:: Jon’s Bliggy Blig Blug Blog ::

Today was a less than interesting rehearsal really. Tomorrow we are having a run-through, so I will hopefully have more to say on that then.

I have started to move forwardish on my writing. It’s a lot harder than it looks, or sounds for that matter. The problem is that I write lyrics for structures fairly well.

I can take a standard song structure, for instance Verse Chorus Verse Chorus Bridge Chorus structure, and insert lyrics for it very easily and it doesn’t always become a great song, but a song nevertheless. In musical theatre writing, I think to have to be more open to a free structure. Possibly a run on verse that never turns into a chorus, or a part of the song that is repeated several times. Some songs are monologues that have a melody to them. It’s very hard for me to grasp the concept. It’s really easy for me to understand the concept and to know what I need to do, but its hard to actually hold it and use it to my advantage in writing the music.

I have always kept a piece of advice close to me since I started writing, and that is that sometimes you have to throw your favorite things away and go with something else. I notice that when I am watching Glory Days develop. Nick has written some beautiful lyrics, and some of them have been scrapped for the sake of the story working the way it needs to. In one song, I used to have this favorite lyrics that had a great, almost immediate rhyme scheme that works so well in an earlier recording and it is not in the final version of the song. I start to find it tempting to speak up in discussion about music, but have to hold my tongue unless I’m invited to say something or to contribute. I understand that I am an observer and not a part of the actual team, even though the process is a more comfortable and familiar process when compared to the processes I went through at Mary Wash. I’m here to learn more about the work and to make some connections. I have started to make friends the last couple of weeks and we’re all connect via the Facebook and MySpace phenomena, so that’s a great start for networking. I’m also learning more about these talented composers and writing teams, and I am realizing that I’m an email from these people that I can glean wisdom and experience from and that is a great comfort to me right now.

Today I went to my first rehearsal since Christmas. Finally I’m feeling a sense of acceptance amongst the cast and creative team. Today we ran a few songs and blocked some scenes. The process is hilarious. I’m so glad to be a part of it. I’ve swapped some of my work with the composer of the show and he said that one song in particular really stuck in his head. Funny because I see this guy as loving any time signature outside of common time, and that is my only song outside of common time.
I haven’t discussed with him the idea for the musical I am starting to work on, but I will eventually. The process of this musical is so involved for a writer that I can understand that. It makes me want to have my show ready to workshop so that I can listen to people singing my stuff. I’m just so far away from that.
Anyway, we’ve reached the period of time where we’re actually doing some real work and I’m starting to see it shaping up. I’ve noticed that I spend almost more time watching processes of shows than I have actually been in shows. It’s fun to sit around and realize that I am in this great situation. Thanks to Eric and Nick I am able to be there and see it coming together and know what is and what once was and what will be in the future. I’m also making friends and learning more.
The fun thing to note is that when I hear Eric talking to the actors, I hear all the things I’ve been hearing for years and it makes me feel confirmation that we really have a department at Mary Washington that prepares students to work in the real world of theatre. I feel so much more confident in my learning and I also watch the process at Signature and find that I could be part of this cast for real. It would be hard work, but it would be doable.

I started observing the rehearsal and building process of Glory Days, a new musical by Nick Blaemire and James Gardiner. I found out about the musical earlier in the year during Signature Theatre’s summer program, Overtures. Oddly enough the writers of the musical were also students of this program a few years ago and brought forth the idea of the musical while in the program to Eric Schaeffer. It was apparently a good idea because here we are watching it come together in less than a month when the show opens on January 15th at Signature Theatre.
Being a songwriter on a different level, this has helped me to understand more completely a style of songwriting I have never given much thought to until now. These songs each tell a story in a way that is almost lost to me because Nick’s style is so mature writing-wise. His musical ability to hear the notes that aren’t working and his ability to change them to a more interesting sound is fascinating to me.
They added new songs to the books today and I love them. Nick’s changes to one from the previous version are brilliant and so very different that its a different song (with the same feelings).
We talked about one of them as being a song that can affect you even when its taken out of context. I agree completely.

