New Title, New Website!
Sophia's Fall, formerly Paradise Lost, gets a new name, a new web presence, and lots of improvements!
Phew. It's been a long couple of months since our fantastic recording session at Deepwave Productions in Long Island City. I'd hoped to be able to crank this website out sooner, but duty called at work, and Rob and I got pretty involved in show revisions and submissions to various festivals. (Hopefully some big news here soon!)
Paradise Lost is no more - but we have a great new show called Sophia's Fall. OK, it's a lot of the same characters, and the same setting, and mostly the same music - but Rob and I have shifted our thinking about the plot pretty significantly. The show, we discovered, is really about the love story between Sophia and Lucifer. We wanted a title and branding that reflected that. And, let's face it, to most people Paradise Lost isn't the sexiest concept out there. (We think Milton is a beautiful, profound poem, full of meaning and grace that the author himself probably didn't even realize. Unfortunately most people don't recall wading through hundreds of pages of iambic pentameter in high school with much in the way of enthusiasm!)
So what's really new about Sophia's Fall? If you saw the 2006 AEA Showcase of Paradise Lost, you probably walked away with a handful of these impressions:
- Exciting action sequences
- Neat music
- Sexy cast
- Tough concept to stage
- Confused ending
- Wandered around quite a bit
We heard all of these critiques and more, loud and clear, from our audiences and our actors, and have done our best to address all of them by elevating the Lucifer/Sophia story to the Main Idea.
Sophia's Fall is now also a 'book musical', which means it has talking in it; the 2006 showcase was sung through. (Those of you who were at our private reading of 'V5' in the fall of 2006 may recall our first wobbly steps into the world of dialog. We're confident that the dialog has improved substantially since then!) Why dialog? The songs, we have found, are strongest when they're about a single moment, a 'Song Moment'. Trying to advance plot while singing has proved to be needlessly awkward, and detracts from the power of the moments when the singing is truly lyrical. We want to heighten the song moments and not try to get in the way of the dialog moments by singing in the middle of them.
Interestingly, there are actually two drafts of Sophia's Fall in existence at the moment. "V7" is a very tightly focused and carefully crafted plot that focuses heavily on the relationship between Lucifer and Sophia, while cutting out some of the bombast and action of the last full Paradise Lost draft (V6.5 as Rob and I count them.) "V6.75", which we submitted to the New York Musical Theatre Festival, is a hybrid between the new plot ideas in V7 and the epic, highly choreographed feel of V6.5. Though we like the idea of a small, intimate version of the show, we're still open to the marketability of a piece that has room for major spectacle. So far, both versions are still on the table. We welcome your thoughts and ideas!
Comments
Re: New Title, New Website!
by Elizabeth V.
on Apr 3rd 2008, 10:42 am
Wow...lots of changes. I look forward to listening to the soundtrack. I'm curious about the two drafts, V7 and V6.75. Do let me know (which I'm sure the mailing list will) if it is accepted into the festival. D and I woudl love to see the changes! Congrats on all your hard work!
