"What Have You Been Doing In New York?"

I got an email from a reader who has been quietly and patiently waiting for me to report all the exciting things I've been doing here in New York. So, here's the report:

I've been hunched over a computer screen.

Here's why: One of my goals on this trip was to work with my music editor Mark Janas to finish a publishable version of the score of The Big Voice for our publisher, Samuel French, so that when other theatres want to perform our show with different casts, they can have a readable, beautiful, professional score to work with.

But, you ask, haven't you already written out most of the score?

Why, yes, I have. The problem was that it was not really in the best, most professional format. Since I've never really worked as a musical director for shows, I've never seen that many scores from musicals. The ones I have seen are wildly inconsistent. Some are almost unreadable and some look absolutely beautiful in their lay-out. I wanted one that looked beautiful so that it was as professional as possible.

I was really happy when Mark Janas, my pal, volunteered to do the work in exchange for an "edited by" credit. He has musical directed all kinds of shows and would know exactly what a score should look like. The problem is that he uses a different music writing program than I do. And also, he's a complete perfectionist, something for which I'm eternally grateful.

The downside is that what I thought might be a three-hour process for him to kind of brush-up what I had done and we'd be done with it. Well, yesterday morning we worked on "James Robertson" and it took us three hours for THAT ONE SONG.

So, I've been spending endless hours converting all the songs from my old program to the new program to try to cut down on the labor hours he's having to put in. It's tedious, time-consuming and laborious.

Now, for the record, it's not that I haven't done other things. But I don't have time to download video, edit pictures or write up diary entries because all of my time at the computer is being spent on doing this music editing work. So, I promise that I will write more, post pictures and video, etc. as soon as I can.