The Stand-Up Theologian
James Cary, BBC comedy writer, author and touring stand-up theologian is on a never-ending quest to understand comedy, the Bible, culture and the church.
The Stand-Up Theologian
When is a musical not a musical?
Stand-Up Theologian James Cary talks to James Sherwood, musical comedian (or comedic musician?). Together they've been writing a musical, although they could have sworn that they wrote one in 2017 (A Monk's Tale) and again in 2019 (A Turbulent Priest). Apparently not. James and James (you decide which is which) explain how they found out what a musical actually was, and then explain what a musical actually is.
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Welcome to the Stand Up Theologian Podcast. My name is James Carey, and this episode is about musicals. Musical theatre is probably the art form that you will most often hear someone say, I don't like that. That's James Sherwood. I've been writing a musical with him about Thomas Beckett and his murder in Canterbury Cathedral. I guess it's a bit like murder in the cathedral, but with jokes and songs. But I don't think we've got any jazz hands, so there's no cause for alarm. Anyway, we talk about the origin story of the musical and the origin story of our musical called Death in Canterbury and our crowdfunder that we're gonna bang on about a bit towards the end. There's an extended version of this podcast available for members of the Wycliffe Papers. So if you want a 67-minute version of this podcast, then go over to the Wickcliffe Papers and upgrade to Paid, and you'll get access to it and loads of other goodies besides. Anyway, we should crack on. Here we go. Welcome to the Stand Up Theologian Podcast. Today I am having a conversation with a collaborator of mine. We are co-writing a musical called Death in Canterbury, and we will get to the lore of that in due course. But first, let me just welcome James Sherwood, who is a writer, a stand-up comedian, sit-down at the piano comedian, musician, musical comedian, comedic musician, arranger of choral music, and a son of a preacher man, or priest, as your father would probably have called himself. James Sherwood, hello. Hello, hello. How would you describe yourself? Which of those monikers do you prefer?
SPEAKER_03:I don't know. Who's asking? Are you a car insurance company trying to say? Comedy and music does sort of uh mix together in various unexpected ways, and then sometimes you're doing one without the other. Um but yeah, I think sort of comedy and music writer and performer covers everything I could possibly do. Right.
SPEAKER_00:We wrote a musical together, at least we thought we had. Yes. And then we wrote another one, and then we realized that we hadn't. So can you just briefly give the listener an idea of the difference between a play with songs, which we've now done twice, and a musical?
SPEAKER_03:I suppose if it's really properly a musical, then the the the songs are really are really sort of part of the of of the structure of the meat of what's happening, rather than um, oh, wouldn't it be nice if someone sang a song at this point? Yeah. Um even I think even if the song is non-diegetic.
SPEAKER_00:So oh my goodness, that big Klaxon's just gone off there, non-diegetic.
SPEAKER_03:Non-dieget.
SPEAKER_00:So that's why you own the big bucks.
SPEAKER_03:So it's uh uh yeah, so a diegetic song is a song that even in the world the characters are in, is a song. So if the character says, I'm gonna sing a song now, then uh and then does, yeah, um, then that's a diegetic song.
SPEAKER_00:Um so a bit like uh so the musical cabaret or chorus line, where they all sort of step forward and sing a song as if they're auditioning or something like that kind of thing.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, a chorus line's a good example because there's there's definitely some non-digetic songs there is because they um yeah, there there are some songs that exist in that world. Right. But then there are other songs where you if you're being really strict about it, you would say that the characters don't know their singing. Okay, yeah, even if even if you are yourself singing. I think you can have a show that uh has uh even if it's got lots of songs where the characters don't know they're singing, so that the the song feels like it's part of the the way that the show communicates with the audience rather than part of the world of where the characters live. Yeah, um, then you you that can still, I think, be a play with songs rather than a musical because because sometimes I mean sometimes it's just the numbers game, you know. If your song, if your show's got four or five songs in it, it's not really a musical.