I’m enjoying the process enough. It gets slow at times, but I feel like things will pick up once the music is learned and we are in staging and such. I can’t be there for the next two days, but I am looking forward to getting back into it on Saturday. I feel so detached, because I don’t know anyone really well at all. Eric the most from the summer, and Nick second from speaking with him about music and meeting him at the concert reading and open house. I hope that in the next few weeks I have made some good friends there. I’m not 100% sure, but its seems that I am one of the older guys in the room and have not even begun to do as much as some of these guys have. Nick just got out of a show, these other actors have done so much already touring and whatnot and the last show that I was in was Bat Boy at Mary Wash. It’s not discouraging that they have been so successful, because I was in college an abnormal amount of time, but it is something to think about. Not only will I be gleaning wisdom from an acting standpoint, but I will also be gleaning wisdom from a writer’s standpoint.

A few weeks ago, I was involved in one of the more powerful experiences I have had in my life. I got to experience full on what the life of professional actors is like and surprisingly (or not so much) I didn’t want to leave, and I really really miss it. I was accepted into Signature Theatre’s 2 week intensive musical theatre training program working with names like Eric Schaeffer, Jane Pesci-Townsend, Karma Camp, Andrew Long, Emily Skinner, Marc Kudisch, and many more instructors from New York and DC. During the program I was presented with a piece from a new musical called “Glory Days” being produced by Signature Theatre at the beginning of 2008. The song was called “Open Road” and I absolutely fell in love with the piece and can’t get over the words and how powerful it is. Personally I think that I performed it well, sang it beautifully and understood the song completely and I believe I got that across to the people I was working with also. It’s something easy to relate to, so I took the next opportunity to hear more. This past weekend I went to Signature to see Glory Days’ staged concert reading. I took one of my best friends, David, with me because I figured he would enjoy it. I don’t know, I knew I loved that one song, but something told me that I wouldn’t be as impressed with the rest of the show and the music and the writing (musically or otherwise) and I was surprised to find out that the rest of the show is outstanding. There was a pleasant complexity to the harmonies and the words and the story and it was exactly what you want to see this day in age from a musical. It was beautifully written and if I loved it as much as I did as a staged reading, I can only imagine what it will be like as a full production.
I mean, I sat down this evening with two of my best friends from high school this evening, two days after the show. And yeah, we’ve changed, we’ve grown apart, and yet, there is an extraordinary sense that we have hung out every night since we last saw each other. They are both married to each other now. When we were in high school, we used to come to the same bar and play open mic nights (we were only allowed in because we were playing when we were only 16 and 17) and we didn’t know too much about what we were doing, we just knew a few songs and we got up there and played them, and we got applause because we were kids, and, for the most part, people are forgiving and accepting that we aren’t seasoned musicians.
Those were like our Glory Days and just when I thought that they were just memories and that they were easily forgotten, my friend, Jenna pulled out her iPod and she had a photo album of only about 40 photos of various things (several wedding photos, several pictures of her and Jay’s dog and amongst all the best memories of their lives and the things that she believed were important enough was one photo taken back then (before everyone and their moms had a digital camera and only one of your 10 friends carried one around) was a photo of all of us on the stage at Orbits (before it was The Colonial Tavern [or as we call it, "The Green Orbits" because it used to be red]) playing some Dave Matthews song no doubt.
That was a good feeling to know that some of those things are kept around and that even though we haven’t seen each other in years that those are still pieces of us.
That was part of the story of Glory Days. My mind is settling to the idea that I want to get involved in writing a musical. I’m looking in every direction for something to write about, and I’m going to things like this to find inspiration of sorts and see in what ways other new playwrights are going with their ideas. I am going to be getting in touch with Nick Blaemire, the guy who wrote the music and lyrics of Glory Days and sitting down with him hopefully in the next few weeks and picking his brain a little bit abut what he did to get it where it is. It was one of the most sobering and eye-opening things I have seen in a while and it wasn’t even a full production. I see that show doing huge things. And having sung a song from it before seeing it I had an idea of what was going on and loved and appreciated it even more. The guys that performed it were great too. The characters are only 19 years old (maybe younger, maybe older) and the story still related to the elderly couple sitting in front of me, and the group of teens sitting in the front (maybe not even out of high school) and me (a summer out of college) and my friend (in senior year of college) and everyone in the room. It spoke to everyone, because High School is still one of those things you don’t forget, it was the worst of times, and the best. We found a lot of ourselves there…okay I’m like stating obviosities and not making a lot of sense.
I’m toying with the idea of writing a “Last Five Years” type musical with a feel like the movie “The Last Kiss” but not with the same storyline. It will just be one of those stories where you didn’t expect the story to end in such a disaster and you don’t know how to feel. More on that one day. I noticed my last post was more than half a year ago now and I’m a big slacker until I experience something worth writing about again and I really should follow through a lot more than I do. We’ll see.

