 So over the last couple of months I've been deliberating, with my erstwhile colleagues Derek Bluebottom (my depression), Jasper Mounterbatten III (my ego) and Colin Shitsmearer (my envy). We've been having weekly meetings at which Derek sits, gently moaning to himself, Colin stares at everyone suspiciously and Jasper is rubbing his nose from all of the cocaine. Needless, to say, despite Jasper's attempts to take over, I've been chairing the meetings. The agenda has only one thing on it. How to make audiences more aware of all of the brilliant work that is being created by my colleagues in UK musical theatre. There is only so much that we can do I suppose, I'm not a marketing or advertising guru. As a writer myself, I want to be spending my time doing what I believe I'm best at. And that is writing. Ideally I'd like to leave the marketing and advertising work to the people who know best. But unfortunately, the people who know best cost money. And I don't have any of that. So instead I'm just going to say how I think we can all help in our own small way to help the UK Musical Theatre Industry really come alive... and I think that the audience is the MOST essential part of the long overdue theatrical revolution in the UK. It's a beautiful cycle... it works like this... IF... Producers and Venues see that audiences are responding to new work... Producers and Venues will keep taking risks on new work... IF... Producers and Venues keep taking risks on new work... Producers and Venues will continue to commission New Writers to make new work... IF... The New Writers get commissioned to make new work... New Writers will get better at writing and then they'll make better work... IF... The New Writers make better work... Audiences will have better experiences at the theatre... IF... Producers and Venues see that audiences are responding to new work... And the cycle continues! So as audience members we owe it to ourselves to support the creation of new work. If you're part of a dramatic society, get as many folks as you can to come along, if you work in a work place, take your work mates along, if you live in a house with house mates take your house mates along. Then tell everybody to make a noise. So the only thing Derek, Colin, Jasper and I feel like we can do is tell everybody we know about some of the wonderful things that are happening in UK musical theatre at the moment. I'm not going to go crazy, I'm just going to tell you about a couple of things coming up that I happen to know about... WASTED Wasted is a rock musical about the Bronte's by Chris Ash (Music) and Carl Miller (Book & Lyrics). Book tickets for it immediately. Tell everybody you know about it. I described it to my house mate. She was dubious. I convinced her that it would be worth her time. Chris and Carl are seriously talented and uber smart guys. They've got a fricking brilliant idea. They've got a seriously smart director in Adam Lenson and they've got a cracking cast and venue at The Southwark Playhouse. I've been fortunate to have been able to listen to various pieces and parts of this show as they've been developing it over the years, and I'm fairly certain it's going to be an event to remember. If you want to know about the Bronte's... If you did an English Literature Degree (come on, everyone knows you did)...If you don't think you like musical theatre. Then this is a show for you. BOOK TICKETS FOR WASTED HERE THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW Sleepy Hollow is a new musical by Eamonn O'Dwyer (music & lyrics) and Helen Watts (Book). It's being performed by the National Youth Music Theatre at The Other Palace from Wednesday 22nd August to Saturday 25th August. Again, book tickets now please. Eamonn is a shit hot writer and there's a bloomin' Harp and a Cor Anglais in the band! Jasper Mountbatten nearly flipped out when he heard about that. If you don't know what a Cor Anglais is, come along and find out. Speak to Eamonn after the show, he's unfeasibly tall and handsome and I'm sure he'll be very happy to tell you all about the Cor Anglais. I haven't heard any of the songs from this one yet, but since Eamonn's written it, it's bound to be jagged, beautiful, funny and haunting. BOOK TICKETS FOR SLEEPY HOLLOW HERE For both of these shows, please go and book tickets right now. And book for early in the runs. Once you've seen the show, if you liked it, then tell people about it. Tweet about it. Social media the shit out of it. One of the best things about these shows is that they are written and created by genuinely nice people and they deserve widespread support. There are of course plenty of other new musicals that have happened and are happening all over the place at the moment, do go out and find them! 
