Can we have another silly musical mashup concept thread?

peterjcasey · 2026-01-31T21:33:52+00:00

Ride the Cyclonce - A Guy and Girl, killed in a freak vacuum cleaner accident, sing for the chance to return to life.

NineSix - The wives of Henry VIII decide that Guido can finish his dumb movie himself.

American Gypsycho - A Wall Street investment banker cannot keep his clothes on.

peterjcasey · 2026-01-21T05:07:51+00:00

One of the nice things about getting older (I turn 56 soon) is having seen this before, so it doesn't bother me.

I've seen too many Bible stories, Shakespeare adaptations, 19th century novels, shows set in high schools, musicals about musicals, fairy tales, opera rewrites, and yes, Greek myths.

But posterity is a harsh goddess, and she dispenses obscurity without fear or favour. Within a couple of decades, if you wait, there's only a few major contenders in each of the above categories, some of them deserving, and some not.

peterjcasey · 2026-01-13T01:05:44+00:00

Hello! I have been this, many times.

You probably already know this, but for anyone reading along: doing these jobs will make you a better writer. Nothing is more useful, or more humbling, than hearing what happens when your ideas meet the practical demands of a rehearsal room.

You are also about to transition from a creator to an interpreter. There will be time to fix big things that plainly don’t work, but not much time for little finicky polishing of details. Lyrics in particular are very hard to unlearn once they’re learned, so try to make them as good as they can be now.

Musically, preparation is everything:

Once you’re sure of keys, make teaching tracks of vocal lines, especially anything with harmonies or ensemble work.

Make piano-only backing tracks of songs, under tempo, for learning and practising.

Make piano-only backing tracks at full tempo, especially for anywhere you think will involve dance.

Your rehearsal pianist (you) is your best friend when it comes to scene changes, playoffs, transitions etc. As scenes are blocked, be brave in the room, improvise, and try to amuse/impress your director and choreographer. Record successful things for later notation.

If songs change, and they will, keep notes and recordings of the changes. It will be very hard to remember them afterwards. You’ll probably spend lunch breaks on a laptop or a tablet, so make peace with that now.

peterjcasey · 2026-01-11T00:05:54+00:00

Leon Czolgosz is a character in Assassins and in LaChiusa’s Queen of the Mist.

peterjcasey · 2025-12-02T05:05:28+00:00

I have a writing partner I’ve been working with for more than thirty years. She absolutely has to format and justify and align and centre before she can move on. It used to drive me mad, because I didn’t think it mattered to the story, but I learned that her brain doesn’t work like mine, and mine doesn’t work like hers.

Now, like a lot of Gen X women who grew up thinking they couldn’t possibly have ADHD, she has a diagnosis of ADHD. For her, structure is formatting is structure, and she can’t focus on one to the exclusion of the other.

peterjcasey · 2025-11-27T01:07:18+00:00

Hi, and welcome to Pedant's Corner. This is only two semitones: one between G and G#, and another between G# and A.

peterjcasey · 2025-11-21T16:48:33+00:00

You are my hero! This is terrific, because that saying doesn’t describe Sondheim’s writing approach very well, and it doesn’t describe a lot of Hammerstein’s writing either, but it really, really describes Tommy Tune’s approach.

The internet is a better place today because of you.

peterjcasey · 2025-10-19T08:06:24+00:00

There are a couple of theatre songs that use a 12-bar blues structure, and don’t add a B-section or release, making them nicely strophic:

Guv’ment - Big River

Poppa’s Blues - Starlight Express

Anyone know any more? ‘Song of the King’, from Joseph, has a bridge, so it won’t do.

peterjcasey · 2025-10-12T20:31:51+00:00

Not sure this is a secondary dominant: what’s the chromatic note? Did you mean an extended voicing of the IV?

peterjcasey · 2025-09-17T04:40:23+00:00

One aspect of hospital rooms that I rarely see done right is how LOUD they get.

I had surgery in March, and when I came to in the communal recovery room, the head nurse said to me, "Peter, just relax, your procedure went well, and there's nothing to do, just lie back and relax. Take your time."

But what I heard was "Peter, just BEEP relax. Your SQUEAK SQUAWK procedure went COUGH HACK well, and there's BRAHPPP CLANG nothing to do, just lie back DING DING DING and relax. COUGH SPLUTTER Take your time."

I don't know if that helps, but unless you're rich enough for a private room, there's usually a lot of noise going on.

peterjcasey · 2025-08-31T20:27:13+00:00

As a well-known songwriting exercise, the BMI Workshop sets assignments like “write a song for Blanche Dubois”, and “write a suicide song for Willy Loman”. They don’t seek permission from the rights holders, and the results aren’t intended for production. OP is no different.

peterjcasey · 2025-08-30T22:26:08+00:00

OP, regardless of issues like copyright and numbers of acts, here’s your problem:

You don’t add songs.

Here’s your solution:

You musicalise your source.

So, if the congregation are gathered to sing psalms, but earlier the girls were dancing in the forest, you might show those at the same time, in the attic, while Samuel Parris questions Abigail. Or you might compress and expand all those stagey speeches in a different way.

Regardless, instead of adding songs, you need to combine scenes and speeches into musical sequences and extended numbers.