SPEAKER_00:So that's what we had. So we we we did a show in 2017 called A Monk's Tale, which was about Martin Luther and the 95 These for the 500th anniversary of the Reformation that toured the UK, and then we followed up with a show called Turbulent Priest, which is about the murder of Thomas Beckett, which we are revisiting, which we will get to uh a little bit later. And again, the songs are kind of funny additions, all not quite in between scenes, but they're not really moving along the plot. So we started doing that before you got into learning how we should have done it or how musicals are actually written. And you always have that barrier or conceit, especially as a sort of a grizzled cynical comedy writer, which is like, what, they're just gonna start singing, are they? How does that how do I justify them singing narratively in a way that a musical is like, oh no, that that ship sailed? It's like, no, no, this is a musical, so it's fine, they can just sing. And it speaks an idea I had probably at some point in the last year, which seems germane to mention, is the fact that it is my belief, and I talk about this in The God, the Bubble and everything, that words are the source code of the universe. So I think they are the fundamental building blocks of reality. God speaks the world into existence in Genesis 1. But words are sounds, and you can't talk about words or use words without using song in a particular way and intonation. And different languages have different sounds, and some some some go right up and down, Italians or you know, Geordie's Chinese dialects also have different sort of things, and things change their meaning based on whether they're whether they go up or whether they go down or anything like that. So words are kind of music anyway, and so I think we've got this really enlightenment view of reality, which is stuff, and therefore we look at a musical and just think, well, this is just nonsense on stilts, they're just bursting as a song. If somebody burst into song in front of me, um, I would be quite perturbed. But actually, you kind of don't, and when people suddenly just go, it's turning into a nightmare, you're not going, well, hang on, why are you singing? Stop it. Is this a song then or what? Music is already ingrained in our brains, and I think we've detached it, and I think the musical is reattaching it. I mean, I know we don't necessarily, I mean, not theologically quite on the same page, but that's not barking mad, is it?
SPEAKER_03:Not at all. And I think that moment of when uh a character starts singing is important in lots of different ways. I I think musical theatre is probably the art form that you will most often hear someone say, I don't like that. Yeah, people won't often say, Oh, I don't like paintings. Uh, I mean, they maybe they can't be bothered to go to galleries very often, and if they do, they're a bit bored. But no one actually says, Oh, not fan of sculpture, you know, or um, don't like songs, or I tell you what, I tell you, I never watch is drama. Um, but you're so much more often than any of those statements here, yeah. Nah, musicals aren't for me. And I I think it's probably the kind of sort of ick feeling that you get when someone who five seconds ago wasn't singing is now singing. Yeah, if that isn't well managed, if if that isn't there for a good reason and isn't well done, then yeah, that's that's a that's a terrible moment. Yeah, uh when a character says, uh, hmm, let me think about that.
SPEAKER_00:You know, it's it can be it can be horrible. And yet, for all the naysayers, some musicals do just fine. Just to get our heads into musicals, I just did a quick uh sort of search for the top top grossing musicals of all time, just to again give ourselves a sense of the world we're in before we talk about you know where musicals even came from. Number one, The Lion King, which is uh estimated grossed eight billion dollars. Um that's just the musical, stage musical, based on a movie. So that's not even including the movie box office, which which did pretty well also.
SPEAKER_03:I wonder I wonder where it comes if you're not allowed to aggregate different countries. Okay, so it's done I imagine a real value of The Lion King is that it's probably running in 30 countries or something.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's interesting, yeah. And I think there's a universality to it as well, isn't it? That it's not because it's the natural world, as it were, or at least the disnification of the natural world. It's made 1.7 billion on Broadway, and the rest, presumably, is worldwide, but it's been running in London for for years and years. Phantom of the Opera is the second longest running musical, and uh that's and that's done pretty well. I think that's up to it's 1.3 on Broadway alone, one for three billion. Then third one on my list is surprising, is Mamma Mia, which is what what is that called? That's like a that's called a songbook musical, isn't it? Um jukebox. Jukebox.
SPEAKER_03:I guess there are two types of jukebox musical. One is where you do all the songs by a particular artist, um, and then the story is also their life story or an aspect of it. Okay.
SPEAKER_00:Um, which would be things like Jersey Boys, okay, which is also on the list that's grossed$1.6 billion.
SPEAKER_03:Whereas Mamma Mia is let's get all the songs from or a good number of the songs from a particular artist, and then let's come up with a story that that can that can support. Yeah, yes, that's right.
SPEAKER_00:And the songs are so wildly famous that you're just sort of thinking, oh, what's oh oh he's gonna be called Fernando, isn't he? Yeah, yeah, okay, right. I mean, I've never I've never seen Mamma Mia. It sounds great.
SPEAKER_03:I mean, I I do like the music of ABBA, but if you think there absolutely is that Fernando moment, I can't remember if it's in the first film or the second. So obviously the first film is is the same story as the uh the stage musical, and then Mamma Mia 2, what's it called? Here we go again. So it's it's an it's an hour lyric, isn't it? But but the perfect introduction of a sequel. There's there are so few musicals where every element has been created anew for that. Um, even even the ones that you might consider to be sort of the highest form of of art um that the musical has achieved. Generally, the subject matter, so the the the script, or as we call it in musicals, the book. The the guy with the highest reputation for artistic achievement within the musicals is probably Stephen Sondheim. And I don't think any of his musicals were based on a brand new idea. I think that they all picked things up from somewhere.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:I think very often it very often it's an existing play.
SPEAKER_00:Um I mean it's the same with Disney as well. All of the Disney movies, I mean, the idea that they own stuff is like, well, no, hang on, these were brothers' grimm stories, these are folk tales, these are you know Pinocchio or whatever. They're they're very Grimms didn't make them up.