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Dear UK Theatre Industry, I would like you to stop your nonsense now please. Those of you who know me, know that I am for the most part a reasonable, polite individual. My mother raised me that way. I always say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. I consider the effect of my actions before taking them whenever possible. I am a forgiving sort, willing to give anyone a second chance (good old Catholic upbringing). I am constantly described by people as laid-back (although if I’m perfectly honest, those who are closest to me know that I am fiercely ambitious and highly exacting in the standards I set for myself). Unfortunately I too, perfect individual though I am, have a Kryptonite. Something that will shatter all of my social niceties, all of my world weary understanding of the complex emotions of both individuals and the mob. And today an announcement from The Stage has pushed me beyond the limits of endurance. Please be aware The Stage, It’s not just you. You’re brilliant. I read you regularly. You have even given my work and the work of my friends several nice reviews... But let me tell you a little story to explain what’s just happened in my brain… Once upon a time (for that’s how all the best stories start) there was this camel. Let’s call her Frankie. And one of the things she liked to do most was hang out on twitter and surf the internet. But one day, for some completely unfathomable reason, someone turned up at Frankie’s watering hole whilst she was retweeting something by Lin-Manuel Miranda (that guy!). That someone came up behind her and very quietly, very deftly placed a piece of straw upon Frankie’s back. It was so quiet and so deft that Frankie barely noticed that it was there at all, at best it was a very slight irritant, and so she continued tweeting about Hamilton. Over the years, every day another person came up behind her and put another straw on Frankie’s back, until it stopped being an annoyance and it grew into a burden. Frankie was now finding it slightly harder to do her usual work, the weight of the straw on her back was beginning to weigh her down. But Frankie was a polite camel and was sure that eventually the people putting the straw on her back would stop. But Frankie was wrong. Because the people putting the straw on her back were completely unaware of what they were doing. And Frankie, although now completely covered in tons and tons of straw, was so polite (god bless her Catholic Camel upbringing!) that she continued to say nothing. Not to question, not to ask. Until one tragic day (let’s call it The 16th August 2018) an unsuspecting organisation called The Stage placed a tiny unsuspecting piece of straw on Frankie’s back. And you can guess what happened… The straw that indeed broke the camel’s back on this occasion is my kryptonite. And that kryptonite comes in the form of ignorance. As mentioned before, I’m quite a forgiving person except when there is wilful ignorance involved. There is no excuse for it. The information is out there to read, the people are there to talk to, you owe it to yourself and your audience to educate yourselves. Everyone, please can you look at the below and tell me what is wrong with this picture?  Nothing wrong with the fonts... nothing wrong with the nominees (all bloody brilliant)...
Ah, that's it'. It's this... I think there is a difference between a COMPOSER and a LYRICIST. It’s quite incredible that you don’t seem to know what that is. One person writes music, the other writes words that are set to music. Simple right? And different. Today you announced the nominees for The Stage Debut Award that is entitled: Best Composer OR Lyricist Indulge me for a second if you will… would it be right for there to be a Stage Debut Award category entitled: Best Director OR Lighting Designer Best Choreographer OR Musical Director Best Sound Designer OR Producer No? Why not? Oh they're completely different jobs? Oh… alright then… that explains everything. So why is it alright for there to be a category entitled: Best Composer OR Lyricist This is for me the utter height of absurdity, but just goes to highlight the depth of ignorance that currently exists in the UK Theatre Industry. Please note that I say “UK” Theatre Industry. The American’s across the pond have long known the value of the lyricist. Indeed they have substantial monetary awards for the best of the new lyricists, such as the Kleban Award ($100,000!). I do not want to take away from the achievements of the people who are nominated for this award. I know and admire the work of all three of the nominees for this award; Gus Gowland, Matt Winkworth and Kate Marlais are all extraordinary people and talents and they deserve to be nominated in a category that makes sense. So… what’s to be done? I’m not the sort of person who just howls about a problem and doesn’t suggest how it be fixed…so how about this The Stage? One category for… Best Composer And one category for a completely different skill/art form? Best Lyricist IMPORTANT NOTE: Having written the above and then continued further investigation, it seems that the above picture is the only place where the category Best Composer OR Lyricist is mentioned. The award on the Official Stage page is Best Composer. I'm not sure if you realised your error and changed it, which is something, but in many ways, this is marginally worse as there isn’t even a category for Best Lyricist (despite the fact that all three of those shows were pieces of musical theatre that involved lyrics). If those involved wrote both music and lyrics (I know Gus Gowland for example did both music & lyrics for Pieces of String) then they should be nominated in two categories. Because they are completely separate art forms. I am fortunate to have been regularly employed as both a composer & lyricist, but just because I happen to do both that doesn’t mean that they are the same. As I say, this is not just about you The Stage, you are merely the final straw. Over the years in the UK the art of the lyricist has been misunderstood, if not almost entirely ignored. As Mrs Oscar Hammerstein said once when being introduced to Mrs Richard Rodgers who’d described her husband as the man who wrote the classic “Some Enchanted Evening”… Her response was something along the following lines of… “No, no my dear… my husband wrote ‘Some Enchanted Evening’, you’re husband wrote ‘Da da da da da da.’ The art of the composer is an extremely specialised art form, the art of the lyricist is no less so. It’s time for the UK Theatre industry to educate itself. There is no excuse for ignorance. I would be very happy to meet and talk with any in the industry who wish to learn a bit more about this. I don’t want to just complain about it. I want to change it. Have you ever had a conversation with a friend and found yourself wondering how they can do that to themselves? And then found yourself in a similar situation, having a similar conversation with a similar friend and arguing eloquently and convincingly FOR every single thing that you had ever so recently argued so passionately AGAINST?
