Writing a Musical about George Mason,
our Founding Father
As I’m finishing up my
undergraduate degrees here at GMU, I jumped at the opportunity to make my cool
idea a reality. I’m a senior in the Physics and English departments, but have
always had a passion for theatre and music. While my fields of study seldom
nurtured that passion, I maintained its flame with what time I could outside of
class, performing with local theatre companies and playing with local bands
& ensembles. After hearing about OSCAR’s summer research opportunities for
undergrads, I took a chance to feed my creative passions on campus for a
change, and wrote my proposal for a grant to write George Mason, the Musical. One month later, I got the good news,
and my cool idea wasn’t just a cool idea anymore. Excited and daunted, the
reality of the enormous endeavor before me was setting in when I realized: I
have a lot of learning to do.
The goal of the project is
to write the first draft of the music & lyrics for the show. Because I’m
envisioning the musical like an operetta—with all scenes sung, and hardly any
spoken dialogue—the “music & lyrics” essentially the first draft of the
whole show. I’ve written lyrics for shows and music for shows, but this is the
first time I’m doing both, and I am up for the challenge!
The real challenge, however,
is the research process. Meetings with my faculty mentor, Dr. Rosemarie
Zagarri, regularly point me in the right direction and kept my work on course.
I am new to history, academically speaking, so writing a show about the real
life story of our university’s namesake has taken me places I’d never gone
before. After my initial reading about the life and times of Colonel George
Mason IV, I found myself spending most of my days at Gunston Hall, Mason’s
ancestral home in Lorton, Virginia, walking the grounds and making myself at
home in their research library. The librarians, scholars, and educators there
have become fast friends and invaluable resources, answering my constant
questions and lingering curiosities. Sometimes I’ll spend an entire day or more
doing what I thought would only take a few hours, but, as my new friends at
Gunston have frequently reminded me, history always takes more time than you
think. But with determination and maybe another listen through the Hamilton soundtrack—if you haven’t
guessed, I’m a big fan—I kept at it and learned so much so quickly visiting
Gunston and other sites in Mason’s story, like Washington’s Mount Vernon,
Colonial Williamsburg, and Independence Hall in Philadelphia—all their
respective scholars seem to to know each other, by the way, so making
introductions has been easy!
After months buried in
books, skimming through archived materials, and deciphering the 18th
Century scrawl of Colonial handwriting, the arc of George’s story became
discernable, and the words of my script were manifesting in the margins: it was
time to start writing.
Sometimes writing is sudden
and instantaneous, with ideas and lyrics popping out of thin air. Sometimes
writing is analytical and tedious, spending hours pouring over the text of a
two-hundred-year old letter or speech, trying to find that perfect rhyme or fit
the lyrics to the beat, all the while sweating over whether or not your thematic
riffing retains the meaning of the piece. Every moment in the story has to mean
something. Every song has to be an opportunity for a character to grow. But
even though the devil’s in the details, remembering that you’re still learning
makes every draft digestible. What’s more, you start to see these historical
statuettes take life on the page like real people, with struggles and dreams
and disappointments and victories. Mason’s got an attitude, and fights for what
he believes; he’s not much one for politics, but will do anything for his
children. Washington has a deep desire to be validated, to steward the new
nation while protecting his reputation, but like Mason sometimes feels like
he’s can’t do what people ask of him. Madison’s soft-spoken and cerebral, shy,
while Jefferson is lanky, witty, dilettantish and pie-in-the-sky, and their
repartee makes heady concepts much more fun to write. Suddenly, history is
personal and intimate; when I write their songs, I have to feel what they feel.
The songs are still being
written and the play is taking shape, but there is still much work yet to do.
In the coming weeks, I’ll soon be making recordings for each musical number, to
get the sound of the show together, and calling on actors and players to see
how the scenes and songs sound for real. Whatever the future holds for George Mason, the Musical, I am deeply,
profoundly thankful for the opportunity OSCAR has given me to take my passion
seriously, working on it full-time. Whatever future work I may pursue, I have
no doubt the things I learned in my research this summer will sing their way
into everything I do.
