Our topic this week at the SFF Seven is "Your book as a musical: which book would you choose to have made into a musical and which composer/lyricist/songwriter would you have score it?"
This is an amusing question in part because it's never been posed to me before. And I'm a fan of musicals from way back, having even performed in a few back in high school. I gave serious thought to which book would best translate to stage and who would do a great job with it.
I finally settled on THE MARK OF THE TALA, the first book in The Twelve Kingdoms trilogy and the overall Uncharted Realms series. I considered The Forgotten Empires books, but I think this story has an arc that would work best for stage - and I can envision the musical numbers. This entire trilogy was heavily influenced by the musical Wicked. There's even a scene in book 3, THE TALON OF THE HAWK, that I drew directly from a climactic song in that musical.
Therefore, I'd pick Stephen Schwartz for the music and lyrics and Winnie Holzman for the book. If they could do for THE MARK OF THE TALA what they did for Gregory Maguire's novel Wicked (which is an amazing book, if you've never read it), I'd be... well, I'd be defying gravity!
Sunday, May 3, 2020
The Mark of the Tala: The Musical
Labels:
Defying Gravity: Writing Cross-Genre and Succeeding Anyway,
Gregory Maguire,
Jeffe Kennedy,
Stephen Schwartz,
The Mark of the Tala,
The Twelve Kingdoms,
Wicked,
Winnie Holzman,
your book as a musical
Jeffe Kennedy is a multi-award-winning and best-selling author of romantic fantasy. She is the current President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) and is a member of Novelists, Inc. (NINC). She is best known for her RITA® Award-winning novel, The Pages of the Mind, the recent trilogy, The Forgotten Empires, and the wildly popular, Dark Wizard. Jeffe lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is represented by Sarah Younger of Nancy Yost Literary Agency.