SPEAKER_03:They just they just told them really well, yeah. Um packaged them up and published them.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Uh last one on the list, which is a huge success, which is actually quite different from the others, is the Book of Mormon. Uh, which is, you know, a South Park meets Mormonism in a relatively uncharitable way.
SPEAKER_03:Actually, the one of the interesting things about the Book of Mormon is that it is written with a very great awareness of the history and convention of musical theatre.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, let's get on to that then. Tell us a bit about that history, about where this art form comes from, because as I was saying before we started recording, I would have confidently asserted that the first musical was West Side Story. And I have no idea why I'm so convinced of that, other than the fact that a production was done at my school and I was involved in some of the tech. Somebody probably once said it and I just took it as gospel. So that's probably wildly wrong, isn't it?
SPEAKER_03:Did someone say um Westside Story is the first musical, and you went, Oh, interesting, and then you left the room, and then they said that we've done at this school. Um I think Westside's so this was Stephen Sontheim's first job was as lyricist on on West Side Story. Oh, interesting. He he sort of came up with his own sort of um um slangy phrases that was gonna be the the lyrical world of West Side Story. I think because that they wanted it to age better than if it had just been right, here's what everyone is saying on the streets of New York in 1956. Instead, no, let's come, let's use, use our own lexicon, um, which is what we did think about.
SPEAKER_00:Including swearing substitutes, because I'm now thinking back to it, and uh, it's a bit like Red Dwarf invented smeg as their own version of you know other ruder words.
SPEAKER_03:You see, I try set, I'm not an insubordinate man by nature. I try and look back rumor and everything, but it's not easy because he's such a smeghead.
SPEAKER_00:Did you hear that, sir? Lister, do you have any conception of the penalty for describing a superior technician as a smeghead?
SPEAKER_02:You are a smeghead.
SPEAKER_00:And I'm thinking uh here come the jets, and we're gonna beat every last bugging town on this whole in this whole bugging street or something. And you just think the word bugging sounds weird there, but oh maybe that was just how they talked in the 50s. Is that no? I suspect it's just a swear substitute that they've just said this is how we use emphasis.
SPEAKER_03:We have a word, I don't know, probably the first musical by common consent is um is sort of nearly a hundred years earlier than than than you thought. Um I was I I was close. Which is um in I was just looking looking up in a book called The American Musical is 1866. There's a couple of impresarios, one of them's booked a not particularly good play called The Black Crook that isn't doing all that well, and another impresario has booked a French ballet troupe to come and and do excerpts from uh from famous ballets. Um, the ballet theatre burns down. So these these two impresarios sit down and they they devise this show where they do a scene from the play, and then the the ballet troupe come on and do a five-minute ballet, and but with a with some costume and a little bit of characters walking on, they make it sort of feel like the whole thing's one thing.
SPEAKER_00:Wow, that's super interesting.
SPEAKER_03:And I'm sure there are so many legends around it, I'm sure loads of it is uh is made up.
SPEAKER_00:But um that it feels like big cigars were smoked in that meeting as well, doesn't it? Okay, so what do we got here? We got a we got a ballet troupe, we got some two-bit play.
SPEAKER_02:Uh, people will remember us for doing this, yeah, from the pauper's graveyard. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_03:But yeah, and it and it paid off and it and it ran and ran and ran and uh you know ran for sort of ten times longer than anyone. Obviously, theatre had only just been invented in North America, but um right uh so it didn't have that many records to to beat, but it broke them all. So then their musicals carry on. Obviously, operetta already existed at uh at this point, but that was basically that that was much more like opera, but it was sort of funnier and shorter.
SPEAKER_00:Are we talking Gilbert and Sullivan here?
SPEAKER_03:Gilbert and Sullivan and people like sort of Lehar or Le, I don't know how you pronounce it to be honest, Le H because he was French, so it's the Merry Widow. Um, and so it's it it carries on without any kind of big um masterpieces, and at this point, no one's calling it a musical. Musical is not yet a uh a noun, right? They're they're what they're called is musical comedies, oh and mostly they were pretty light. So the when you get into the uh the princess theatre started putting these shows on, and most of those were written by the books were written by a guy called Guy Bolton. The music was by Jerome Kern, his sort of massive name in songwriting, and the lyrics were by PG Woodhouse. Oh so Woodhouse, when he was in America, was contributing to this still pretty embryonic form. So then the the next important thing that happens is uh the kind of the first musical, but it sort of belongs to the pre-history of music, is the the show uh Showboat. Jerome Kern again on the music, and then the first appearance of a guy called Oscar Hammerstein. Um so they they did they did show boat. Um again, I should have all the years to hand, but it's I think that's not something like 1926.