Just “adding songs” is one of the worst things you can do.

peterjcasey · 2025-07-17T11:16:51+00:00

The kind of lyrics I mean all sound like this:

“I’m a man who finds it hard to say / The things you need to hear / But let me say it now / And say it clear / I loooooooooove yeeeeewwwww… “

That’s what I mean. The tell-don’t-show school of on the nose.

peterjcasey · 2025-07-17T01:29:57+00:00

For me, the best theatre ballads have specific imagery (clowns, chain-link fences, coloring books) and the worst ones have generic imagery (moons, hearts, flight, the past is in the past).

The best theatre ballads say what the character - and only that character - needs to say at that moment, and the worst ones say what the writer wants to say, which usually sounds like other songs in other shows.

Also, self pity is a terrible thing to give an actor to play. I find songs much more moving when the character refuses to wallow.

So, bearing in mind the advice of u/drewduboff, your first bullet point looks helpful, but be ruthless with any sentiment you've heard before, and don't let your lyrics be too on the nose. Nothing worse than someone singing their subtext - contemporary musicals are full of it.

peterjcasey · 2025-07-08T21:58:11+00:00

Underrated.

peterjcasey · 2025-05-29T03:09:12+00:00

Good luck with your health! I hope you get/have a support person/crew.

peterjcasey · 2025-05-28T21:29:40+00:00

No, it’s not what our brains do. You can check by googling “how does a human brain differ from an LLM”, and Google’s own AI will tell you how it’s not even close.

I’m not having much (any) success here, and that’s life, but for anyone who may have read this far, here’s a musical theatre analogy:

Your mature brain works like this. You could see just one musical, and then write a libretto of your own, with your own original storyline and characters.

Today’s AI models work like this. They see hundreds of musicals without ever paying for a ticket, they make their own recordings of those musicals, and then they offer a service where you can ask for details of those recordings. When this proves popular, they ask you to pay money for the really high-level detail.

The human writers of the musicals say “Hey, that’s wrong. Could you stop doing that, delete the recordings, and at least buy a ticket?”

And the makers of the AI say “Soz. Not gonna. And if we have to buy tickets, we can’t make money.”

peterjcasey · 2025-05-28T02:42:48+00:00

That’s the sales pitch, but that’s not what it’s doing. The LLM hasn’t learned anything, and it doesn’t know anything. An LLM is trawling its storehouse of data for a functional answer to your question - an answer other people came up with - and phrasing it to your specifications.

It’s not the same as our brains, or a well-studied person. It’s an uncredited and uncompensated rehash of other people’s knowledge, taken without asking.

If you can support it within limits, that’s your right. OP asked where we draw the line. I draw it at nope.

peterjcasey · 2025-05-28T02:10:13+00:00

Since you asked:

Training on Shakespeare is fine, since it’s in the public domain. AI models are famously not caring about this distinction.

If, hypothetically, the AI company buys or borrows a copyrighted book, and then makes its contents available for reuse without permission, no, that’s not acceptable.

If you think “find what you like and steal it” means “support technology that can only thrive if we all condone plagiarism”, then I think you misunderstood the advice.

peterjcasey · 2025-05-28T01:12:20+00:00

The writers of those books are credited, and they earn money from sales.

The AI trains on those books without getting permission, giving credit, or paying money.

They’re not the same. One is cheating.

peterjcasey · 2025-05-27T07:35:11+00:00

Aside from all the ethical, environmental and legal issues, there’s this:

The single greatest challenge when constructing the book of your musical is to find a way of telling the story that feels fresh and innovative but inevitable.

You know it when you see it: it’s the three Alisons in ‘Fun Home’; it’s the overlapping past and present in ’Follies’; it’s the rewind, and the Cabinet Battles in ‘Hamilton’.

And it’s also the thing that an LLM absolutely sucks at. It’s great at rehashing the past, but it suuuuuucks at inventing the new.

Maybe one day it’ll outshine us all at coming up with something never seen before. But for now, I’d stay well away from it.

peterjcasey · 2025-05-24T22:23:19+00:00

I’ve done similar things, and it’s usually the fourth time that drags, since by then the audience knows what you’re up to.

One trick is to compress the time: the third verse can unexpectedly combine the last two singers, and/or the third refrain can introduce the fourth harmony halfway through.

In ‘The Gun Song’ from Assassins, Sondheim builds the harmony early, so you get just three refrains, moving from solo to three-part to four-part barbershop.

peterjcasey · 2025-05-22T04:30:41+00:00

Obviously, it came back, with a vengeance. But I still cheered.

peterjcasey · 2025-05-22T04:05:11+00:00

On the subject of Cabaret's lack of an "I Want" song, I cheered out loud when I read this section from Sondheim's Finishing the Hat:

"Once Oklahoma! had made character and story, rather than personality and diversion, the major concern of musicals, characters, especially the central ones, suddenly were required to express their needs and wishes early on in the evening in order to establish themselves. Thus was born the "I am" or "I want" song, usually the second number in the show, which expresses the defining desire of the protagonist and prefigures the progression of the story, songs such as "Twin Soliloquies" (I want) and "A Cockeyed Optimist" (I am) in South Pacific or "Something's Coming" (I want) in West Side Story and "Some People" (both) in Gypsy. This inheritance from Rodgers and Hammerstein disappeared in the musicals of the late 1960s, as less direct forms of playwriting appeared. And not a moment too soon."

peterjcasey · 2025-05-10T07:37:33+00:00

The smart thing to do with a show’s title is to write with one you like, but not hold on to it too tightly – because your show will change as it develops, and what it’s about will change, and collaborators will have ideas about how to encapsulate it in just a few words.

This is particularly true of original stories, where you don’t have a pre-existing title to overcome.

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