MELISANDE More thoughts on musicals, and a few thoughts on keeping an audience's attention MELISANDE update! The Queen's song is final-first-drafted, which is to say that all of the musical elements except the performers are in place, and I have begun the King's song, which is to say that I've figured out how to navigate the sixteen-year-time-jump in
MELISANDE "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
MELISANDE Taking Yourself Seriously First of all, the Queen's song is scored. I need to go through it as a pianist and make sure each of the parts are functionally playable – I suspect they are, since I play them as I compose them, but every time I play through an entire accompaniment
MELISANDE I rewrote the song... It was actually very easy, once it came down to understanding what was wrong with it. Also, I talked to Larry about whether it would be better to have the play play as written, with Melisande realizing that her mother had been lying about the whole "hair isn'
MELISANDE "oh, I get it, it's the failure mode of humanism" The thing about writer's block is that it's a signal that something you've written is wrong. Or, maybe, that the writing you've done already hasn't effectively set you up for the writing you need to do next. Or, maybe maybe,
MELISANDE 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