Feeling: creative
Listening to: Vienna Teng - Gravity
Reading/Watching: Clockwork, by Phillip Pullman

Today Mini-Me showed me Phillip Pullman's Clockwork, told me I had to read it. So while the cast ran blocking for Act I (which I am not in), I read the book (it's not very long).

Afterward, she came over, excited, asking, wouldn't it be perfect to set as an opera?

That had us off and running, and within an hour we had staging ideas, orchestration notes, and voice parts assigned to every character. We were already discussing how Prince Florian's theme should be playful and mechanical, and fit perfectly into Gretl's sweet, simple theme. I'm envisioning Florian having tick-tock perfect fifths in it which turn into syncopation when set against Gretl's triplet rhythms, and the evil Doctor having lots of dissonance and melodic tritones, especially in harmony with the clockwork knight, Sir Ironsoul, and wow, I really am that much of a geek; stop laughing.

Mini-Me wants to do it Gilbert-and-Sullivan style, where I write the libretto and she does the composition, but I think we're both too interested in both aspects of the writing to make it that clear-cut, and we'll have to wait until she finishes taking Arranging and I take Composition to get much of anywhere.

This is, oddly enough, reminding me of elementary school, when I would write plays and my friends and I would plan to perform them and make bajillions of dollars by selling tickets to our parents (because back then, parents had bajillions of dollars). We never actually made it to performance time, because blocking and costuming and rehearsing were all foreign concepts and all we ever did was read the plays out loud and talk about the pretty, pretty money we'd make.

(Do you remember that, Bear? Particularly The Ghost in the Girls' Bathroom. I think I still have the handwritten script somewhere in desk drawers in Hometown.)

But yeah. Hopefully this opera thing will make it farther than the Bathroom Ghost did, because I don't think that one made it out of the toilet.

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