The Oe4K blog

Don't have much time, but wanted to do a quick post about Saturday day and yesterday day.

Saturday:

• Came in a little late. Watched them do the choreography for the Plague song. When I wrote the lyrics for it, my idea is that Sphinxy, Oedipus' puppet/best-friend has just died, and "What Is It Like When Ya Get The Plague?" is a song where Jocasta tries to explain what the plague is in a "fun!" way. It involves acting out the different symptoms of a plague (you eat some food that's full of mold / then your body shivers like you're really cold) along with hand motions. Sort of a cross between "who stole the cookie from the cookie jar" and... well, I don't know, The Chicken Dance or any Passover song?
  Well, Dan and Jessica looked at it and said, "what if the Plague song was done before the Sphinx dies?" So now, the sphinx is on his deathbed, trying his best to do the hand motions with Oedipus and Jocasta.
• Watched the Blind song's choeography finally. Apparently the humor of the dance never really fully came to me till I saw it. I think what I kept seeing was two people tap-dancing in perfect unison, but one of them facing the wrong way or something. Turns out it's not just that, but it's two guys with sunglasses, tap-dancing with a cane that they sometimes use to feel their way around the stage, and then alternate it to using the way you would in a tap dance. I can't explain it. But as I watched it, I knew I was going to hell.
  
• The show's really coming together. It's fun to watch it on its feet, watching actors make choices, and see the humor come out often in different ways than I've intended.
  

Last night we went over "My Lover Is My Husband Is My Son", which is the "artistic" finale with Jocasta. In it, Jocasta/Laura uses a scarf to represent Oedipus. She gives birth to the scarf, nurses it, dances with it, proceeds to have sex with it and then hangs herself with the scarf. There's tango break in the middle and I'd ended it with a lyric filled with possible ways for her to kill herself. But one thing you don't realize when writing a new musical on paper/computer is how it changes once the dance comes in. We looked at it, realizing that the suicide list was difficult to dance to, kept running around with ideas about her just "talking", a la "Glitter and Be Gay", and then eventually just decided to cut the lyrics and have her only dancing.

Which is a lot closer to our original idea. Before we wrote Lover/Husband/Son, it was just going to be an "artistic" dance with a boombox. Funny how sometimes you revert back to your original ideas.