SPEAKER_00:Is that got old man river in it? Is that the that's the song that people remember particularly?
SPEAKER_03:And I think I think the songs in it are mostly to go back to our term, um mostly diegetic. So because they're on a show boat.
SPEAKER_00:So okay, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_03:They're on a on a boat. So the people are singers. I don't know showboat very well. So that that's probably the first show. I mean, the the Black Crook is is a nice sort of historical uh little story. Um show Showboat is probably the first one that's got a real claim to being the first musical. One of the reasons Showboat is interesting is because it's it's not a comedy. So it would have been called a musical comedy because that's the only for it, but it's not it's not structured like that, it's not mostly about making people laugh and and make getting the music to make people smile and get the comedy to make people laugh.
SPEAKER_00:It's sort of folk y, isn't it? I I get the sense that they're probably some of them are existing folk songs because Old Man River feels like it's definitely from the south, and it probably wasn't original. But people like Cole Porter were pretty good at just going, the song The Sun Has Got Its Hat On, for example, from oh, I can't remember which one that was from. But that sounds like a folk tune. It's like, no, no, it was written for that musical. It's like, oh wow, okay. So these guys who are absolute masters at it are able to produce furniture that already looks 300 years old. I mean, that's just incredible, isn't it? So Cole Porter's kicking in around about the 20s, isn't he?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, okay, so Cole Porter's around in this time between Showboat and the end of the Second World War, you've got um you've got Cole Porter, you've got Irving Berlin. Yeah. So there's a few, and you've got George Gershwin. And and the other, yeah, so the best Irving Berlin and like uh and Cole Porter, so sort of and you get your gun, Kiss Me Kate. Um yeah they're they're quite light comedies, but but terrifically well done and with stunning songs.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, and then and usually, and this is the bit where I'm kind of more interested, usually one really funny song, and that's the funny song. So in Kiss Me Kate, it's Brush Up Your Shakespeare, isn't it? That's your lot, really. The rest of it is fairly classic.
SPEAKER_03:And brush up your shakespeare is written. I can't remember what the absolutely correct theatrical term for it is, but it's one because they've got a massive scene change to it. Yeah, and so you send your two comedians from the cast out in front of the of the of the curtain to do a bit until they've finished. And this this reveals the the kind of vaudeville background, the the fact that um there's still a little bit of that, right? This guy's on the cast, so he you get them to do that, she's on the cast, get her to do that. So you you've always got they there'd be a moment where um uh in a vaudeville show where whoever was the biggest number biggest star, there would be bits where they would just sing their their best known song, but there would also be another number in the uh uh in the lineup that uh would be sort of uh a moment with right um where the star would would sort of sit on a stool near the front of the stage, yeah, yeah, yeah. Share an intimate moment with the audience, and that absolutely lives on, yeah, as you get as you get into musicals that actually tell a story. Um, and similarly, yeah, you use the comedians as as comedians. I was um a couple of years ago, I had to look into um the song Um But Not For Me, the Gershman Beautiful song. Um beautiful, heartfelt song. But what uh what I discovered was that it was in the original musical that it was written for, uh, which was Girl Crazy 1930, um, it was it was a comedy number. Then we get to the next musical that has the claim to be the first one, which is Oklahoma. Ah, okay. So the first Rogers and and Hammerstein. Rogers and Hammerstein starts with with Oklahoma in I think that's 43. Um, and that's the the birth of what of what I think came to be known as the book musical, but right basically a musical that kind of tells a story properly.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Um you you can depending on your taste, you can pick various other important ones from after that. But I think once once someone's made Oklahoma, Oklahoma as a kind of successor to Showboat, Showboat's.
SPEAKER_00:Right, yeah. So they're very much one, you can't have one without the other, can you?
SPEAKER_03:It's a sort of proto book musical, and then the book musical really becomes established with Oklahoma in the later work and then the continuing works of Rogers and Hammerstein. Yeah. Then you yeah, you've got the sort of the comedy background, and then you've got the more serious option as well. Um, and those are then the building blocks that that musicals are built on from then onwards, really.
SPEAKER_00:Rogers and Hammerstein, Oklahoma, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I. You know, you're not losing money on reviving those shows, are you? Probably.
SPEAKER_03:Their their output is an extraordinary achievement. And go and their last one was the sound of music.