This past weekend I went up to New York with a badly sprained ankle to visit Jess and to see her show. I made an impromptu trip to Broadway to see the matinee of Spring Awakening Saturday afternoon before I went to see Jess’ show in the evening. I fell in love with this musical.
I feel that I have searched a little bit for this one. The guitar heavy orchestrations and the modern musical stylings were so intriguing to me. I really wish I could talk to Duncan Sheik and find out some things about how he had the ideas for these songs and how the orchestrations were made up. It is very possible that he wrote all the instrument parts, but I wonder how possible it is that they had a jam session and built everything around the chord structure and the guitarist said, “Well, I can put a fill here and do this.” or the violinist said “I think this will work really well here” and the musical was built through the collaboration of these musicians. I don’t know a lot about composing. I write some things, but its stuff like the music in Spring Awakening that made me feel like a speck of dust on the dashboard of the musical world. The songs were beautiful. I was in standing room only and I had to stand through the entire show, but I was unaffected by that, because the songs were so much that it made me wonder, “How can you sit through this show?” I was glad to be standing (despite the sprain).
I am looking into more of Duncan Sheik’s work. The show was done with such genius. Steven Sater took a script that is more than 100 years old and turned it into this beautiful production. I loved the way that the story was told, but my main interest in any musical work is the music. I’m a musician first, actor second, and trying to develop my creativity into writing thirdly. We’re moving into a new age of musicals and this one is a breakthrough. To take such a modern take on music and put it on the stage was a bold and ultimately smart move. And to have adapted a piece that was so controversial in its time, and didn’t resurface until so recently in its original form makes this production even more amazing to me. I hope this one stays around for a long time.

I went to The Shakespeare Theatre this past Sunday with Tori to see their rendition on Love’s Labour’s Lost. It was interesting to be watching a show that I performed not 2 months ago. I often caught myself mouthing the lines and saw bits and pieces where my lines were cut or the King’s lines were distributed more evenly between the other three. The idea for this production was fantastic. It was set in the 70′s with the King playing an Guru type character and the three lords playing 70′s rock stars. Berowne played Electric Guitar, Dumaine played Rhythm Guitar and Longaville played Drums with the King occasionally joining in with the tamborine. They put all the longer sonnets to music in the letter scene. I can’t really put into words how cool the scene was.
I also saw some things that troubled me. There were moments that I feel were not realized fully by the actors. Moments that seemed to come rather easily to our cast members seemed to be misunderstood or not understood at all. The problem with live theatre and me is that I can’t remember a specific moment where this happened, but I know it did. There were lines that were supposed to be funny that were not said correctly and on top of that, if there were funny moments, the actors did not hold for their laughs. I know many moments during the nine worthies scene in which there are funny lines one after the other and the actors were plowing through. To be honest, the show is not one of Shakespeare’s best works and being a part of the show at one time, I know that unless you are well versed in the language, things that are supposed to be funny are boring. This scene with the nine worthies is funny and I think was a great opportunity to get some laughs from the audience and to give us a break from the droning monologues delivered by the King and Berowne and it went by faster than some of the longest speeches in the show.
To be fair, I had a bigger positive feeling about the show than a negative feeling. I think I used to go away from a show harping on the bad, and I find myself more an more leaving talking about the good and I think that may be a sign that I’m growing up as an actor. I loved that they incorporated music into the show more and the actors played isntruments. The actor playing Longaville learned to play the drums, and what’s more, he learned to play them and sing at the same time, which any instrumentalist can tell you is NOT an easy thing to accomplish. All in all, I was impressed and its the first time I have been to see a show that I had acted in at one time and be able to compare what this professional actor was doing to what I did.

