I. Beauty and the Beast (1991)
Many musicals have an “I Wish” song — a song that establishes early on what the protagonist feels is missing from their life, a desire the story will both fulfill and complicate.
In Disney’s animated Beauty and the Beast, Belle’s “I Wish” song is very short and says, roughly: “I don’t want to be a little wife; I want adventure in the wider world; I want much more than is planned for me.” She releases dandelion seeds into the wind over a sun-drenched vista.
Belle’s story: she gets locked in the darl castle down the street, and eventually marries the guy she finds there.
What is most fascinating, to me, about that contrast is that there’s no need to change the story. The whole film would work fine if you swap out those 30 seconds of song, instead. She could wish for a quiet place to read, someone to talk to, and to not be mocked for her imagination — that would work with all the other evidence! And it would work in the “oh, getting my wish is not making me content” way, at first, too!
Instead, she sings an “I Wish” song that might reasonably suit the story of The Little Mermaid or Mulan — a story with travel and adventure in foreign lands.
II. Wicked
Many musicals have a show-stopping number involving a character girding their loins to make an important choice. In Wicked, that number is Defying Gravity. But as much as Defying Gravity is a banger, it always felt thematically unearned to me. What does gravity, or flying, have to do with the emotional journey of any of the characters? What does the metaphor built by the lyrics have to do with the internal decision Elphaba is making?
It’s the right moment in the musical for a song like that — the emotion is earned — but the actual content of the song is more related to this tiny bit of plot machinery (a spell that makes things fly) instead of any central theme or aspect of character.
The concept of defying gravity absolutely could have thematic resonance: she’s defying the laws of physics AND the laws of man. So what could you change leading up to it to make that connection work?
You could make two changes:
- make Elphaba extremely rules-bound and Glinda “rules are for other people”; let that drive their conflict
- and make flying a forbidden branch of magic
In that adjusted story, Elphaba seeing the cruelty of the laws towards non-humans, deciding to be an outlaw, AND experimenting with flight all thematically act together, and then whether or not to “Defy Gravity” can effectively represent the choice both characters are making.
Admittedly, equating “defying the laws of physics” with “defying the rules” could cause other problems, given that the head of state is A Wizard.
So, alternately, rather than change the story to suit the song, how could the song be adapted to better connect to the story given the themes that are already there?
The first act is almost entirely about perception: being seen as good vs being good; being seen as strong, or beautiful, or liked, or beloved vs actually being any of those things.
A physics metaphor about giving up on being perceived as something? That’s easy! Try one of these:
- “I think I’ll try superposition”
- “I think I’ll try quantum coherence”
- “I think I’ll exist in several eigenstates”
The scansion and prosody of these options are, frankly, unassailable, and the language widely accessible. So that’s how I’d fix Wicked’s hit song and my version would be way more relatable and popular than the dud they’ve got, which no one likes.
III. Sheesh, Sam! What are you talking about?
I think a lot of my acquaintances think of me as a critical and negative person because I tend to think and talk about things I think don’t work, even when they’re a small detail in an otherwise successful whole (one short song, or even one lyric, in a popular and critically acclaimed musical, to pick an example at random.)
That’s not because I want to tear others down, though: I do exactly the same to my own work, both the technical and the artistic! Nor is it because I am a perfectionist — I am happy to release “good enough” into the world and work from there. My nitpickiness comes from just this: to me, how things fail is the most interesting part. That is the meat worth chewing on.
There are sometimes things to be learned in analyzing something that works well, to see how it works; but most often what you discover in the analysis is “it works because it follows guiding principles I already know.”
There is always a practical lesson available in examining something that doesn’t work, and investigating how it could be improved; because even when you discover that it is most easily improved by making it adhere to the principles you already know, you get the practice of mentally doing that work.
This urge to pick at the scabs of any undertaking has, in many ways, led to my current approach to consulting. I rarely accept a contract longer than 6 months. Why? Because while your teams and processes will grow and improve under my constant prodding at even small dysfunctions, they will not stabilize. To make a beautiful bonsai, you train and prune it aggressively and then leave it alone. I am constitutionally very good at the former and poor at the latter; so I try to provide the nitpicking as a service, rather than fight my instincts in order to effectively serve a long-term placement.
Still, it is good for me, sometimes, to play against type and spend some time admiring what works. If you’re my opposite and tend to shy away from analyzing smaller losses inside larger successes, let’s trade for a bit: I’ll set my nitpicks aside for a bit, and you try to see the failures as the most interesting part.