SHINE: A Burlesque Musical
SHINE is an original musical I co-wrote with Cass King and Sam Dulmage. It was produced in Vancouver in 2008-2009, in Seattle in 2010, and in New York City in 2010.
It's set in a modern-day burlesque club on Manhattan's Lower East Side. I think it represents the best songwriting of my career.
It's set in a modern-day burlesque club on Manhattan's Lower East Side. I think it represents the best songwriting of my career.
Large And In Charge is one of my favourite songs form the show. It has that great ominous descending bass line and bump & grind feel you get from midcentury pop jazz numbers like Nina Simone's "Feeling Good". It's sung by a plus-sized dancer. An affirmation of her own inner beauty and a testament to the glamour and power of her performing persona. It's very burlesque: body positive, goddess-energy-evocative, erotic.
Blind is great fun. An upbeat pop hit. The moment where the two romantic leads come clean(?) with one another about their true feelings. This sort of number is a musical theatre staple - a cliche even. Raunching it up with a risque lyric adds comedy, surprise and delight. I was using Queen's "Killer Queen" as a template, but many people say the song feels Beatle-esque.
When The Money Starts To Roll Every good musical needs an argument duet or an angry tirade song. In this number, a slick businessman runs out of patience with his bohemian dilettante collaborator. He lays into her about market realities. The song replaced a lyrically-clever, Cole Porter-esque mid-tempo number which served the same purpose in the show. Act two needed a boost of energy off the top, so it was time to dumb it down and amp it up.
Girls Gone Wild is a total guilty pleasure. This song satirizes the infantilization of women and the glorification of consumerism in pop music. The Pussycat Dolls were big the year I wrote this, so I borrowed a few licks from them.
A FEW THOUGHTS ON WRITING FOR SHINE
At a contemporary burlesque show, you can expect to hear all genres of music from 1920s swing to hip hop to death metal. (Dancers usually work with recordings, rather than live musicians.) For our show to ring true, our live songs had to reflect that wide musical diversity while maintaining a coherent flavour.
Another challenge in writing for musical theatre is that every song must drive the show from point A to point B, or else it bogs it down. Plot or character must be revealed. Confrontation must erupt or resolve or both.
I also prefer that the musical theatre songs I write make coherent sense outside of the context of the show. You could hear them on their own without knowing the character who's singing them or their situation, and they'd still speak truth. Broadway songs used to be written with this sort of eye to universality, since the hit parade was often full of musical theatre numbers sung by stars like Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald. Modern Broadway songs rarely make it into the charts, but when they do they also have that universality. They are also tidy little earners for composers. So that's an incentive...
Balancing these two opposing principles - writing a song that is at once utterly individual to a plot and a person and utterly universal is like threading the tiniest of needles. Writing inside demanding parameters is my favourite way to work. Songwriting becomes solving a specific puzzle, rather than looking into the vast blue sky for a random idea.