics, how dare a critic say "well, my brain is capable of remembering this bit of shared culture but I cannot imagine Usnavi, who is underprivileged, having the same capabilities" and also if anyone knows the second line to "Take the A Train" without looking it up you may email me nicole@nicolediekerfinley.com because the whole point is that we only know the first line but everyone knows it and when we figure out why that works we'll have figured out something tremendously important.)

(also I looked up what I missed about the lyric, wow this is going to be interesting to discuss later.)