Ok, this isn’t a very long blog post because I have a lot to do, but I wanted to make sure people got to hear this thing. I had a lot of fun producing it. This is just the start everyone. CHECK OUT MY STORY!!

ALSO, I ADDED SOME THINGS TO THE “MUSIC MUSIC MUSIC” POST A FEW POSTS DOWN, SO CHECK THAT OUT TOO!

So, I am finally done with the final project. I put all the finishing touches on it today and have a hard copy in my hand right now. I’m so relieved to have all the work done and to know that I’m almost out of my Junior year. This project felt like a huge weight, but having it done is a huge reward. It’s not perfect in my opinion, but I’m very critical of my own work, and normally if the music isn’t just right, I’ll compeltely beat myself up over it, and let it completely consume me for the next few days. I’m not going to do that. There’s too much going on to perfect the project. I’m also not a professional sound designer or anything, so I have a very limited idea of what I’m doing. It sounds great though on a real CD player and with good speakers. I was worried about the quality, but I’m going to let it go for the sake of sanity and the fact that some people may not even notice. I learned so much new stuff about the program I used too, and I can see the progression of my experience with the program and the cleanliness of the audio toward the end and the beginning, which I re-recorded. I will definitely be making more similar recordings some day.

I started writing out a real script today. All the planning is done, and now I need to actually execute the ideas into recorded audio. I found out the best way to record and the best place to record. I’m getting a little scared about using my own music right now because I have not yet gotten to a place where I feel like I’ve mastered my mixing skills with my guitar and vocals. We’ll see, I still have time. But, anyway, reason for this post. I’m writing out the script for my story and remembering all these things that happened SO many years ago. I had to go back to the “root” of the path that I’m on right now and it was weird digging back that far. Haha. I mean, now I have all this blogging and back-ups of the stuff I’ve done through this process, and will probably continue to document a lot of my life from here on out, so that feeling is probably not going to be as frequent. Alright, well I thought I wanted to blog a lot, but I’m actually pretty tired.

So, right now I’m brushing up on some guitar stuff, just instrumental right now, to use as background music. I realize that I have different talents that can contribute so much to this project and the different stories within the acts of my overall project. I mean, I have a whole segment about my start and love of songwriting which opens a very great opportunity for my own music. I’m going to enjoy this part the most. Unfortunately, I broke a few strings last night and have to go out and buy some new ones, restring and tune before I can start recording. I also have this new organ that has an output so I can record music straight off of that to the recording equipment. I need more space. Physical space. It seems to be a problem in every aspect of my life. I need a bigger room, I have too many instruments and too much equipment now and with the idea of rerecording some of my music and wanting to get serious about voiceovers and this career I’m trying to pursue, I need to have an organized area to do all these things. The townhouse isn’t lending itself much space and the department has spaces that I could use, but I’m not going to ahve the access like I do now in the summer where I would be using more of my free time to do these things. Lots to think about, lots to do and not a lot of time.
Below are some samplings of my music work up to now and things that made it into the final project.
Written 4/23/06
*This little ditty was written to bring a feeling of an outro to the entire project. I feel it served its purpose.
Written 4/20/06
*This one was written to give a bit of an uptempo feel to the project toward the middle of the beginning of the project. I love this tune.
Less Traveled Road
*This is a part of an entire song that I wrote Spring of 2005 and I used it in my final project as background with vocals. Hope you enjoy it. It’s one of many songs that I have written and recorded myself, and although, not entirely proud of the sound quality or the mixing, it served its purpose for the project and showed off my voice a little bit too. When I get up the money to re-record in a professional studio, I will post a newer version.