A song must move the story ahead. A song must take the place of dialogue. If a song halts the show, pushes it back, stalls it, the audience won't buy it; they'll be unhappy.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I don't care how good a song is - if it holds back the storyline, stalls the plot, your audience will reject it.
The songs become the show, which is how it should be.
I think with musicals, it's much more part of the script. They don't want songs that would stop the show; they need songs that keep the plot moving.
If you're dealing with a musical in which you're trying to tell a story, it's got to sound like speech. At the same time it's got to be a song.
In so many musicals today, the story is moved forward by a song. I don't think we're gonna try to do that.
Music is a dialogue.
A song doesn't happen as a whole verse; it happens linearly, line by line, almost word by word, phrase by phrase. And if each phrase, each line, has a proper emotional feel and connects to the line before it and the line after it, the song will be doing what it should be doing.
The music's job is to get the audience so involved that they forget how the movie turns out.
Sometimes I just think that there are more things to be said to make the audience understand what I'm trying to do more. When I'm singing, I don't want you to just hear the melody. I want you to relive the story, because most of the songs have pretty good storytelling.
On stage, generally speaking, the story is stopped or held back by songs, because that's the convention. Audiences enjoy the song and the singer, that's the point.