The inspiration to write “Grail” came after I watched a few episodes of “The  Power Of The Myth” broadcast on PBS. It was a great series with Bill Moyers interviewing Joseph Campbell, who to me, was THE master myth-story teller. He talked about the Parsival and Fisher King myths, and they both struck a chord in my imagination. These myths are the basis of more stories, movies and shows than just about any other of our myths. You can see them in ‘Star Wars”, “A Christmas Carol”, “Battlestar Gallactica” and hundreds more. They even made a movie called “The Fisher King” with Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges that was set in modern day.

Well, my “original” idea was to retell the Fisher King/Parsival legend in the future, and make it a science fiction action adventure story…..and also make it a Rock Musical. The Rock Musical, although not loved by the broadway community, is my favorite musical form to write in. I wrote my first rock musical when I was in college called “Cycles” (along with co-writers Gary Burke & Fred Serfis) and I became hooked for life. It was the combination of hearing a smokin’ rock band, full orchestra, chorus and rock singers that always got my juices flowing. It was the best of both worlds to me…the classical and the modern, and I always felt that my musical “voice” belonged there.

When I first started looking for a lyricist/bookwriter for “Grail”, I asked my friend Lynn Ahrens who she would recommend, and she suggested the writer Cappy Capossela.

When I approached Cappy about the idea for the show, her first response was “I don’t know anything about science fiction!”. Luckily, I was able to convince her that the musical was not about science fiction, it was about PEOPLE. Sci-fi was just the “world” I decided to put the people in. To me, all good sci-fi is about the people, and their stories. It’s one of the reasons I loved the new “Battlestar Galactica” series so much. It was the people and their stories that got me and millions like me “hooked on the series”. It was one of the best written shows on television EVER, because you CARED about the people.

I have been a sci-fi fan forever, and I’ve always felt that the one demographic that Broadway ignored when it came to musicals was the sci-fi demographic…which is HUGE! If we could find a producer with enough guts and vision to realize that “if he built it, they would come” (to quote a famous movie), we would have a huge hit that would run for years. Of the top ten movies of all time, a majority are either sci-fi or fantasy. Most of the top films last year were either sci-fi or fantasy, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone on Broadway noticing (with the exception of the producers of “Wicked”, which just passed the 1 billion dollar mark…..)

When we were writing “Grail”, Cappy and I decided to do things backwards. We decided to record the songs “full up” while we were writing, which is totally different from how a normal musical is done. With musicals, the smart idea is to work on the show until you can’t get it any better (or run out of time….whichever comes first) and after the show opens, THEN you record the show. We also made the decision that we would put the whole book to music, and have the actors tell the listener things we would never say once the show was mounted. Rule #1 of musical theater is “show, don’t tell”, but since our plot was dense, we decided that we had to “tell” our audience more information on the CD than we would if the show was on stage. If we didn’t, our CD audience wouldn’t understand the show. Once our show was on stage, we would get rid of massive amounts of dialogue, and make a stage musical out of it.

In my next blog entry, I’ll tell you about the incredible cast Cappy and I were able to put together to perform “Grail”, and I’ll also tell you how the story got written, and in retrospect, how “ahead of our time” the story turned out to be.