Summerhaven

Last week I began work on another musical: Summerhaven. It's the story of an eccentric teacher of an alternative method of education who has a crisis of faith when his school is taken over by the local board of education. I feel good about where it's going so far, even though I'm only just beginning the first very rough draft.

Here's how I started the work: after working out a full sketch of the play using Dramatica, I created an outline. Then I created character sheets for each of the characters.

Now, I have to do lots of research about different kinds of movement-as-healing practices, such as yoga, the Waldorf method's eurythmy, Delacroix's Eurythmics, and others. This is important, because the teacher in my play practices the Lotus Flower method of education, which is an entirely fictional mishmash of such therapeutic methods. It fuses music and movement in a way that nurtures the child's inner spiritual bud as it opens into the beautiful flower that the child will become. It's very woo woo. I'm looking forward to writing about it.

The play opens with Charlotte, a girl of 25, entering a temple in Nepal where her father, Marcus, the play's Main Character, is meditating. They haven't seen each other for 20 years and Charlotte has been searching for him. The two have a confrontation and Marcus explains why he left Charlotte all those years ago. Then the opening number begins. It's hard to describe the opening number, but I'll try in a later post. Right now I'm going to start writing some more. More later!