ysabetwordsmith | Musicals in Fanfic and Canon

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Musicals in Fanfic and Canon

I came across the fanfic "A Very Sherlock Musical," which is actually a great deal deeper than it seems. Begin with the premise: So, you know how musicals are set in a world where people just burst into song every five minutes, and everyone around them automatically knows to join in with the tune and choreography? This fic is set in that world. You now know enough to write brilliant fanfic of your own in whatever canon you wish, using the same premise. Add the plot: John finds it extremely frustrating that Sherlock won't sing their theme song with him.

Here we have a motif straight out of crackfic, the musical episode. Yet the author uses this setting to explore some very serious issues -- it's actually a story about attachment problems told through the metaphor of musical interaction or rejection. Touch on another Sherlock motif, and what you have is fantastic analog of asexuality: a situation in which Sherlock doesn't want to do the thing that everyone else is doing, and people think less of him for not liking it and not understanding why it's So Very Important to them. There's quite a lot of astute exploration into how social ties form between couples or work groups, and how that gets expressed.

This story reminds me strongly of "Once More, with Feeling." That famous episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer showed the problems that can come from stripping away filters and forcing people to sing about their feelings. In that show, they're not used to it, because it's not natural; it's demonic influence. Compare that with the above story set in a world where musical interactions are the norm.

Another variation is Happy Feet, in which all penguins are expected to sing, and the one who can't gets rejected.

There is a lot of potential to explore more challenges caused by living in a musical world. Most musicals never examine the fact that they are musicals. They just do their thing, a quirky little commentary on everyday life. But when they become genre-savvy, a whole new realm of possibilities opens up. How does the musicality work? What can go wrong with it? How do people cope with disabilities -- being deaf, blind, mobility-impaired, etc. in a world where singing and dancing are fundamental aspects of every human interaction?

I'm not all that fond of musicals, but I'm fascinated by the "musical world" as an AU setting template.

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This is fascinating. :)

And yes, so many possibilities.

I like a good deal of musicals, or used to when I was younger, so this is especially intriguing.

-Fallon~

Regarding talking about one's emotions, I have similar thoughts about monologues.

Regarding disabilities, I saw this play sometime back; it was written by the actually-disabled actors.
http://nalagaat.org.il/en/theater-2/not-by-bread-alone/
Eleven deaf-blind actors take the audience on a magical tour in the districts of their inner world; the world of darkness, silence and…bread. As the process of bread making unfolds on stage – the dough is being kneaded, raised and baked “for real” – a unique encounter occurs between actors and audience. Together they re-enact vivid or distant memories, recall forgotten dreams and joyful moments and ‘touch’ the spark of Creation present in every one of us.

Edited 2018-01-17 14:13 (UTC)

Whew!

>> Regarding talking about one's emotions, I have similar thoughts about monologues. <<

:D It's why Contretemps monologues with world-class violin serenades. He wants the connection, but he doesn't want to give away any actionable details.

>> Regarding disabilities, I saw this play sometime back; it was written by the actually-disabled actors.<<

Wow! I am especially impressed by their efforts to time the play to the length of breadmaking.

(I've only got a sad pre-Serum Steve. Drop in your favorite defiant Steve in substitution)
I know there is a dance troupe that's part wheel-chair users, part one foot after the other.

wheel-chair ballroom
30 years of varied dancing bodies

I know there is also at least one acting group that's combined; they found during one performance in NYC the stage was distinctly not level and an actor hadn't been blocked to brake-lock because they'd not found that precise mark before (they might have had to hit the space 'cold').

>> (I've only got a sad pre-Serum Steve. Drop in your favorite defiant Steve in substitution) <<

Well, Marvel did drop that canonical crumb about Steve being in a barbershop quartet. In a musical universe, permanent singing groups would logically be a type of family.

God, Steve's music after coming out of the ice. O_O I would be buying kleenex by the case.

>> I know there is a dance troupe that's part wheel-chair users, part one foot after the other.<<

That's cool. I've seen wheelchair dancing before, and it's awesome.

In the context of a musical world, I would be interested in exploring how they incorporate that, or not. Some of the moves they use are different, some of what their partners do is different -- you need training for that. Does the culture genuinely believe that musicality is an essential part of life? If so, they will widely teach how to pickup-dance with partners of diverse abilities, and there will be wheelchair-dance-friendly areas and equipment all around. But if they have a narrower focus on fully mobile dance, that's going to cause a lot of tension in society -- every broken ankle becomes a major social impediment, and the typical process of aging even more so.

