Blast From The Past #1: An Inn Not-A-Keeper

Hey everyone! Week three of rehearsals has commenced, and I'll be blogging on our singing sessions shortly. But for now, I would like to feature a "blast from the past": an excerpt from FTL when it was first staged as a university-level production almost five years ago. The point of this is to provide some account of the trajectory of the FTL score and libretto, and to demonstrate how the words, music and script for a musical can change over time — in the case of FTL, how it has changed, and indeed how it has had to change, over time!

As I mentioned in my welcome note, FTL has gone through some massive rewrites since the 2005 production, thanks to collaborations with our director, Colin. These rewrites include script and lyric edits aplenty; tweaks and fixes of existing melodies; more fully developed characters and more clearly defined motivations; restructuring of songs, including creating greater variety in musical styles; and, in certain cases, the throwing-out of entire songs and the writing of completely new music! The changes to the script and lyrics are something that's ongoing, which I think every production-in-the-making should undergo and every production team that has the time and opportunity should do, especially when it comes to original works. Even right now, we're tweaking words that don't quite make sense, or rhymes that sound a bit too forced, or moments in the script that are a touch too kooky even for our version of the Christmas story!

I think as a composer/writer it's easy to be possessive over one's creations and to not want to change what you've originally written, but I've come to learn that it's when you're able to allow others to criticise and make constructive suggestions, as tricky as it can be to digest, that you're able to watch your work grow and (theoretically) get better over time. So the end result, come December, is what you guys and girls are going to witness after months, years of editing and tightening, writing and rewriting, composing and decomposing! Whoohoo!

In the meantime, here's the scene from the 2005 production of FTL which was staged in Australia. Colin likes to pretend this version doesn't exist (LOL!), and rest assured our upcoming version is an entirely different animal altogether (with better production values!) from what I presented as a wet-behind-the-ears university student. This song, which is the famous "no room at the inn" scene from the Christmas story, has been removed almost entirely from FTL 2010, predominantly because it was felt that the melody wasn't particularly interesting, memorable or original enough for such a significant part of the story. Ouch! Painful but true! ;) It has since been replaced with what we believe is a much stronger melody, and the pièce de résistance is in how we've recontextualised the scene, subverting the...

Oh you know what? You're going to have to wait till this year-end and come and see the show to find out!!! But here's the original scene - check it out now, for you won't be seeing or hearing (most of) it again! ;))