SPEAKER_00:Right. Hi there, just interrupting the podcast. And just to let you know that there is a longer version of this podcast for those who support this show via the Wycliffe Papers. So if you want to go over and get some free jokes at the Wycliffe Papers, there's a link in the show notes, and then you can upgrade to paid. You're supporting that and this podcast and me, and you get the full 67-minute version or whatever it is that we ended up producing between us. Uh, James and I talk a fair amount. There are lots of other interjections and the sides that you might find really interesting. So do go over to the Wickliffe papers and have a look at that. And also, we're going to start talking about Death in Canterbury relatively soon, which is our musical that we're writing together. And it would be brilliant if you could at least go and have a look at the page and see what the offers are. You could become a knight or a king or a bishop or a papal legate or something like that. Obviously, these Taylor Church offices is very much frowned upon, but it wasn't in 1170, so we're alright. Okay, back to the show. We've got these potential, game-changing, gigantic hits. A bit like the movie business in one sense, isn't it? It's not that different, but it just feels like the investment in a musical is just enormous. But if you get it right, you've just created something that's just gonna, it's like a money machine that's just gonna pay out for 15, 20, 30, 40 years, and then will be revived and then revived again and then re-revived. And people, a lot of people are right writing musicals, and it is a bit of a gold rush, isn't it? Not so much gonna-I mean, gold rush is pro it's like prospecting, isn't it? It's people spending an awful lot of time and energy and money, and you've been swimming in this world for a while. You went off and did a course on musical making, and and there's a whole bunch of people in London and New York and various places who would just live, eat, and breathe musicals, aren't there?
SPEAKER_03:Absolutely, yeah, yeah. I mean, the the development process is long and involved, and kind of necessarily so. I think it it compares well with something like television, where the phrase I don't hear the phrase development hell in the context of uh of musicals, because I think people recognise a musical's development is every bit as slow, but stuff's happening. Um, I mean, obviously there there are times where nothing's happening and this the script and the score are just sitting in your bottom drawer, but things do happen, and I think it's partly because you there's a there's a certain amount that you can achieve when a musical has has reached a level of development, like the level that we're at, we've basically we've completed the script and we've completed the score, but we've never put it stuck it in front of anybody. So no one's gonna say no no one's gonna actually sit down, read every word of the script, and sit down uh at the piano or uh or ask their butler to come in and play and play through the score so they can sing all the songs. The only way to get an idea of how the show is is to put it on in some form, but no one's gonna give you enough money to actually put it on in full. So the first thing as we're doing, we're putting on a concert performance of the whole thing, uh, of our musical, so that that will then lead to a slightly bigger version of the same thing with with more of this or more of that, and then eventually maybe you're in costumes, and then eventually you're in a theater and you and you've got but it does go go step by step. Um, and I think that that's because a musical, when you finish writing it, there's still such a long way to go.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Whereas I think with a play, when you finish writing it, you've you need to hire a director's director needs to come up with some ideas, but basically, basically you're 90% of the way there.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, yeah. And in rehearsal, you might discover bits, you're probably not doing massive rewrites. Um whereas in a musical, even in previews, you're just thinking, we need a song there. You know, and there are great examples of that where very famous songs are written. Yeah. And you probably know what they're doing.
SPEAKER_03:And really good songs are dropped. You know, they weren't duffs, they were just they they were wrong.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:They were just as good songs, possibly better songs than the songs that ended up in the show. They just weren't right for the show at that time. Yeah. Stephen Sondheim's first solo effort, so where he did music and lyrics, although he never never wrote the book for any of his musicals, was A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which is definitely an interesting example of of comedy, proper comedy in um uh in musicals, because he um the the book writers were were people who were proper comedy writers um from sort of early, early days, sort of 50s American TV onwards. They they got through actually, I don't know how many opening numbers they got to, but it but it it was uh famously the opening number was was completely wrong. Um and uh while they were out of town, um while they were going through the um 1950s, 1960s version of uh the development process, which was the out of town tour, Sondai had to come up with a new opening number, which was Comedy Tonight, um which is then acknowledged as an absolute masterpiece of how to open a show.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, uh it's you're telling the audience, you know, this this is this is don't worry, the thing you've just paid through the nose for is gonna be absolutely brilliant and hilarious. And if you and if you think it's a joke, it is. So that's great. Laugh.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, and it's it's explaining what sort of jokes you're gonna get by giving you load to them and and making you laugh and putting you at ease.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. Funnily enough, we're in that position as well, aren't we? Because we're now thinking our opening number might be the wrong way to start. Yep. And not only added songs, and you you know, the there's a thing called an I Want song as well. You know, we did a play which toured the UK in 2019 and it had songs in it. We've gone back to it. Well, everyone liked it. Everyone liked it, yeah, yeah. But it was very churchy and it played in churches, and it was not particularly aimed at the secular audience. And the idea, backstory side note, was that in 2020, for the 850th anniversary, we'd have a clearer sense of what we had and could rewrite it so that it could do a a tour of bigger churches called cathedrals and/or theatres or whatever. But for whatever reason, you know, we didn't have I mean, we could blame COVID for that, but actually, I don't think we quite had a sense of what it could become, and because I think we didn't even know what we didn't know, which was this isn't a musical, this is a play with songs in it. And after COVID or whatever, you went back to college as it were, and just like, oh, right. So we want a stronger opening number that does X. We also want our hero to have a song where he sings about the thing that he wants. So, what does he want? Ooh.