Musical!Steve, of course, would have damn well gone out and learned all of the accommodations, even if he couldn't get through more than one song without wheezing himself into oblivion. "Girls don't like a guy they might step on," ouch! And then to get thrown into the USO, which in musical!world must have been one of the most prestigious positions, only Steve didn't want it.

I love Infinite Flow. :D Over in T-America, that would be a great match for Haru. Obviously they won't discriminate against soups, they're hardcore inclusive.

>>I know there is also at least one acting group that's combined; they found during one performance in NYC the stage was distinctly not level and an actor hadn't been blocked to brake-lock because they'd not found that precise mark before (they might have had to hit the space 'cold').<<

Yikes. But it's not just wheelchairs. You can't transpose directly from a flat stage to a raked stage because, in dancing, it changes the physics of the moves; and in acting, it changes the view from the audience.

Barbershop, as Steve mentions there, is almost assuredly Steve snarking and playing into the conflated ideas of the past he's probably still not sure how they happened. By now I'd think Steve has figured out about John-Boy and Mary Ellen.

It wasn't that it was a raked stage, it was a warped stage. And off they started drifting, iirc towards the rear.

I have performed dance on a concert stage. Turned my foot landing on the cover plate for the outlet.

>> Barbershop, as Steve mentions there, is almost assuredly Steve snarking and playing into the conflated ideas of the past he's probably still not sure how they happened. <<

Huh, I read it as a reference to how social activities have changed over time.

>> It wasn't that it was a raked stage, it was a warped stage. And off they started drifting, iirc towards the rear. <<

Yikes, that's worse. O_O

>> I have performed dance on a concert stage. Turned my foot landing on the cover plate for the outlet.<<

Bummer. I'm reminded of the "murder box" in swimming pool skateboarding (the drain holes).

Barbershop quartet was having a revival during the 1940s; I'm not sure an asthmatic before inhalers would have been in such a group, and there wasn't a lot of 1940s for Steve to be indulging in hobbies what with missing the second half. Steve however is a walking case study in snark, which is one take away from Civil War worth having. (cf the Queens-Brooklyn exchange on the tarmac)

It's sort of like Natasha baiting Steve about "who's the girl?" regarding Peggy Carter's picture next to Howard's.

An asthmatic shouldn't have been getting into fights at least twice a week either, and that didn't stop Steve. He even tried dancing.

Well, yeah. Maybe this is the real reason Bucky took Steve on the Cyclone, trying to get him a little less reckless that week.

Now Steve can get into daily fights and give a matinee Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Barnes is not amused.

>> Well, yeah. Maybe this is the real reason Bucky took Steve on the Cyclone, trying to get him a little less reckless that week. <<

Trying to meet Steve's adrenaline craving, yeah.

>> Now Steve can get into daily fights and give a matinee Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Barnes is not amused.<<

Poor Bucky. Now he doesn't even get the 2-3 days of grace while Steve waits for the swelling to go down before looking for more trouble.

Barnes:If I get two or three hours, I light a candle from whatever is still on fire.

On the bright side he can afford to toss Steve a box of 8 Crayons and watch him draw things. Too bad he started being able to see red just in time for a war.

>> Barnes:If I get two or three hours, I light a candle from whatever is still on fire.<<

*pat pat* I know that feel, bro.

>>On the bright side he can afford to toss Steve a box of 8 Crayons and watch him draw things. Too bad he started being able to see red just in time for a war.<<

Yeah.

One of the things I did with Steve in LIFC is watch him go nuts over the 64 Crayola crayons. :D

In Just a Kid From Brooklyn Howard uses a box of oil pastels to give Steve a test and a bit of a reward.

Much is done in Hamilton with the concept of "musical support"...

"Yorktown" is probably the best example. Hamilton sings "'Til the world turns upside down" and the ensemble echos it... "Take the bullets out your gun" is met - twice - with WHAT?! so Hamilton monologues at them as to why... and by the time he gives them their code word, they roar it back at him. At the top of the song, Lafayette declaims, "Freedom for America, freedom for France!" and gets no support; Hamilton's corresponding line about meeting his son *also* gets no support; Phillip will precede his father in dying in a duel. Then the cry of "We won!", started by Laurens, builds until Washington himself joins in, turning an expression of disbelief into a celebratory shout, followed by the full company's final line double forte...

I love Hamilton as a musical because it plays with so many musical conventions. Your obedient servant plays on the 2 characters do a duet even though they are not physically close trope, by having them send letters back and forth.