Our brains are not simple. True they aren’t as complex as the brain of a dolphin but certainly they are not simple. And so our stories shouldn’t be simple either. The narrative of our lives is at once overwhelmingly complex and mind-numbingly simple. As we are experiencing them in real-time they are as complex as the task of a four hundred-sided Rubiks Cube being completed by a creature without opposable thumbs (read: Dolphin). And yet, looking back on them, everything seems so simple, almost as structured as a perfectly formed narrative… “If this hadn’t happened, then this would never have happened… if this disaster hadn’t occurred then I would never have met the best person in my life…” etc. etc. etc. and so on and so on for ever and ever amen. So, doesn’t it make sense then that when creating something, when we are inside the middle of it… it is a puzzle, a maze, a beast of almost incomprehensible difficulty. Then when we have finished it, it seems so impossibly inevitable that we could never have imagined it any other way. Except… that we did. We imagined every other scenario, every other direction, every scene, decision and choice. And we made only one. We are all murderers. We murder alternate realities with every step we take, every choice we make. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Certainly it means that some things will never be, but when we look back in half a century’s time, we will see that it all seemed inevitable. That the narrative of our lives only makes sense when played backwards. SO… that show that you got fired from, that meeting that you couldn’t make, that job that you couldn’t take… and yes, that person that you fell in love with in the middle of a maze who couldn’t love you back. All these things will be OK. Maybe not now, maybe not for a long time, but they are all part of a bigger narrative, a larger world and one day you’re going to look back at quite a glorious view… Hey folks,
Derek Bluebottom here. Just to say sometimes life can be tough. It's not that anything is particularly wrong. It's just that nothing feels particularly right. It's worse when it's sunny. I think rain is healthy. When you look out the window and see the rain pelting it down on some poor schmuck who has just locked himself out of his car, you can watch him struggle and shout, getting wetter and wetter, until a car drives past him and covers him in rain soaked London filth, and you can think: "Ah. You poor schmuck. Bless you and your beautiful struggles. At least that's not me." And then when you do find yourself out there amongst the rain, the dull grey sky dripping all over you, you can think, "Well. At least the atmosphere feels exactly the same way I do about everything right at the moment. I suppose that's something." Please note my lack of exclamation marks. For one thing it's too hot for exclamation marks. For another, exclamation marks smack of a huge amount of effort and energy. Neither of which are currently on the menu. They have been replaced by Lethargy and Melancholy. Both of which require only full stops to give them their full sodden grey weight. There shall be no grand revelation at the bottom of this post. There shall be no sudden rallying of the troops. There shall be very little of anything that will comfort the weary traveller or the disgruntled composer as he goes about his business. Even when everything is going so well. Even when everything is going right. Sometimes I still feel like a useless piece of shit. Even when I'm taking my pills. And I suppose that's cool. Whether we know it or not, I think everyone is a born storyteller. After all, we tell ourselves stories every minute of every day. When we walk down the street our eyes are telling our brain a story. We can't possibly take in everything we see, so our imagination fills in the gaps. We see three people walking together, one of them is a child, we might tell ourselves the story that they are a family. We see two people sitting on a bench at a certain distance from each other, we might tell ourselves the story that they are strangers, or that they are a couple who have just had massive row.
