Why did I write this thing?

Well, the main reason is to help the PA Players (Pembroke Academy, Pembroke NH) save money that they would otherwise have spent on paying royalties for a "known" play.

It all began in 2005 -

After the Sound of Music play was over (or just about over, my memory's not that good) and Mr. Mehegan (PA's french/drama/media club teacher) was talking to me about doing Romeo & Juliet. He wanted to have just the balcony sticking out past the curtains with no visible support. I thought that was a cool idea and then mentioned, maybe he could have a "room" for one of the scenes (I've never seen the play so am not aware of what would be needed on stage as a set piece) under the balcony.

Well, after some more talk, I went home and started thinking about the set. Somehow, a tavern came to mind with a bedroom upstairs (I have designed some medieval fantasy floorplans of castles, keeps & dungeons in the past, so I kinda gravitate towards those things). So I started doing some sketches, and the sketch turned into a 2 week period where I made the first version of the stage set - to a 1" equals 1' scale - around the size and limitations of the PA auditorium stage.

EDITED: Here's some pics of the original model...





EDITED: There's also a 3rd model based on the 2nd model. It's mostly the same except I extended the stair area and added a 'corridor/hallway'. The actors voted on using set design #2.


I added 'figures' from pics of other PA Players productions to help me get a better idea of stage set size & placement.
Ok, back to my 'story'...

While I was making the model, I started coming up with a story about people in a tavern. Pretty limiting if you think about it, one set, no possible chances of set changes. And to top it off, I've never written anything before (except songs, I'm a songwriter) so I've no idea of the "structure" of what a script needed to look like!

So, here I have a reasonably cool looking set piece that I'm pretty sure can be constructed within 2 weeks (It took 3 weeks or so, about 60 hours total building every night after rehersals and on weekends. Some days I came in and did some things just before school ended). I've got a basic idea of the play (people in a tavern...), and well, I like comedy. I'm a fan of Monty Python, The Monkees, Jerry Lewis, Carol Burnett, etc. and that 'style' of humor.
I'll make it a comedic situation!

I've written a few songs in my time (well over 100 over the years. I play guitar, bass & drums - been in bands, etc...), so I decided to write some songs to put in it - it must be a musical then! A musical comedy about people in a tavern (must be in medieval-ish times then...).

So far, so good.

I didn't like the original set and I needed to do something to make it more 'real' in my head, so I reprinted the design in full color and rebuilt the model and added lights and took pictures. That helped a lot because I could just stare at it in the dark for hours all lit up (or until the batteries ran down) and get a feel for what goes on inside - much like a child lying under a lit xmas tree - one of my favorite things I still occasionally do, until people come home and wonder why there's a strange man lying under their tree...;>)

Firstly I envisioned that the Tavernkeeper had a Wife and they had a daughter (Lily). Then there had to be customers and the tavern was in a coastal fishing village (which turned the customers into Fishermen. My wife and I love Mt. Desert Island in Maine and vacation there whenever we can. Our last time was in 2004 so I was able to 'remember' the 'atmosphere' being still 'recharged' from the memories).
And they go there everynight to drink their cares away.

What are their cares? The usual stuff we all have, taxes, long days at work, etc. So I needed a bad guy which in the beginning was going to be the Baron of the province they are in (which eventually turned into the Baron's son).
Right there, I've got a reason to write a song for the play! And being a comedy, it would have to be a fun song with happy/silly words & music.

I'm going to jump ahead of myself here talking about this.
So I have a tavern with ale drinking, hard working Fishermen in it and the tavern is in a coastal fishing town.
What to write a song about?
Fish of course!

I was planning on doing a spin/rip off of Pythons 'spam' song and that way I could work the Wife into the song. But the spam song was in an 'eatery' with customers! So, I needed some customers to come into the tavern, they needed a reason to come in that would 'help' with the song. So I've got this neat idea for a song and it'll involve the 'regulars' plus the Wife, plus the hungry customers with a reason to go in (which turns into a short subplot about their anniversary allowing for some funny bits to be put in). As you can finally see, the Wife never made it into the song.

