I Know It's Today

I know it's today - because it is today...Today is the day that I get back into blogging. I started the year with a lofty goal to post one blog a week...but when I couldn't do that I just didn't do it. And I kept not doing it because now I've already failed, what's to stop me from failing again. But I was reminded of the quote "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly" and so here we are, making a bad blog that probably won't get updated as much as I want it to and will probably be more ramble then I would like...but it's a blog and I want to do it, which makes it worth doing even if it's bad. (And it will be bad because I intend to word vomit and then post with basically no editing because I have a fast flowing stream of consciousness that just needs a place to get out)

Why do I want to write this blog? As a young female composer with larger than life dreams, it's hard to find examples of people who do what I do and even harder to find details about the early days of them starting out. Sure Jeanine Tesori went on a personal artistic retreat and wrote the beginnings ofViolet, but I want the nitty gritty of the slog that starts when you first decide to write a musical and then never really stops. As my favorite composer Alan Menken once said "The best parts about writing a show are [its] first, second and 10th anniversaries. Everything else is relative levels of hell." As an early career writer I can definitely agree with at least the first bit of it. I love the first discovery of an idea, the first read through, and the first time an audience applauds (very narcissistic, I know...but it's nice for your work to be appreciated). However, the rewrites, and the rewrites, and the rewrites are awful. Not the kind of awful that makes me want to quit, just the kind of awful that makes me want to work harder so I can get back to the performances and the collaboration and the sharing that only happens in a rehearsal room or onstage.

So...What am I working on?

1. Current project: A new musical adaptation of the book Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine. I finally got permission to continue workshopping the script and score that made up about 450 pages of my Master's dissertation :) I'm on draft four and the moments that still elude me are the opening song and the love song in act two. So we procrastinate with other projects while the back burner of my brain works on those little numbers.

2. Witch Cakes: My second original musical (don't ask about the first one :P) This musical is a lovely Crucible meets Spamalot retelling of a very small portion of the Salem Witch Trials. This project is written in collaboration with the fantastic Edward Lindem and right now needs m a s s i v e rewrites. I definitely want to lean more into the feminist ideas presented in the show and get away from some of the spoof-y numbers that the early versions of the show. So basically, I want to tear it down and start over :P But that's okay!!! It's just time and brain consuming...so that's also on the back burner

3. The Devils You Know & The Devils You Don't: I wrote this piece as a way to process my experiences with the struggles between passion and practicality. My senior year of college was particularly difficult on a variety of levels and I really just needed a way to tell people what I had gone through without actually telling them, if that makes sense. I think there are important ideas in this piece and I would like to return to it eventually, but right now I think it needs to rest for a while.

4. Unfinished: An apt title for a dream project that started as a freshman short film idea and has blossomed into 45 pages of a play that probably needs to be closer to 60-70 pages. It's Jekyll and Hyde meets Romeo and Juliet in an enchanted fantasy forest. Yeah...all of Brynn's favorite things :) Will it be a screen play, a novel, a musical, a play? Who knows! I come back to it every now and then and each time it grows in a different area.

5. I.Love.You: An attempt at a 10 minute play that will probably be waaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyy longer than I want it to be...This project is about reigning in my brain :P Or it will just be a full length show...TBD