The Director Sector

A few years ago at my alma mater, I enjoyed (read: hated) my first solo number in a musical. I played Everett Baker in Crazy for You. For those who are unfamiliar, Crazy for You is a play that essentially wrote itself around songs by the Gershwins. The story is crap and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, characters are introduced for the sole purpose of singing certain songs, and they’re not great songs to begin with.

At any rate, I tend to avoid those types of musicals because I don’t really think random songs should be stuck together and have a story written around them. If you want to promote music, promote it the old fashioned way — radio or whatever. Stay off my stage with it.

However, I’ve often listened to regular albums or concept albums by artists and felt like these albums had an overall theme. Indeed, often one or two songs will provide a story or overarching theme that ties the rest of the songs into one album. Ideally, this song will be the title of an album.

I’m probably going to receive a lot of flak about this, but one of my favorite artists is Garth Brooks. Many years ago, he released an album under a pseudonym and received a LOT of negative publicity about it. People thought he was committing career suicide (proved them wrong!) and thought that he was trying to cross over from country into rock. This was not the case, fortunately.

Under the pseudonym of Chris Gaines, Brooks released an album that was essentially the Greatest Hits of a fictional rocker, Chris Gaines. The album was to be a “pre-soundtrack” for a movie titled “The Bird” (I think). Brooks loved the script and was even a top contender for the lead role. He felt that once the movie was released, other movies would pick up on his trend — soundtracks that introduced audiences to the characters before the movies were even made.

The movie was to be about Chris Gaines rise to fame and subsequent fall from grace.

Unfortunately, Hollywood moves a lot slower than Nashville. The album was written, recorded and produced in under six months. The movie never got off the ground — possibly because of all the Brooks/Gaines negative publicity.

That album, however, is one of my favorites. I enjoy seeing Brooks go off into different genres. Each song on the album has a different feel to it. As an actor, I also enjoy Brooks going off into a completely different persona — Gaines made appearances on The Today Show, Saturday Night Live (mango!), and many others.

An interesting side note: the day I bought the album, I also bought Final Fantasy 8. I listened to the album over and over and over, learning all the words as I played the game. Now, whenever I listen to the Chris Gaines album, I get flashes of the video game in my mind. I associate certain songs with certain parts of the game. Neat.

Anyway, to tie this all together: two of the songs on the album strike me as very good stories that could ultimately tie the entire album together into a musical a la Crazy for You (albeit not total shit) or Across the Universe.

I’ve debated writing a script for it. The big question is whether or not to actually incorporate the songs. And even if I did, what’s the point since I’ll never get rights to the songs? Another possibility is to use the songs as the basis for an actual straight play.

Another show I’d love to write/do is Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.  I know Bowie essentially did a show for his rock shows, but they were basically rock performances and not really musicals.  I think there’s a lot of potential there for a well-written musical.

What do you think?