All I Want Is a Better Life

This is an unusual page in that I am offering an Open Source musical. It’s even more interesting considering I have acted in 2 plays in my life, the required one in grade school and another as an adult. My lack of experience in this area is very likely to show through very strongly, and is perhaps a very good reason why I don’t want to try and sell my work. 🙂

Anyway, I started writing this play after living in a small town and seeing the variety of people who choose to act in small town high school plays. The cast tends to be primarily young girls and women with a few men who overcome their shyness to participate. In thinking about it, most plays that schools could use are geared towards a more equal cast or possibly weighted more towards men, so I wanted to write something with a lot of female parts in it, to meet the needs of a high school casting director and to allow more young women to show off their talent.

I also wanted some big crowd scenes for lots of extras and I wanted it to be a simple, tried and true plot with some variations in the musical numbers, to allow the high school director some freedom and fun to try something a little different then your standard play.

So, here it is, a work in progress with some unfortunate problems, as stated below:

1. I don’t really have any experience doing this kind of stuff
2. While I can sing and hear the songs in my head, I couldn’t write out the music to save my life. I hope to record my singing, such as it is, with perhaps someone else helping out in writing the accompaniement.
3. I’m not a good editor.

With these above ideas, and a background in developing software, I came up with the idea of making this play Open Source so that maybe I could get some help in my weak areas. I also want this play to be freely available for those high school theater groups that I mention, because I know they are usually working with a small budget and I’d rather they have the money to spend on other parts of the play to make it a better experience.

With all of that out of the way, prepare for the curtain to open on my foray into writing a musical.