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How To Dramatize Historical Stories (Infographic)

• It is a long and rocky road from the inception to the premiere; make sure you are passionately fascinated by your story idea. Don’t follow trends…follow your heart! You dream about seeing it on stage, and you can’t wait to share it with an audience.
• Your initial attraction to the material becomes the inspiration for any further development. Select story ideas that offer themselves for musical interpretation, where melodies may reveal a secret garden of hidden realities.
• Conflict does it! The protagonist must have a strong desire to reach a certain goal. Powerful antagonistic forces try to stop him, chiefly among them his own character flaws.
• Only through a dramatic learning experience (epiphany and change of character) can the protagonist in the end become a better person than in the beginning of the story.
• Special elements of the musical theatre include dance scenes, multiple locations, and a break-down of the “Fourth Wall” between stage and audience.
• Dramatic turning points between the three acts (exposition, confrontation, solution) mark the protagonist’s character changes. More turning points may occur during key scenes and key songs within the acts.
• The more dangerous and powerful the antagonist, the greater the drama of the protagonist’s struggle. They may have similar, respectable goals (and deserve our empathy), but only one of them can win.
• Additional characters may support a more in-depth exploration of the story. Allies may become enemies, and vice versa. Mirrors may find themselves in similar conflict situations as the main characters, but they pursue alternate solutions.
• In a great drama musical, both protagonist and antagonist are convinced of their own righteousness. Their conflict is not of a personal nature; their different value systems collide. The audience should experience conflicting sympathies. A simple evil witch is boring.

The story should become the means for the hero’s character to overcome some kind of fault, or shortcoming, either within himself, or in regard to his relationships with other people.

For example, Marie Antoinette must overcome her arrogance and become a better person. The entire story structure must be designed so that all elements support her in this quest.

Michael emphasizes that he does not intend to “preach” to the audience about the “right way” to live one’s life. He’d rather wants to give the story a real meaning which goes beyond the protagonist’s transformation. In fact, the protagonist should only the reach her goal, when she has clearly overcome her character flaws.

“I find this type of structure particularly useful for whipping a story into shape.”

Michael recalls his favorite metaphor—the main character’s descend into a “pit”, somewhere near the beginning of the story, and then his focus on a way out of this “hole”. He adds, “Death and resurrection is a very intense and often recurring theme in my musicals.”

In the case of ELISABETH, her son Rudolph’s burial becomes the catalyst for her own life-changing epiphany. Now she knows what has been wrong with herself. Again, the key song beautifully illustrates her transformation and she can now move on to the fulfillment of her quest…her love for death.

Michael concedes that most of his stories are rooted in historical events. However, he wants his themes—whether they relate to women’s lib, arrogance, or a struggle for freedom— to be understood by a modern-day audience.

Watch the video here!

Some people might wonder…why should the composer serve the story?

Why not?, says Michael. Everyone and everything connected to a drama musical should have only one purpose in mind: How to best serve the story.

Lighting, set, costumes, dance…all elements must support the effort of making the story understandable to the audience. All must help to carry the story’s emotions into the hearts of the viewers.

If the story does not work, no special effects can ever fix it. Sure, they can strengthen a play, but the story has to work without them already.

Michael talks about the final scene of his musical REBECCA, when Manderley goes up in flames…

“If possible, every producer would like to see fire on stage…but I don’t need it for my story. It’s enough if the audience sees the light effects around the mansion, as if it was ablaze.”

Watch the video here!

Click on the squares and play away. You probably won’t be able to stop.

Thank you to the kind folks at sembeo.com for their invitation to spread this joy.

]]> http://www.musicalworkshop.org/amazing-computer-music-machine/feed/ 0 http://www.musicalworkshop.org/musical-master-class-7-how-to-dramatize-a-musical-song/ http://www.musicalworkshop.org/musical-master-class-7-how-to-dramatize-a-musical-song/#comments Thu, 07 Apr 2011 02:17:38 +0000 Chef Keem http://www.musicalworkshop.org/?p=577 Michael Kunze remembers Robert McKee’s words: “A scene without a change is not a scene.” The same can be said about a musical song: A song without a change is not a dramatic song.

“If you want to dramatize a musical song, you have to write it like a key scene with a built-in turning point.”

