A Musical is Born! - Part 2 - The Leap

January, 2020. 

Now with a script in my hand (or actually, a digital script in my Googledrive), I had to take the big leap and tell someone about it. 

My girls had decided to audition for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which turned out to be a wonderful, delightful show to be a part of. At this point, my girls were not just in love with musical theater, they were in love with CYT Tri-Valley. They had great friends and they were learning and growing and having fun. 

My girls and I after a night of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

My role as a parent volunteer for Tom Sawyer was to hem, fix, and organize costumes. No one in CYT Tri-Valley knew about my musical background, which was perfect. I sat and sewed and quietly observed how the organization ran, and found myself falling in love with CYT Tri-Valley as well. I also watched the directors at work, and I had the feeling that they were artists who liked to try new things, which was exactly the kind of people I needed. My musical could be a good fit for CYT Tri-Valley– if they would be willing. I drummed up my courage and approached the Artistic Director during a rehearsal one day. 

"Would you ever consider putting on something completely new?" I asked her.

She was surprised. The question was most unexpected. But she was open to the idea, and told me to send her the script. The next thing I knew, a CYT Tri-Valley board member had also read the script. Then another board member, "KW", the one who was also directing Tom Sawyer, read the script.

But, a few weeks after the excitement of seeing my girls on stage in Tom Sawyer, Covid lockdown happened. Live theater (and most everything else) shut down. I hardly thought about my musical for the rest of 2020 as I worked on other projects. It wasn't until 2021 and the talk of teaching classes that Five Children and It came up again. KW told me that I should workshop the musical in a class. I didn't know exactly what that meant at the time. I soon learned that it's a way of working through a script with actual actors in order to improve it.

So, in November 2021, I nervously sat in a classroom of 18 students and passed out my script. I started off by assigning different students to read each part. As they read, I listened for any awkward lines that caused stumbling. Then at the end of each scene, we discussed changes that needed to be made, before moving on to the next scene with new actors reading. I braced myself for the criticisms, but everything the students said was constructive and beneficial. There were so many little details that I had forgotten (like what happened to the nuts?!) There was even a very big detail that I had completely forgotten to mention, and that was that the family was going on vacation, not moving to the countryside! And the class as a whole agreed that the ending was not very satisfying, so I went back and rewrote the ending. The students had so many great suggestions that their collaboration only made the whole musical better. 

A few weeks later, I played the music to the class for the first time. I had held back on playing the music because I wanted to focus on the story itself and not let the music be a distraction. I was even more nervous that day than on the first day– the recordings were rough, my singing was just-okay, would they like my songs?! But my nervousness subsided with each listen.

"I can picture the scene in my mind," said one student after hearing the prologue.

"Oh, it's so pretty," uttered another student after one of the solos.

The students clapped after each and every song, and cheered for me when one recording didn't work and I had to perform the song live. By the time we finished listening, we had two songs that we wanted to perform as a class, and I was inspired to add more choral parts for the class to sing. The musical was still developing!