*nods* Hamilton plays with a *bazillion* conventions. Duet/not-duet, hip-hop/rap/pop/jazz as the modern analogs to prose/doggerel/blank verse in telling the characters' backgrounds apart, time signatures, singing... even the use of silence. There's even a character who's not officially credited that plays Death's incarnation... she's called #thebullet... (oooh, Death as *female*... ) and the fourth wall is kind of a half-wall that people can talk over, lean on, all but do backflips over...

And in the end it doesn't just tell Alexander's story, but Phillip's, Eliza's, Angelica's.... and, very indirectly, Peggy's. What you're looking for is the comment by AlannaR off "And Peggy!" that starts "Peggy may not have been involved in politics, but she was kind of a total badass." Which wouldn't have gotten out there if Peggy hadn't been featured in the show.

And the final line shatters the fourth wall once and for all, asking the audience directly (and ending in unison, unaccompanied):

o/~ Who lives, who dies who tells your story o/~

Catharsis. He masters it.

I wanna se3e so bad.

Your...descriptions make us cry. o.o

-Fallon/Jay~

Awwwwww.

The soundtrack album is available, and has *almost* everything in it. There are certain elements Lin-Manuel reserved exclusively for the live stage production...

I don't know how much of the Genius notes you will be able to make sense of, but there are COPIOUS notes on various elements and how they fit together like this.

I'm coming to realise that this guy may - through a combination of creative genius and the times he's growing up with - is, when the boot meets the board, not better than Shakespeare, better than Shakespeare *could have been*. There are tons of history jokes - Jefferson's crack about missing 80's music - that work *just because* of the happy accident that the time that his audience remembers as part of their personal history just *happens* to map decadewise to the history of the play. There are audio jokes that work ("chick-a-pow!") because Rap is a Thing; rap wouldn't be a thing for 400 years after Shakespeare's heyday. The juxtaposition of symphony and contemporary music. The fact that the entire historical cast is lilly-white, and the only white dude on the stage is King George singing bad pop? Not possible in 1600. Heck, you couldn't even have *women.* Here? Half the ensemble is *women dressed as men*, including The Bullet. And yet, the way he uses the music, the layering of voices, the interleaving references, the way the play is designed to re-use actors and to have those double roles have layers of meaning....

Pure.

Timeless.

Genius.

I can't wait to see what he does next.

Dammit. Now we gunna have to find a way to see this shit. Da's my people an' shit....an' the more ya talk it, the better it gits. :d

Fallon an me fo sho, cause rap and R&B's our thang, right? so yheah. We supposed to be gettin' a copy sometime of the soundtrack, but due to life gettin' away wi'us we ain't gotten ityet.

-Jay~

Did you know that rap and related genres have their roots in African poetry, which is declaimed rather than sung or spoken? It's why rap has that particular sound in between the two. You can listen to African poetry slams today, and compare that with tribal examples from history, and hear the commonalities. It's also why you hear so much call-and-response in both African-American poetry and churches -- it's out of Africa. :D

Oh my. Thank you for this elucidation. — Do you have a source to cite?

I've read about this for decades. Here are some references I turned up online:

https://penandthepad.com/characteristics-african-american-literature-8595869.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetry_in_Africa

https://news.uark.edu/articles/23774/king-fahd-center-hosts-lebanese-oral-poetry-duel

http://web.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/hum211/CoursePack/praisesongs.htm

http://articles.latimes.com/1987-12-01/news/vw-25908_1_south-africans

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/vachel-lindsay

http://colemizestudios.com/how-did-rap-start/

Ooooh.... turns out this call-and-response thing in sea shanties *came from* the African style... and it was picked up mostly by *American merchies*, not British men'o'war. (British fighting ships were by rule no-talking zones during an evolution, so that orders could be heard... instead of a shanty, the bosun would play his pipe, or a fife or fiddle would be used to keep the beat, but no singing.) *reads further* Aha. While the sailors were free men, the *stevedores* often were not... and there's where the songs jumped the gap. The capstan shanty, in particular, was derived from the stevedores using huge jackscrew capstans to stuff the cotton their brothers and sisters had harvested into the holds.

The age of steam killed the shantyman's job (and much of the music onboard ship), but the old tars weren't going down lightly, and set about preserving their music; to this day, the old shanties can be heard along many a waterfront (including Seattle's Center for Wooden Boats, a supremely appropriate venue).

