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| April Alsup: Music & Lyrics Mark Sbani: Book |
Monday, May 21, 2018
Introducing Sbani & Alsup
It's official Mark and April have inked a deal for co-writing "The Isle of Eigg", so without further adieu, here's the writing team of Mark Sbani and April Alsup. They've been collaborating most of the year and now they've agreed to make a go of it.
Friday, March 2, 2018
Eigg the Musical early development video
Here's a short promo video for Eigg the Musical. It's a medley of excerpts from five different songs with several process tidbits scattered around here and there. Eigg is truly a magical island with a long history of conflict. Hippies, a manipulative laird, ancestry, flashbacks, rivalries, revolution, tragedy, loyalty and love. What more can you ask for?
Saturday, February 10, 2018
The joy of a replenished song list!
Towards the end of the Sisyphus production I started getting back into the mode of composing music. It takes about 6 months to compose the songs needed to create a full length musical. Composers are always thinking about their "next" work, but you never really know when an idea will get enough traction for you to commit to the magnitude of a full length musical. In any case, you need a bunch of songs to work with so you might as well get at it and replenish your song list with new musical ideas.At first, you're just putting chords and melodies on paper with words scattered around here and there. Then the story emerges and the songs start having relevance to the characters and the plot, that's when the lyrics start flowing and complete songs are placed in the libretto.
For me, if the songs come, so does the story. I wouldn't be good at writing songs for a predefined script. So here's the list of songs we have to use with Eigg, I started working on them in early 2017 as the Sisyphus production geared up and I put that work in the hands of the director. There are nearly 50 new songs here! I'm so thankful they came together like they did.
Wednesday, February 7, 2018
An interesting logo concept
We've started thinking about logo concepts for marketing/branding and one idea we have is to form a heart when Ross and Kaja's hands come together. The heart actually resembles the outline of the island and we are exploring ways to use the concept in the script. It's a clever idea, but we'll have to see if we get any traction with it.
I've always enjoyed creating logo concepts. The current logo is really just a placeholder. Now we get to explore combining elements from the story with messaging, visuals and typography. I'll reach out to our graphic designer and see what they think. I can't wait to see what they come up with...stay tuned!
Sunday, January 14, 2018
ALPHA1...we have a song list...do you read me Houston...over
I thought it might be fun to document the steps we take creating Eigg the Musical; after all, this is a "blog" and that's short for "web log"...right? I've left out some of the preliminary steps because you never really know when or if a project is going to reach the tipping point, but we're there now. The initial concept came in mid 2017 after reading about the Isle of Eigg on Wikipedia. It was a bit touch and go at first, but songs came and the story emerged. It's really quite magical, you have to do a lot of research and get out of the box too. I think we (composers) do this differently, I find it important to let the music drive the story and if the music comes, so does the story; in any case, it takes roughly 6 months to write the songs needed for a full length musical. Here's a preliminary set of songs, but trust me this will change! songs will come...songs will go, as we fully develop the libretto (more to come!)
Thursday, January 4, 2018
Experience Eigg Island
Here's a short video clip of the 60 Minutes' adventure to the Isle of Eigg. The camera shots are amazing and really capture the beauty of this place. We all enjoyed listening to Draggan Mihailovich talk about the experience and the magic of the small island.