Page turn

It is very likely that I will finish writing the second act of MELISANDE this week. There is still a lot of it still to be scored, there are nine musical numbers (including overture) in the first act and nine (including entr'acte) in the second, and although I've already scored the first two numbers in the second act that gives me seven to go.

One of the discoveries Larry and I made during Act II development was that the character of the Page has to serve as the entry point for children.

We came to this idea when we were talking about the musical version of The Secret Garden, and how the story is really about the way adults solve problems but, since children have an entry point into the story through the characters of Mary and Colin, they are able to observe what's going on and begin to understand concepts that might otherwise be incomprehensible.

This changed what I had been doing with the character of the Page, who was formerly a bit of background color, and gave me what might actually be the best song in the show, but we'll get to that when we get to that.

The point of all of this was that I began thinking of MELISANDE as a series of interlocking plotlines that might each attract a different segment of the audience:

• The King and Queen, representing the process of integrating intellect and intuition while directly presenting the problems of managing work and family, may be of most interest to the adults.
• Melisande and Florizel, representing the process of becoming an individual while directly presenting the problem of falling in love, may be of most interest to the adolescents.
• The Page, representing the process of learning how to understand the world while directly presenting the problem of what to do when you make a huge mistake ("and twice as fast every time it's cut!"), may be of most interest to the children.

If this works, on all three levels, then the show works.

This, by the way, is one more reason why The Sound of Music works so beautifully. (Also Les Miserables, Fun Home, Falsettos, Into the Woods, and so on.) Unfortunately, you can't simply say "every show has to have a kid story and a teen story and a grownup story" because then it becomes formulaic and you get people filling in what someone else has discovered instead of figuring it out for the first time with the best person they know in the garden they built together.

Not that that's a metaphor or anything.