A Short Guide To Writing A Musical

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How do you write a quick and dirty musical? Read this and you'll see the method that I use

The Opening

How do you open up your musical? Make it big! Make it expressive! Make it memorable!  You should open up your musical with a huge number, often involving the whole company (although I have written ones that only involve a single character, and that can work as well). When writing the opening for your musical, you have to remember that this is a way for you to capture your audiences attention, so you have to make sure that you go big. In musicals like Hairspray or RENT, the opening is a high energy song that draws your audience into the world that you are trying to create.  In the theatre, you have to suspend your disbelief and believe that anything is possible.

“For many people, the appeal of a musical is its simplicity, its innocence. They go to see Hello, Dolly! to escape the often mind-bending task of living in our increasingly complicated, politically correct mine field of a world. For others, the musical theatre is like any other narrative art form – its beauty is in its ability to make order out of chaos, to sort through the craziness of our lives and make sense of it all…” – SCOTT MILLER

Your opening move needs to set up everything that you will be doing in the remainder of your musical. Make your opening strong and you are on your way to a great musical!

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The cast of the Broadway musical Hairspray

 

Defying Gravity

The end of Act I from the new Broadway musical Wicked!

The body of the musical

This is where you get all of your ideas out to your audience, and it is no different than writing anything else – you need to have your characters, you need to present problems for them to overcome, and you need to do so in an interesting way.

If anyone has ever written anything before, you know that the most difficult thing to do some of the time is to come up with ideas and ways to present any ideas that you do have in a way that actually makes sense to others.

Since this is such a quick article, there is really no way to properly give you a full breakdown of how to explain this. I highly suggest some further research on the subject if it interests you.

How do I end the musoical?

How you end your musical is completely up to you. For some musicals, like Wicked, the way it ends is setting up the movie/musical The Wizard of Oz to take place. For other, likes RENT or Hairspray, it is giving closure to the storyline that has been taking place. And then for musicals like Phantom of the Opera, it makes the audience make their own decisions about what happens next.

The only thing you need to remember is to have your story complete itself.  Other than that, it is completely up to you as to how you do it – it can be a song (more typical) or just some sort of dialogue/monologue.

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Discussions

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by tylerwrites  11/08/2008  Reply

Thanks! I’ve always enjoyed writing (as can be seen by the fact that I wrote the musical I posted there just because I could)…so getting to share the knowledge of how to do the same allows me to write and teach others, two of my favourite things.

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by jessicajoy  11/08/2008  Reply

Good first guide!! I’m impressed!

About The Author

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tylerwrites Rss 

Regina, SK, Canada
Tyler Parker is 25 and has a constant pain in the foot.

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