SPEAKER_03:Um, yeah, yeah, which which then sharpens up your whole drama when you've answered that question. Because in in musicals, uh everything is written in quite large print. So there's there's kind of some subtlety that you can you can achieve in a in a serious drama, but in a in a as well as just the general theatre thing of the fact that you don't have any close-ups, yeah. It's not cinema, someone can't just raise an eyebrow and and millions weep. Yeah, um uh yeah, you have to you have to play it out, but it's yeah, it does musicals do tend to be told in in quite sort of large kind of hundred percent this, hundred percent that.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, that's right. And it and it's not show and it's not show not tell, it is show, but it's also don't tell, but sing, that's fine. Uh a character can't say, I just want to be the best person I can be at this thing, or I just want to make my dad proud. It's like, okay, don't don't say that. You can sing that, that that's fine. And that's the chorus, which is I just want to make him proud, and or whatever it is. Those are the rules, and the audience will go, yeah, fine, yeah, that's how it works. And yeah, uh It's just so it's learning those conventions, isn't it? Because it's what the audience are expecting a certain thing, even though they're expecting a story about Thomas Beckett, they're not fully they don't quite know how it's going to work because I think this is not a natural fit for the musical theatre. So you sort of need to reassure them it is a musical, it is about Beckett, everything's fine. So okay, so what's your opening number now?
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:I mean we'll figure it out by the 13th of January. I can I can tell you that.
SPEAKER_03:The textbook way of writing a musical is to write the opening number last.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Because it's got to tell the audience everything that they're going to need to know. And you probably only know what that list is when the rest of the show exists.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And it is all part of that process of discovering what you have written, which sounds very alien when you're starting out as a writer, but you would you you know, because you've been doing this for ages as well, you do write things that kind of transcend the words on the page, and after a while you're just thinking, what is this that I've written? And you can go thinking, well, it just turns out I'm a genius and I've written a whole lot of stuff I hadn't intended. No, no, not really, because I think going back to the story that words are magic and the source code of the universe, these things have got power of their own that you're trying to kind of line up and also get out of the way of, and you know what I mean? It's it's it's it's it's it's it's a bit of a dance to discover what you've written, and so that's what we've been finding, isn't it?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, and uh I think music definitely um answers the description you were just giving. Yeah, um, I think when you hear a second rate composer, sometimes although I was maintaining there are many rates of composers, and the second rate is still pretty stunningly good.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, that's right. I'd settle for second rate, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Fourth rate, no, but the second rate I could do.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, but when someone's not quite as good, it's sometimes it's that they couldn't get themselves out of the way. Right. And then what what is truly them comes through in a in a in a much deeper level. So it's like Mozart has no absolute need to keep reminding you he's there, and that's what allows his voice to come through so strongly because it's at a at a deeper level. Down on the fifth rate where I live.
SPEAKER_00:Um yes, you you've you've you've gone in quite high with Mozart, and and and now yes, how does that apply to you exactly?
SPEAKER_03:By way of contrast, me, um I I mean it's a really simple example. Because I can play the piano, but I'm absolutely not a master pianist, I tend not to write at the piano. I want to hear it in my head, because in my head I can play orchestras, I can play rock bands, I can play hip hip hop, whatever that is. It's freer. Whereas when I'm at the keat list with the the fingers where you can see them, yeah, yeah, I'm I'm limited harmonically. I can go anywhere, I can play any chord, but I don't have an infinite number of textures that I can create with my fingers. If I'm a brilliant pianist, and a lot of composers are, obviously, then um it doesn't limit them at all very much, and possibly even at all if they're that good. Because everything's eventually going to need to get written down, you know, it's yeah, orchestration is down a whole other category of uh discussions about about musical theatres.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And when so when you were doing the hard yards, as it were, doing this course over the course of two years, and what is it that you thought going in, oh, I'm really looking forward to X and Y. I really need to brush up A and B. But at what point did you think, oh, I thought I was good at this thing, and actually turns out that's a lot harder than I thought. I remember when I I learned to drive and I found changing gear quite easy. I found steering oddly difficult. I was not expecting to find steering difficult because that's a thing you've been practicing since you were three years old, you know. It's like um changing gear with the clutch and stuff. It's like, no, no, no, you're not doing that when you're seven. Um so what was the what were the hard bits that you actually were really challenged by that you that kind of made you go, oh okay, that's that's not something I thought I could do, or stuff that you were good at that you didn't expect. But I think there was a lot of unknown unknowns really.
