Went to see Hairy Maclary and Friends at the Opera House Playhouse.  A much younger audience than we’re aiming for, obviously, but lots of fun.  I find I am already assessing shows differently.  As a scriptwriter, I’ve always tended to analyse how a theatre production is put together – in fact, my sister won’t go to the theatre or movies with me anymore because she says I spoil the illusion by dissecting ‘how they did it’ afterwards!  But my focus has been on what you might call the storytelling aspects of the craft.  Now I find I’m looking more closely at staging and costs.

For example, the Hairy Maclary show has seven cast members.  That’s big for a kids’ show, but was forced on them by the books.  They had to have all the dogs on stage at once, because the stories require that.  That makes six actors, plus at least one human (Miss Plum).  Although the dog actors take other parts (Sam Stone, Schnitzel Von Krumm’s family, bees), it’s still quite a hefty cast for a one-hour production.  This means that the ticket cost is quite high:  between $29 and $49.  That might not seem a lot compared to an adult play, but imagine if you have four kids – for the good seats, that’s $245; for the worst seats, it’s still $145.  A lot to pay for an hour.  I’d love to know if other venues charge as much for this show, because the Opera House can charge a premium.

There was also live music – a guy on a keyboard, who also operated a bubble machine at the end.  Now this was interesting – not having pre-recorded music allowed the actors to interact more with the audience, as this show was very much the ‘behind you, behind you!’ style of kids’ performance, where there is no fourth wall and the kids are part of the action.  With pre-recorded music, it would be very hard to do a lot of this, it seems to me.  Less improvisation is not necessarily a bad thing, however.

The stage design was beautifully flexible.  Nothing came down out of the flies except some spiders, who could just as easily have been on a long pole.  So the show doesn’t need a proscenium arch theatre.  The scene changes were done by the on-stage cast rolling scenery around or pulling it out.  Simple and effective and completely acceptable to an audience raised on Playschool, which does the same thing even more simply.  You could stage this on a dais in a shopping mall; you could stage it in theatre in the round; you could stage it in a church hall; you could stage it in a school playground, if you had to.

So much to think about!

It is quite hard to find a copy of Into the Woods! But the lovely City of Sydney library has a VHS, it appears, so it’s a trip to the city for me this week.  I am doing quite a bit of research (hehe).  This requires me to go to lots of musicals and musicalish shows.  No, really, it does.

So last week I went to Annie and Tubular Bells for Two, and last night saw La Soiree at the Opera House.  What a fantastic show!  Athletic, sophisticated, hysterically funny and beautifully staged.  But definitely not for children!

I’m very excited.  Yesterday I had my first formal meeting with Neil Gooding and Peter Rutherford about turning my kids’ book, Victor’s Quest, into a musical.  I’m doubly excited because Neil and Peter are letting me have a go at writing the play and the lyrics (which is, interestingly, called a ‘book’).

Neil Gooding is the producer:  check him out here.

Peter Rutherford is the composer:  you can read about him here or, better yet, go to iTunes and download his recent shows, Love Bites and The Hatpin.  Then you’ll know how lucky I am to be working with these two.

While I started writing as a scriptwriter for kids’ TV, I’ve never written for the stage except doing Readers’ Theatre adaptations of a couple of stories.  So the process will be fascinating.

Already there are surprises.  My first job is to do an outline.  Although we’ve agreed to aim for a 75 minutes performance without an interval, Neil and Peter don’t need me to stick to specific timings in my outline or first draft.  Musicals, they tell me, tend to be too long to start with, then get whittled away in workshops and tryouts until only the bits that work are left.

This is sooo different to the way I usually work, in either script or prose.  TV scripts are so precisely timed that there is no wiggle room, and woe betide a writer who turns in a script which is too long.

When I write books, I tend to write more in my second draft than my first, so I have found it best to aim a little below – if my contract says 100 000 words, I will aim for 90 000 in my first draft, knowing I will have to add things once the editor gets to it.  I have a tendency to not explain things well enough, or not to flesh them out enough, and editors frequently ask me for ‘more on this section, please’.

So I find the idea of writing more than you need and then cutting back quite challenging!

Peter is looking at the book now to see which bits ‘cry out for a song’ – he’ll let me know and I’ll incorporate that into the outline.  Some are obvious, but I was fascinated to hear him say that he liked Victor’s Quest more than Victor’s Challenge for a musical because there were more gaps in Victor’s Quest where Victor is just doing stuff, where the music can come in.  So beware of dialogue, I guess, unless it’s sung!

My tasks:  to write the outline and to watch Into the Woods, Peter’s favourite musical.

I will keep you posted.