rosey hussein violet X's Journal

I take it all back …
So, realizing that I may have come off unfairly bitchy in my previous post, I just wanted to explain my seemingly arbitrary annoyance at Glory Days. And I hate to get hung up on such a seemingly inconsequential issue as the age of the writers, but … I mean, come on!

Let’s do the math on this, shall we? The authors are, as of this writing, 23 years old. Their show ran “successfully” in Washington DC, and is currently (as of March of this year) planning a move to NYC. Let’s say the paperwork on that took less than three months. That means that the show would have ended its DC run in around December of 2007. And let’s say it ran for a whopping sixty days. That means it opened in October. And let’s say it was in rehearsals for less than three months, which takes us back to around July of 2007.

But even with a work of such transcendent genius as this show no doubt is, it’s pretty rare for a producing organization to take a script and a pile of sheet music, hand it to the actors and say, “Here you go, kids! See ya opening night!” I mean, there’s usually a development, or workshop period, and no doubt this was no exception. So let’s assume that took, oh, six months. Yeah. Mmm hmm. Six months, that should do it. I mean, okay, Sunday in the Park was in development for something like, five years but hey! These kids are prodigies. It only takes as long as you actually need, losers. So, that would get us back to about February of 2007. At this point, the writers are barely 22 years old.

And of course, shows don’t just magically wind up in the hands of a producer. First you have to actually send it out to people, and what with the backlog of unsolicited scripts and the sluggishness of the US postal service, that all by itself is going to add oh, gosh. I’m gonna have to say at least three to six months to the process. (It’s true what they say, you know: The waiting really is the hardest part.)

Which brings us to around September of 2006.

But come on, you say. To just, write a show — to simply sit down at the piano and the typewriter and bang out a perfectly structured, flawlessly scored full-length musical on the first try — in a single, unedited draft? Even the Gershwins probably couldn’t pull that off. So let’s say there were oh, three months of informal readings before they felt confident to send it out, and we’re back to June, 2006. And let’s give the boys credit for being human, and say it took at least one round of revisions and rewrites before they got it to even that point, and that must have taken oh, at least six weeks or so. So, the whole glorious enterprise began in roughly the spring of ’06, when our youthful talent-machines were twenty-one.

Wow. Twenty-one! That’s really young. I mean, it’s pretty rare that you find someone with anything really interesting to say, let alone an interesting way to say it at such an early — oh, holy shit! I totally forgot! At this point, they already have a completed script and score! They’re just starting their re-writes now!!

Whoosh! Okay. I’ll dig back into my own experience to a show I wrote with an astonishingly gifted young composer many years ago. He already had a lot of music written, and a good ten or fifteen pages of dialogue, plus a rough outline of the script before I even came on board, and even at that, it still took us around six months to hammer out a first draft. And even at that, everyone we knew (who was also in musical theater) was astonished that we could have written such a solid, cohesive show in such an absurdly short period of time. Also, you have to take into consideration that neither of us had a full-time job at the time, and that we would literally work twelve hours a day on this thing, seven days a week, that’s how passionately consumed we were. So, I’m gonna have to go out on a limb here and say that, just as a rule of thumb, a typical full-length musical is going to take at least a year to rough out on a first attempt. And that’s not including the amount of time that was spent in trying to decide what to write about in the first place.

Which would mean that these guys were maybe all of nineteen and change when they first said, “Dude, you know what? Let’s write a musical!”

Now, that’s not to say that there aren’t prodigiously talented 19-year-old kids out there. I happen to know a prodigiously talented 19-year-old kid (I actually do. That’s not a joke). Here’s an excerpt from an e-mail he sent me a while back, about the movie Cloverdale:

“It's not Godzilla, but its toward that kinda effect. Its big,
can swim, and I think has little creators go around bite
people and infect them. so yes, it should be good. and i want
to go into film, but if i get into Juilliard I'm definable
going into acting.”

(And okay, obviously, his talents don’t necessarily lie in the field of writing, and he doesn’t necessarily claim that they do, so maybe that’s unjustly cruel. And to his credit, he did actually spell “Juilliard” correctly, which is more than a lot of people can do, bless his heart.)

So, who’s to say that a couple of kids just out of high school couldn’t turn out a show that genuinely deserves to be on Broadway? Certainly not me. So for the sake of fairness, let’s see what the producers themselves have to say about the show:

“Glory Days is the story of four best friends who reunite a year after high school graduation, only to find how much they have grown apart," according to the producers. "As they attempt to understand each other’s differences, they soon realize that nothing can compare to the glory days of high school when life was simpler."

Oh my God! For real? A story about people who knew each other in high school, then reunite (after a year; this is my undisputed favorite part of the blurb) and realize they no longer have anything in common? That is fucking genius!! You gize, srsly!! In fact, when I was nineteen? And taking a Writing 101 class in a fifth-rate community college in Brooklyn? And when half the class explained that they were writing about a guy/girl who returns to his/her home town and runs into a friend from high school, only to discover s/he’s outgrown him/her, and I did that bitchy little internal eyeroll thing in my brane? I was totally wrong about that. (I was also a totally misguided and needlessly snobbish bitch to dismiss the other half, who were writing a story that was “basically about a man on a journey.”)

Okay, again, I’m being pointlessly condescending and bitter. Because really, a truly brilliant writer can take even the most mundane subject matter and spin it into something that surpasses all expectations; that lights up the sky and lives through the ages. And that’s probably exactly what happens here.

I mean, that truly moving scene, where Zach confesses to his former football teammate that he’s gay? Worth the hundred bucks, right there.

Actually, I have no idea if that happens.

I’m just assuming.

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