SPEAKER_03:Um but I was presented with them very quickly. Um so I I thought I've I've written certain many songs. I've I've written sort of pop songs kind of style, all unpublished, and I've written comedy songs that I've written for my stand-up shows. My I did six Edinburgh shows, so I've done lots of funny songs. I know how to write a song, and people what used to sell my Edinburgh shows is that people would walk out of the show singing the choruses every now and then it would be so how'd you hear about the show? I was sitting next to someone and they were going, what you singing with a nice little funny hook and that kind of thing, and it's like so. I thought I'd I think I'm pretty sure I can do that. So I I think I can basically I can write good songs was my feeling going in. And I and I but I think it was the realization that that that is not all important, and in fact, what a what a songwriter needs to be in a musical is a dramatist, right? Everybody involved is the dramatist, so the lyricist has to be the dramatist, the the composer has to be the be the dramatist, even the choreographer and the lighting guy has uh the designer has to be the uh um has to be the dramatist. So you're always it's not just okay, the the story has got us to this point, but let's press pause on the drama, and now let's have three minutes of a really remarkably good song. That's not what a musical is meant to feel like. Yeah, yes, that's right.
SPEAKER_00:It's got to be more than the sum total of the parts, and the thing that makes it more than the sum total of the parts is the story and is the transformation, isn't it? So, in one sense, it's it's very normal in terms of the hero's journey, epiphany. I I thought I wanted this, and now that I've got it, it isn't what I thought it was, and now I know what I really wanted, and in order to do that, I've got to let go of the one thing that I always thought I needed, and it turns out that I don't, and here I can move in. And we've got that, and and just being specific about the story of Thomas Beckett, which is, I have to say, endlessly fascinating. And even though, if I may speak explicitly, developing this musical is potentially a colossal waste of my time and yours, and neither of us make enough money to actually have the time to spend this long developing this thing. Fair?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I mean, you've you've never had any intention of writing any musicals, and I um I I'm not particularly developing a uh an audience of uh you know of theologian fans. Um hi, hi everyone high standard theologian fans, yes, exactly.
SPEAKER_00:The story itself, and I've just been listening to a four-part series on Going Medieval, which is one of the history hit podcasts, and uh going through his or you know, Beckett's origin story, his career, his death, and then the cult of Beckett that arises around how he became wildly famous. And I've just learned this morning that they had so much gold on his tomb, on his shrine in 1220, uh, when they eventually built it, that it caused a run on gold in England. You couldn't get gold because it was all on Beckett. And foreign diplomats would come and would just say, we have never seen anything like this. This is just astonishing. That this was a a world-class uh shrine to a saint that people would come to see from absolutely miles around, including people from India apparently, uh, were coming along to see this now completely forgotten scent, who was completely abolished, cancelled by Cromwell, Thomas Cromwell, actually, who and I I'm now discovering that Henry VIII was like, I don't know actually about all this desecration because he was sort of by 18 by 1539, he was starting to swing back to traditional Catholicism. And the idea that you would just obliterate, like he's just got rid of all the monasteries, and even the King of England, Henry VIII, is thinking twice about demolishing the shrine of Thomas Becket. That is how huge Thomas of Canterbury, as he was known, um, was in the in the in the eyes of the thing. So, but there are so many that his relationship with the King of England, with Henry II, is kind of weird. Why why did he change his why did he change his allegiance when it's and all of these academics are asking exactly the same questions and have no fixed opinions necessarily on all of the things that we've been wrestling with. So, in a way, it feels like we're being really true to the history because it is ambiguous, and therefore we can show the ambiguity of that in the musical, can't we? You know, we because we we've gone back and forth on this so many times, haven't we?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, yeah. I I remember as a as a kid, and I I wasn't I always quite enjoyed history, I was rubbish at it. I think because I I wanted to get jokes into the um uh into the history essays, and that that gets that gets you marked down.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, frowned upon. It was better in the begrudging respect of your teacher, but they don't give you marks for it.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, yeah. Well, I've I felt that in English they you didn't get marks for it, whereas in history you lost marks. Yes, so I was I was rubbish at history, but but liked it. And one story that kind of really grabbed me was the the Thomas Becker one, and I think it it it was that there's this moment where he goes from A to B, and it's absolutely clear that he goes from do absolutely everything the king asks you to to don't do that. It's completely black and white, except the explanation of the motivation for it. Yeah. Where does it come from? And that some of the theories are sort of are so obvious as to sound naive, like it's sort of, well, he's just been made Archbishop of Canterbury. Did that have some effect on him? Um but but yeah, but surely he was some sort of guy, which meant that he was the sort of person who would say yes to to the you know, it it all quite enjoyably doesn't totally solve itself. Yeah, yeah, yeah. From our point of view, it means that there's there's not one answer, and we we we kind of pick an answer and we stick to it, and um and I think certainly with uh when I've I've I've not read or listened as widely as you have on the subject, but it sort of reassures us at at every stage that that um yet there is no proof that our theory of why that happened is true, but it's definitely not been disproved, and no one's come up with anything better.