"That's not bad, but it isn't good either."
-In Control
As I prepare for the reading on Saturday, when In Control 2.0 (the revision, not the sequel, don't worry) will mark the official beginning of its development, I couldn't help but look back at the first drafts of the play. As I mentioned in a post yesterday, the show could not have been more different. A hundred and thirty pages in its uncut form, the style and sensibility could not have been more different. Taking refuge in a surrealistic, free-form often vulgar stream of consciousness, the "Untitled Cancer Musical Comedy," as it was known then, contained a tap-dancing archangel, a girl whose hair was on fire, misadventures with Icy-Hot, a two-headed ghetto-talking mallrat, and a rival garage band made up of obscure celebrity impersonators. Rest assured that NONE of these are still in the show.
Why such a random assortment of items and such a huge length? I'm not going to say "because we didn't know better," because, frankly, we did. We knew those things were absurd and laughable, and we loved them for it. Rather, it was because of two key points: genre and location. We hadn't written the "Untitled Cancer Musical Comedy" to see it played out on stage as we had described. We had written it for a pseudo-radio-theatre setting, gatherings on patios, in basements and living rooms, when four people and a guitar would provide the dozens of characters and locations using nothing but our voices, our instruments and the imaginations of the audience. Radio theatre and other "theatre of the imagination" genres (audio drama, podcasts, even some television shows with tiny production teams and performing rosters like "South Park") have a long history of surrealist absurdity, and I saw myself as the head writer of such a team, following in the footsteps of "The Goon Show" or "The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy." But naturally, as I mentioned yesterday, that sort of stylistic approach almost never works onstage, hence the massive changes between "Untitled Cancer Musical Comedy" and "In Control."
Why such a random assortment of items and such a huge length? I'm not going to say "because we didn't know better," because, frankly, we did. We knew those things were absurd and laughable, and we loved them for it. Rather, it was because of two key points: genre and location. We hadn't written the "Untitled Cancer Musical Comedy" to see it played out on stage as we had described. We had written it for a pseudo-radio-theatre setting, gatherings on patios, in basements and living rooms, when four people and a guitar would provide the dozens of characters and locations using nothing but our voices, our instruments and the imaginations of the audience. Radio theatre and other "theatre of the imagination" genres (audio drama, podcasts, even some television shows with tiny production teams and performing rosters like "South Park") have a long history of surrealist absurdity, and I saw myself as the head writer of such a team, following in the footsteps of "The Goon Show" or "The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy." But naturally, as I mentioned yesterday, that sort of stylistic approach almost never works onstage, hence the massive changes between "Untitled Cancer Musical Comedy" and "In Control."
Luckily, I'm not alone in doing revisions- every writer does them, even the greats of the field. Stephen Sondheim, accepted grand master of his craft, puts his pants on like the rest of us, and does revisions right along with us, and he has three major commandments to ensure that revisions are made for the right reasons. In his memoirs, Sondheim breaks down everything he knows about solid writing for the stage into the following maxims. “I have not always been skilled or diligent enough to follow them as faithfully as I would like,” he writes, “but they underlie everything I’ve ever written. In no particular order, and to be inscribed in stone: CONTENT DICTATES FORM. LESS IS MORE. GOD IS IN THE DETAILS. All in the service of CLARITY."
How do these work in practice? Well, I've shared my case studies from the trenches of "In Control" until you're probably sick of them, so let's let The Master himself serve as our example this time, shall we? When "The Frogs," one of Sondheim's earlier musicals, was first staged in the swimming pool at Yale in 1974, many of the lyrics alluded specifically to a pool and a college setting. Revising those lyrics for the 2004 Broadway production, which was to be staged in a standard proscenium theatre, not only required removing those immediate references, but updating the style of the piece for a theatrical audience, not for a group of college students in a relatively liberal campus. Lines like “And please, no grass, this is a classic, NOT a class” would make no sense in a theatre far from campus, especially at a time when smoking pot in the classroom would be unthinkable, so he revised the line to read “And please, no chow- unwrap those candy wrappers now," not only removing the out-of-date material, but also alluding to one of the current pitfalls of mainstream theatre. Similar references to nude swimmers and admonitions for the audience about the sauna heat were replaced as well with commands not to squeak the seats or rustle playbills, and a warning to turn off cell phones before the performance begins.
So, there you have it: even the greats of the field feel obliged to change their works at one time or another. If it's any comfort to me, as I sit here laboring over how to fix one or two of the scenes that still bother me in "In Control," I know for a fact that Stephen Sondheim is sitting in his New York home office (with or without a "Fifty Shades of Grey" dungeon depending on who you believe), working on revisions to his first new musical in over a decade, which he has been reworking, not for two years, but for almost ten. Some things never change.