The other thingthat inspired me was when I was a kid, my father used to show me old movies and he showed me the Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney movie Boys Town where I saw simple people putting on a show for themselves and I realized that it was something that I really wanted to do. I could imagine seeing my name in the credits as a writer of musicals and plays. But more than that, I could imagine getting a bunch of friends together and put on a show. That’s what I enjoyed the best. I enjoyed getting my friends together and even if there wasn’t an audience, we were the audience and we would make each other laugh. We could hang out for hours and just make jokes and almost entertain each other, theater is very much the same except higher stakes and more people can see it. So I began to ask myself: How do you write a show? My mom took me to see Broadway shows constantly! From when I was 10 until maybe when I was 16, my mother would take me on 3 vacation trips to New York City to see Broadway shows: in February, July, and December and the primary reason was to see Broadway shows. We would take a bus from Peabody and travel in one day to New York, usually stay in New Jersey and, yes do the sightseeing stuff but also see musicals and shows. I saw a ton of shows with some very good performers like Nathan Lane, Bebe Newuirth, and Michael Crawford. I was enjoying seeing these shows like Oklahoma, Urinetown, and Annie Get Your Gun, but I also had an alternative reason: I wanted to learn more about shows. I really wanted to learn how to write a show. I also used to visit the play bookstores and buy tons of books about playwriting and shows but also plays and musical librettos and I would read through them constantly to try to learn how to write my own show. I never bought a How to book, I always bought the librettos of the musicals and just read them from cover to cover multiple times and just try to learn how to write from that. Starting at 12-year-old, I began to try to write my own show to disastrous results. I began to learn how to write songs and my first writing partner was a kid called Marc Krupsky. Marc was a composer and a lyricist of his own, but we wrote together as Marc the composer and Matt the lyricist. I learned how to play keyboards, but I never took a music theory class, so I never really knew how to write music down, but Marc knew how to so that’s why I trusted him to take care of that. We found we loved early rock bands like The Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Who, and Led Zeppelin. So, we decided to try to write a show together and we called it The 60’s Story. It was going to be about the Vietnam War and it was like Miss Saigon mixed with Hair. We wrote a few of the songs and I wrote the book, but it got bogged down by my stupid lyrics. I read it now and it makes me embarrassed but that’s what happens with most people’s early work. I wasn’t ready yet. Marc and I tried to write a few more musicals but life took us in different paths so I began writing by myself but since I couldn’t really write music, I decided to learn how to write plays. The first play I wrote was called Wouldn’t Have Missed it for the World and it was terrible. Then I wrote a play called Stupidity Run Amuck which again was me trying to be Neil Simon and I came off like a bigger schmuck, but I was still learning. I also fell in love with Kaufman and Hart, and I tried to write plays that took place in only one place, but I hadn’t discovered dialogue and how dialogue should sound. I would just write scenes that wouldn’t go anywhere, and may I remind you, reader, that I was 12 and 13 so I wrote like a 12 or 13 year old with your mom jokes and random stupid juvenile jokes. Then I discovered Stephen Sondheim...
About the Creator
Matthew Garlin
Matthew Garlin is a playwright, producer, lighting designer, director, actor for Theatre, Film, and TV. He is also an author with many of his books available on Amazon Kindle and paperback.
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The Beginnings of Writing
So with the start of this Vocal website a question comes of how does this story begin? Writing? I have always been good with writing. and I have always loved writing. When i was a kid, i used to write poems all the time. By the time I was in Elementary school and there was the occasional assignment to write a poem, I would sit down at the kitchen table and write out a poem in ten minutes usually. My mother would usually ask me if I finished my homework and I would answer in the affirmative and she would ask to read it. Nine times out of ten she would be crying and immediately call her cousin on the phone to tell her about the poem I had written. Because of that affirmation, I continued to write poems happily and give them to my mom to rad. I thought it was just a hobby just for fun as well as an attempt to show off. When I was a kid, I knew nothing about writing or even theater writing beyond writing poems for fun. Then I was 7 years old when I saw my first musical. It was a Saturday night, my mom and I took the train from Beverly into Boston, a twenty-minute train ride. I remember walking through the street, in a button down shirt and nice pants and it being a really big deal to be going into the city from Suburbia We walked through Fanuel Hall right up to the Wang Theater, now called something else and we saw Phantom of the Opera. I remember looking at this immense stage and this HUGE chandelier and seeing these figures, we were in the balcony, running around the stage and I don’t think I understand what was going on but that night, I fell in love with theater, but it wasn’t until I was 9 and I saw Les Misérables when I realized something even bigger: Someone writes these things. Two years later, my mom and I took the same exact trip on the train from Beverly to Boston for a night at the theater. I may have been wearing the same exact thing I wore the Phantom night. But for some reason, the impact from Les Misérables was amazing. The minute the music started and the minute I saw the show, maybe I was closer than the balcony when we saw it, I immediately was in tears of the beauty of the show. Maybe it was because I was older and I understood the story more but I just saw the beauty of the show and I couldn’t get it out of my head and I immediately realized that someone had written this music, someone wrote these lyrics and someone had sat down and put the book together and created this show. I'm a little embarrassed but I was so naïve and moronic to never realize before Les Miz that someone or some people write these shows and spend years trying to put on a show. I never even thought that someone sat down at a piano and someone else sat at a table and wrote a show and that through workshops and other methods, the show goes upon a stage. But then I saw a documentary about Les Miz and I saw the writers talking about how they created the show and put their fingers to the pen and then to the paper to write this show and I was amazed. I just couldn’t believe that people did this for a living. That day, I said something that I would find out later many other writers said the same thing like Jonathan Larson, Jason Robert Brown, and Lin Manuel Miranda, I want to do that! TO BE CONTINUED!!!!
By Matthew Garlin9 months ago in Writers
The Silence That Follows
“Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything . . . It is the presence of time, undisturbed. It can be felt within the chest. Silence nurtures our nature, our human nature, and lets us know who we are. Left with a more receptive mind and a more attuned ear, we become better listeners not only to nature but to each other. Silence can be carried like embers from a fire. Silence can be found, and silence can find you. Silence can be lost and also recovered. But silence cannot be imagined, although most people think so. To experience the soul-swelling wonder of silence, you must hear it.”― Gordon Hempton
By Paul Stewarta day ago in Fiction
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