I think that the best stories are told in such a way that allows individual imagination to fill in the gaps of what is presented to us. Because then they become our stories. They become unique to us and our life experience. As a result they come to mean more to us and they become part of our individual culture. In essence, I think stories make us who we are. I like to tell stories with music. When I was young my Dad decided that he wanted to learn to play the guitar so that he could play songs to me and my brother at bedtime. I don't remember being particularly fascinated by the guitar back then or by the singing, but interestingly enough I remember all those songs that were played to me. And it's not so much the melodies I remember, but the stories they told... So when I eventually started writing songs, I suppose I was always more concerned with the story than with a melody or a style. Because I think that melody, harmony, rhythm and lyric are storytelling tools rather than the heart of a piece of music. We are, first and foremost emotional, irrational beings. The research has been done, that's literally how our brains work. The instinctual, emotional part of our brain (or the lizard brain) operates at an impossibly fast rate. Before our thinking, rational mind can blink, our lizard brain has told us what to do and we're already primed to act on it. In other words human beings are programmed to feel before we think. I think that a good story should reflect that hard-wired programming. After all, it's what our audience are programmed to react to. If we want our audience to really think about the rationale of what our story is trying to say, we better make sure that they are FEELING it first. This isn't to say that we should all write work that stands on the top of a building and shouts "FEELINGS! Look at all these FEELINGS I have! LISTEN TO MY FEELINGS!" But that we should tell stories that engage our emotions. As a company, we at Paper Balloon tell original stories for young people. We don't do adaptations of existing work. There are plenty of companies out there in the world adapting work and doing it very well. We wanted to do something different. We wanted to create new stories for a new audience and in order to do that we have had to learn about how to build stories. We don't believe that we've nailed it yet. We've learnt a huge amount about it, we know alot of the theory and technique that goes into story making and we've put that theory into practice in the creation of our work... but we're not done with the journey just yet. Having said that I thought I'd share with you three of the things that I've learnt about story building over the years... I hope you find them useful... and obviously, being a storyteller, I'm going to use a big fat metaphor to do it. 1. Find the heart of your story... Step into the trees. Don't worry if you don't know exactly where you're going immediately. Don't let that stop you from beginning your journey. The journey through the woods will teach you everything you need to know, and you'll only find the real heart of your story when you sit down in that beautiful sun dappled glade halfway through the forest. When you do find it, that uniquely shaped piece of wood, half hidden amongst the bluebells, pick it up. Take a good long look at it, admire it. You're going to be spending a fair bit of time with it in the future... and don't forget to take it with you when you leave the glade. If you drop it somewhere along the way, make sure you pick it up. If you finally get out of the trees and realise it's fallen somewhere along the path, turn back, retrace your steps and find it. You won't regret it. 2. Learn the tools of your craft... When you looked at that strangely shaped piece of wood amongst the bluebells you saw something there. Now that you look at it again you can see it still, an image in the unique contours, the nooks, the twists and turns of the grain. You can see it but other people need to be able to see it too. Take your whittling tools... hone and refine the edges, the corners, bring out the curves and smooth down the rough surfaces. But careful not to try and reinvent it into something that it never was. Your job is to bring that rough image into focus. To make it beautiful so that other's may see what you can see. Learning how to use the tools of your craft will not diminish the magic of creation, it can only ever enhance it. 3. Trust your audience... That unique piece of wood that you found in the glade in the heart of the forest is finished. The images that you saw when you first looked at it all those years ago have been brought into sharp relief by careful refining and honing. The carvings are beautiful, you have hollowed out the centre, you have bored holes upon it's length at careful intervals. You have made a musical pipe. The strong structure is there, the potential is there... but it won't truly be finished until your audience blows the air of their imagination into the pipe. Trust your audience to do some of your work for you. Your job is to give them the opportunity to feel. Their job is to take that opportunity. Everyone is a born storyteller, all we have to do is decide what story we want to tell and tell it. |
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