Well, I had yet to write anything down or start any songs. So I was looking at the model and wanted to do something with that upper 'bedroom' overhang. I thought it would be cool to have Lily up there singing and to have the Fishermen below singing. But there were (originally) four fishermen and only one Lily, so I gave her some friends that came into the tavern and went upstairs.

I'd like to take a moment and say it was VERY important to me to try and give all the actors something to do and to try and make them interact with each other as much as possible. During songs and during those speaking parts that make up all the other bits of the play. The songs HAD to tell something about the characters and advance the storyline!
The songs also 'give' the audience background - visually - about the characters via the way they 'act' and 'react' when singing.

So with that in mind, I wrote a song for Lily (with just the bare building block idea of the play) which included her friends and then I moved them downstairs during the song which meant I'd need to involve the Fishermen and, what the heck, it sort of turned into a boys vs girls song, so of course, I needed to have Lily's mom in there too! Which led to a final act of adding an extra closet & 'escape' stairway to the set model bedroom as a way for those characters to 'leave' that area when the Storyteller 'ends' that part of his tale, and no, I didn't see that coming... just goes to show...

That song kind of 'set' the stage of my attitude for the play, interaction and involvement between the characters - in and 'outside' the songs.

I then wrote the scene that the song takes 'place' in.

I then sat down and 'built' the play in my head (the basic storyline). Then I wrote down the scene titles in order of appearance and thought of the types of songs that would need to go into certain scenes, ones that would allow me to expand the story and 'history/attitude' of the characters singing them.
So I had the idea, I made the model, I wrote a scene, I wrote the songs.

Then,

Then, I sat and wrote the script.
I learned a lot about the characters while I wrote it.
I learned that all was not going as I planned. It seemed that certain 'ideas' I had in my head didn't work out well because, frankly, the characters went off and did & said other things! It became almost like watching a movie in my head and I just typed out what they said & what they did. My original plan was to have this 'story within a story' take place over a few 'nights' - script time. And here's the main thing I learned from the production, write the script as if your watching it from the audience's point of view! Not from a camera lens...;>)

But it turned out to be weeks in the story.
But that helped because it just made it easy to come up with more ideas and I hope I was able to inter-twine certain things and come up with a great ending that will catch a lot of people off guard.

Which, I guess is the fun part about writing, because that's what I had.
I never really thought I could finish it and what's more, I never thought I'd do it in the first place!
That's another thing I 'learned', is that I started out figuring I'd do just funny stuff, and then I started writing some very sad and mean parts (for the bad guys in the play) which again, just seemed to be exactly what they'd do and say.
I started to write a comedy and then I added pain, suffering, sadness, yelling, death and wall mounted stuffed singing fish.

Sounds just like a Python movie to me, but I also have lovely poignant moments too. Hopefully mothers will cry, men will laugh and pee themselves and the younger types (teenagers) will see some of themselves here & there.

The overall 'premise' of the story - the Storyteller coming in to tell the story - allowed me to play with the time frame, to 'jump in and out' as needed so having scenes 'interlock together' wasn't necessary. I was then freed up to jump ahead or backwards in time - the Fairy Godmother scene comes to mind, using that to give some brief history and interject some additional comedy, a song and some dancing - as needed.

Another fun thing I did was to 'blur' the two storylines a bit that will hopefully make the audience a bit confused for a few moments here & there.
Are the Fishermen in the main story or are they 'now' in the Storyteller's story? Those moments are but a few seconds but I hope someone will go, "Wait a moment!?!" and think about what they just saw before the next line hits them.

Well, that's about all my 'wisdom' rolled up in a few words. Except that this whole thing was initially idealized as a trilogy. Here's some ideas for part 2:

I think it'll be wintertime and around Xmas. Bethany and Squire Tim are making plans for their wedding (they fell in love during a few seconds in the first play - love at first sight and all that sort of rubbish), and someone from the first play is coming back to haunt the tavern, for revenge naturally.
It'll give me a reason to tell what happened to William and Lily 'after' the end of the first story.
Maybe the Golden Spatula and that tarnished silver medallion have something 'magical' in common.

Then I'll go off and write part 3, but that won't be in the tavern... I believe there's some foundation ruins near the lower end of Echo Lake on Mt. Desert to which a nice campfire would be a good spot for a wandering Storyteller to tell a tale...