(Of course, the fact that the shantyman's job *onboard ship* has been dead and gone a century or more doesn't mean that his job in the pub or on the concert hall stage is done, no, not atall... I've had the pleasure of hearing a few live. Hank Cramer and the "Crew of the Constellation" (among whose number was Heather Alexander, who was known to sing a shanty or two of her own), Séan McCann late of Great Big Sea... and then there was a certain Ontario chap who got tired of singing chanteys because he could sing along but never got to sing lead .... so he wrote one of his own, about a leaky, near-derelict Canadian privateer named the Antelope, so he could sing lead...

No, of *course* I didn't forget. How *could* I?

o/~ So here I sit in twenty-eighteen
How I wish there was more fanfic now
It's been five years since the lyrics post
I've gotta stop laughing, or give up the ghost!
God help us all! I was told
We'd peruse for free, refining gold,
We'd sire no puns, spread no jeers.
Now I'm a broken fan laughing into my beer
The last of Barrette's Private Ears.

(No, of course, it's not that bad, I can breathe, really... but it *is* just that good... and of *course* I had to tweak it. Because *filk*. ;)

Hee hee hee! Sir, I am honored. At first I was wondering. Then at line 6 I was startled, then almost overcome with egoboo. Thank you, sir!

*laughter* As I learnt myself in this very corner of cyberspace, be careful what you tell even an apprentice bard, you're liable to hear it again... RIGHT, Ysabet?! ;)

Yea, verily.

We had occasion to write down a defining word about ourselves tonight. Mine was Bard. :D

As well it should be!

Honestly, worksongs will crop up anywhere you have people doing a lot of work. I've heard it happen. The challenge is that now, people don't know all the same songs, unless they work together regularly or they share a common background.

Some cultures have kept it up more than others, though. Agricultural workers in the South, if black, often know and use some of the cotton calls or other field songs. Shanteys on the docks. *laugh* And you put Native Americans together anywhere, they will sing, and they'll find something to bang for a drum. I saw one video from a lacrosse locker room where someone started chanting, they all joined in, someone else grabbed a bucket to turn over and a minute later a bunch of them were drumming on it. <3 community.

Yeah, and put two filkers together *anywhere* and you're liable to get a musical... I remember one dark and stormy night(tm) me and

bethinexile were waiting for New Years' Eve fireworks, and found ourselves singing the aforementioned Mr. Rogers' "Giant"... because it kinda seemed appropriate for the nasty weather...

♫ Cold wind on the harbour and rain on the road
Wet promise of winter brings recourse to coal
There's fire in the blood and a fog on Bras d'Or
The giant will rise with the moon ♪

G-d I miss Stan. One of these years, I hope, Nathan or Garnet will grace whatever great hall we have at the time... stupid pant loo fire...

*squee

Thanks for articulating all the things about Hamilton. I've listened to the cast album and devoured what i could find about it online. Most of that sounds familiar. I haven't listened to it in order for a while tho. Have you seen the lyric analysis on genius.com? * drools

Yes, it's fabulous. It's where I discovered some of the stuff I burble about elsethread. :)

Yay!

Send us plz?

-Fallon/Jay~

Here is the link for the genius page for the cast album & the cast album on YouTube.

https://genius.com/albums/Lin-manuel-miranda/Hamilton-original-broadway-cast-recording.

https://m.youtube.com/#/playlist?list=PL3jgxo6Qj6wfyoeQbR6RWXo4l_9-CngGY

There is a post making its rounds on tumblr about what if Anakin (and the other Star Wars characters) could hear their theme music and other Musical Cues.

"Oh, maybe I _should_ apply more supervision just now."

ROTFLMAO!!! Darth Emo would have the world's worst inferiority complex because Darth Vader and even Luke Skywalker have better, scarier theme music. And Darth Emo can't keep his temper long enough to actually follow the beat.

This is a better motivation for him going apeshit than anything the movies have bothered to present.

*ROFL* Fourth wall? WE DON' NEED NO STEEKING FOURTH WALL!"

I'm reminded of Mickey Mouse telling James Levine that Donald Duck isn't ready to play his part in the Fantasia 2000 skit "Pomp and Circumstance"...

and thinking of a character very-offstage suddenly hearing his musical cue (Daffy, perhaps?) and charging on stage wildly inappropriately...

Cross-over!

This sounds like fun, I'll check it out. Once More With Feeling is definitely on my short list of fav BtVS episodes, perhaps one of the top 3.

I used to run an RPG called Multiverse, and it allowed people to travel to fictions... and one skill available was Genre Mastery - figuring out *where* you were and *how* to act. I never had them fall into a musical world because I wasn't quite sure how it would roleplay, but it was tempting.

That's how I navigate between lives. *looks at Washington* I seem to be in a farce at the moment, or perhaps tragicomedy.

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