People Like Violence?

Not that this is scientific but I was just sitting here thinking about how I’ve written three musicals in my life, all three stories are cautionary tales or warnings of some kind, each with an outcome distinct from the others, and all very different in terms of their success:

One, Frankenstein, warns that human arrogance will destroy us, and it does; the story ends catastrophically for everyone involved. Our musical was basically stillborn and abandoned. It didn’t work, and we walked away.

Two, The Life & Hard Times of Hester Prynne, says that things are bad but that we can make a better world if we commit ourselves to work for it. This piece was more successful, we did a couple of readings, recorded some of the music. It was in a good place, needed more time and work and support, but the collaboration fell apart and now it languishes.

And three, LIZZIE, a story of violent rebellion, a woman bashes her parents heads in with an axe and transmogrifies into a deity. It’s the most successful of the three by a mile—artistically, professionally, and financially. A hundred-some productions all over the world.

People like quick, unequivocal solutions and happy endings.

Granted, these three works span nearly the whole of my career—from Frankenstein in 1991, Hester Prynne in 2017, and LIZZIE, well, LIZZIE is hard to pin down because it was done and revised and done and revised a few times over 25ish years, but let’s just say the version people know now debuted, sort of, in 2009—which introduces all kinds of variables like differences in my level of experience and skill, changes in the industry, luck, the Zeitgeist (when we first started writing LIZZIE, a big concern was getting the audience to sympathize with an axe murderer—not a problem now). And maybe LIZZIE is just better. I mean it is, but that’s true in part because it (and we) persisted through years of readings and changes and workshops and festival productions and on and on, in other words development. Frankenstein we wrote, rehearsed, and put on stage in the course of a couple months, and none of us had ever done anything like it before. We spent about two years writing Hester Prynne. And LIZZIE was decades in the making.

Just thoughts, for whatever they’re worth.