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. Yeah, as I've listened to, they've interviewed three different academics, and I've thought I've thought each academic, if they watched our production as it's currently configured, would just go, huh, yeah, fair. Yeah, yeah. That's a really good question. They wouldn't look at it and just go, oh, okay, none of that happened. They would go, Yeah, it's so weird. His relationship with the king was completely asymmetrical because he was lowborn, son of a wealthy merchant, but not noble. It got as a weird friendship. He appointed him Archbishop of Canterbury, suddenly he pivots, he hands back the chancellorship that must have felt like a betrayal. We've we've got the human story in there, and it in one sense, that's something that the historians maybe lack a little bit, is that sense of personal betrayal that Henry II would have felt, even though I think he was a psychopath and a bully, uh, like Henry VIII. But he just would have just felt awfully wounded by the fact that Beckett wasn't dancing to his tune anymore. And I just think we show all that stuff, and I think it's so I think it's all it just feels historically responsible, even though I'm I'm actually okay with mucking around with it a bit and that kind of stuff. I I just think but the other thing also is the fact that I've learned, even though I have strong theological convictions, that the idea that well, do you know what happened? Thomas Beckett became a Christian when he was Archbishop of Canterbury, and that changed everything. It's like you can't really show that. That's not that's not it that's not compelling for an audience, even a Christian audience, actually. It's a bit like um trying to explain sport to someone who just doesn't get it, just to say, oh, but can't you? And that's why sports movies tend not to work. We've embodied his theological sense of as as loyalty to his predecessor, Theobald, who gave him his first start. I think that's the way we're we're going at the moment, and that that feels quite fruitful, and I think that will survive the rehearsals, but you could I guess you could come and find out on the 13th and 14th of January uh if you can make it to one of the St. Botolf's churches in the city of London.
SPEAKER_03:St. Botolf without Bishop's Gates. Yes. Not to be confused with St. Botov without all gates, and I think there's also a third one that's right.
SPEAKER_00:And we haven't even gone into who Botolf is, but I'm not the faintest idea. Yeah, so the idea is that we're running a crowdfunding campaign on Greenlit, which is a platform that specialises in this kind of thing. It's like Kickstarter, but for showbiz uh and musicals and plays and that kind of thing. And so we're just hoping that some people might want to get a bit of a vision for it. Obviously, so tickets are available in December, but if you join the Kickstarter, as it were, the Green Lit campaign, you can get tickets early to make sure you get them. And also, even if you can't be with us, you can get the digital recording. So we're gonna do a half-decent audio recording of it so you can hear it afterwards. So there are all kinds of rewards at various levels.
SPEAKER_03:So people can I think that's that's what we should call it in the packaging, a half-decent recording.
SPEAKER_00:A half-decent recording of a half-decent show. Um so uh wow, classic English uh downplay understatement.
SPEAKER_03:I meant probably by the standards of a lot of musicals, that's a strong starting point if you're already a half decent at this point.
SPEAKER_00:Half decent at this thing. Well, that's that's true, isn't it? Because as you were saying, some musicals just have got three an idea and three songs, and that's about it. Um, because we've already done an awful lot. Yes, that's right. Again, that is what we should have done, and um yeah, but anyway, uh that would be great. Go to a link in the uh show notes and have a look at that. And if you're it's a way of supporting this podcast as well, but it in this case it directly benefits us because we have to pay professional singers to turn up and rehearse and sing, and the actual box office won't quite cover that, so that's why we're trying to go. And it'd be great if we could sail through our target and pay for the next stage of development, which is getting actors who can sing, which is not the same as getting professional singers, uh, together to do a whole full-on read through production or whatever. So, but at the moment, we're just trying to get through this particular thing, uh, and it'd be great if you could join us in that. Thank you very much, James. Working with you is always a joy, fascinating. You can tell why we've taken so long to get this thing to its current state because we just end up talking about all these other things, and you know, boy, we both love cricket, and that takes up quite a lot of time as well.
SPEAKER_03:We haven't even mentioned cricket at all yet.
SPEAKER_00:We haven't even talked about who's gonna bat number three for England in the forthcoming Ashes test. So let's not we'll we'll we'll save that one for offline, shall we? I think, yeah, we've we've Ironically, it's gotta be Pope. How can it fit perfectly with the theme, surely? Anyway, thanks very much, uh James, for being on the podcast. Thanks for listening, everyone, and we'll speak to you next time. Cheerio. I'm still touring the UK with God, the Bible, and everything. I'm doing that all the way through next year as well. So if you want to get in touch and book my show, then come and get in contact with me. There's a link in the show notes to my website. And don't forget the crowdfunder Death in Canterbury. Go and have a look. There's a link to that in the show notes too. Is this how it ends? Yep.