The song, “Ich gehör nur mir” (I belong to me), from the musical ELISABETH, depicts Elisabeth’s change from an insecure girl to a mature woman who knows what she wants. The girl leaves the stage after the first part of the song, and — following the instrumental middle part — she returns as the woman. To underscore this change, Michael even asked his composer, Sylvester Levay, to set the second half of the song in a lower key.

In a key scene, there is one emotional state at the beginning, and a different one at the end. In the center is the turning point, and that’s where the key song should be placed, as well. To support the change in the scene, this musical song also contains a dramatic turning point.

Toward the end of this video installment, Dr. Kunze lays out an entire diagram of a drama musical…

Watch the video here!

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This video clip contains Elisabeth’s key song, “I belong to me” (starting at 3:50)

• Exposition
• Confrontation
• Solution

The intermission happens about two-thirds through the musical. Dr. Kunze calls it “the point of no return”. (Not for the audience, he jokes, but for the protagonist’s development.) The hero’s inner need to come to this point of no return will be further explained in the following episodes.

“One thing is very important, especially in the structure of musical theater: The pivotal songs have to signal the key scenes and the turning points — when something happens that turns the story into a completely new direction. These events are usually found at the beginning of the second and third act, and that’s when you definitely need a song…and the turn should be demonstrated within that song.”

Key scenes play a special role in the drama structure — they emphasize the crucial story elements within certain sequences of the act.

“I always try first to describe what happens, and then I condense it into a scene, and then I condense it into a song. That is what I call a key song and it is usually placed around the middle of the act. I employ establishing songs to prepare for these high-points of my musical structure.”

And then Michael Kunze reveals a very special technique, which he has learned from Andrew Lloyd Webber: How to structure the development of a key song to its maximum effect…

Watch the video here!

After connecting with his former collaborator, Sylvester Levay, who in the meanwhile was highly successful as a Hollywood film score composer, Dr. Kunze entered the difficult path of finding a producer for his first original drama musical.

“It took years to convince someone of putting their trust into a local piece, and not something that had already garnered success in the West End or on Broadway.”

Michael continues to point out his immense resources as a very experienced songwriter and novelist. While the first skill enabled him to write highly singable songs for his performers, the latter is mostly important in regard to the structure of his drama musicals. Furthermore, he credits his work as an adapter of the world’s top musicals along with his studies with American story teachers for his success as a newly-minted musical author. Dr. Kunze names Robert McKee his most influential teacher, because he really cared about the “idea of story-telling”, not just some simple rule of what has to appear on page 25.

Again, Michael emphasizes his ability to elicit emotions as an especially useful talent:

“People don’t go to the theater to see emotions…they want to experience emotions. You can achieve that with musical theater by breaking through the fourth wall between stage and audience.”

From now on forward, Dr. Kunze will discuss the 10 most important elements of a drama musical…the way he developed them on his path to becoming the most successful stage author in the history of German-language musical theater.

Watch the video here!

“And we know that in many respects, the twentieth century was a terrible time. I was interested in finding out how it all happened and how people had felt at that time.”

Harold Prince suggested a story about Emperor Franz Josef, and Michael spent many months researching the history of the Habsburg Court and its primary characters. However, he could not find a suitable protagonist for a musical drama. Franz Josef didn’t change…he didn’t grow and become a better person over the course of a certain time period. But those were the core qualities of a good protagonist.

Crown Prince Rudolf and his mother Elisabeth were much more interesting characters, so Michael focused on them for a while. After a series of bestselling books and movies about her life, the former Austrian Empress enjoyed cult status and idolatry among the peoples of South Central Europe. But as it happens so often, such sweet “Cinderella stories” are quite a bit removed from reality, and Michael wanted to write a true account of the world-changing events between the two centuries.

At one point during his research on Elisabeth’s life, Michael found a book called “My Years With The Empress”. The author had been Elisabeth’s “reader” — the man who accompanied the Empress during her hours-long walks while reading to her from a variety of books.

There was a passage in this book that changed Dr. Kunze’s entire perception of the person Elisabeth, and — pardon the pun — the rest is history…

Watch the video here!

This is the “Collector’s Edition” of Michael Kunze’s most successful drama musical ELISABETH. Click on the link or the picture to order your copy from Amazon.com…

Elisabeth — Das Musical Sammler Edition — Live aus dem Theater an der Wien

Elisabeth — The Musical “Collector’s Edition”