An editor learns a new narrative form: writing musicals

Every story needs an opening number. In journalism, there’s your lede; in musicals, it's the explosive early minutes telling the audience about the world they've entered. My latest chapter began with a simple conversation over coffee and the shocking notion that I didn't need permission to reinvent myself as a writer.

I started my career at The Daily Beast during the Tina Brown era, when wild cover stories made news and billionaires threw around digital outlets like Slinkys. After the website’s merger with veteran print publication Newsweek, I was editing culture stories and celebrity interviews.

Being an editor, I learned, requires unnatural selflessness. After layoffs and Newsweek’s first (but not last) burial, I threw myself into the solitary role of a freelance writer and editor, consulting on magazine gigs and writing about the potpourri an erratic generalist embraces: travel, running, almond milk. 

A couple years into this sequence, I got the itch to write in new venues. It started with a short film script. Then plays. I’d always liked musical theater — not quite in the “listened to 'Rent' on repeat as a sad-eyed teenager” way, but enough to appreciate it as an art form. However, I didn’t read music, and the idea of writing a song was a laugh. 

And yet all it took was one coffee meeting with a new friend, a theater writer who cracked open the world: “You don’t need to play an instrument,” she said. “You can still learn how to write a musical.” I could learn. What a concept. How often do we wait for permission to move forward?

I enrolled in a lyrics-writing class with Adam Gwon, a crash course in perfect rhymes and AABA song form, scrounging together enough lyrics to apply for the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop, a prestigious writing haven recently known as the launchpad for EGOT winner Robert Lopez ("Avenue Q," "The Book of Mormon") and Kristen Anderson-Lopez ("Frozen" and "Frozen 2") and where Lynn Ahrens met Stephen Flaherty (“Ragtime,” “Once on This Island”). Hitting submit on that application sloughed off a chunk of my editor identity. Then I got in. Suddenly, I was surrounded by composers and lyricists who not only played "Rent" on repeat, but wanted to debate the prodigious creative output of Stephen Sondheim versus Andrew Lloyd Webber deep into the night. They scared me and I adored them and we could learn how to write musicals together. 

I felt out of depth and at home — just like my early days in a newsroom. Both were incubators for ideas, safe spaces to try, fail, nerd out. The first year was full of difficult assignments, like turning a scene from "A Streetcar Named Desire" into a song for Blanche DuBois. (Go ahead and try it. Blanche really doesn’t want to sing.) One week my writing partner and I turned a quaint New York Times profile of a retiring lighthouse keeper into a moody ballad. In the workshop, a singer performs your song and your fellow writers give feedback. (This intimidating workshop environment was memorably put on film in "Tick, Tick…Boom!") Imagine your editor reading aloud their Google Doc comments and qualms about your story in an editorial meeting. Honest feedback is intoxicating and awful, a shot of adrenaline that somehow knocks you out cold.

Yet you keep learning. Isn’t the point to always keep learning? In the workshop’s second year, members test their structure skills by adapting an existing property into a musical. My composer partner Ron Passaro and I turned the TV series "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" into a singing and dancing spectacle. One challenge was deciding if Midge, the comedienne heroine, would sing as fast as she talked. (Answer: Yes.) Another was deciding what story elements were important to keep, and which should stay on screen. The relationship between Midge and manager Susie Myerson remained the heart of the show, and in our song “You Got the Goods,” Susie convinces Midge to give her new career a shot: “Everybody lives / Everybody dies / Don’t you wanna be / The kinda broad who tries?”

Musical structure can be intensely, almost annoyingly formulaic. With so much action onstage, an audience can easily lapse into confusion or, worse, boredom. So you need an opening number that reflects the tone and style of the entire show. You need the protagonist to sing their “I want” song in the first few scenes so the audience can begin tracking their journey. You need a big number before intermission, to ratchet tension and urge people to return to their seats after their bathroom visit. You need a penultimate “11 o’clock number” to showcase the climax of the musical and lead character’s a-ha moment. One classic example is “Rose’s Turn” from "Gypsy," in which beleaguered Rose, currently embodied by Audra McDonald in a Broadway revival, has a breakdown and breakthrough over five enthralling minutes. The show’s themes, storytelling, and action coalesce. Audra earns her standing ovation. The audience is sated.

Balancing these structural needs is half the art form. The other half? What the writer highlights through character and dialogue. Actually, doesn’t that sound like constructing a journalistic piece? Choosing which sources to spotlight and facts to include, then carefully translating that message to a wide readership: that is a writer’s job. Much like in narrative nonfiction, a musical writer must titrate crucial drips of information to keep the story moving, entertain, and continue the mystery—all at the same time.

If I was going to write an original, full-length musical, I needed creative constraints. A columnist might aim to hit a word count; composer Kristoffer Bjarke and I gave ourselves one act, six characters, and 26.2 miles. One day I was running a 5K, looked at the crowd, and thought, “What if I could hear what the other runners were thinking?” And then thought I’d turn that wild idea into a musical. We called it "Marathon," and the show takes place entirely during a road race. 

Musicals are notorious for taking a long time to develop, but the missing piece, I’ve found, is there’s rarely a deadline. No one is asking for your creative project to be born. So I invented a forcing function for us to complete a draft: I invented a deadline. Booking the space, hiring actors, inviting an audience—sometimes you have to scare yourself into finishing. You have to pretend the printer is firing off the front page at midnight, and your copy has to be ready. This magical thinking works.

We finished the draft, held a wonderful reading, and can move on to revising. My editor’s brain doesn’t mind. It knows that rewriting is writing. 

Leaning into a new medium is challenging and invigorating. Looking back, it’s easy to connect the dots: an experiment led to a conversation, a class to a workshop, to collaborators. Of course, it’s delightful to nudge someone else, “Go ahead, try something new.” But it’s never easy. You may feel like the same nervous wallflower you were on day one of your first internship. There’s a hidden truth, though: Being a beginner again allows you to see your skills in a new light. 

Stories are illuminating, comforting, infuriating, eye-opening—and can be in any medium. Once you find a lane, it’s unnerving to leave. It’s cozy to stay where you’re valued, where office politics are familiar and job titles validating. But if you feel a little pull toward fiction or poetry, musicals, or podcasts, I say: Swerve towards the new. Discomfort fuels creativity, and gives you fresh eyes on your most meaningful work. Remember there are many roads to follow, and you have so much to offer the world.

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Kara Cutruzzula is a writer who creates musicals, plays, and stories exploring ambition and connection in our modern world. Her articles and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, TIME, and other publications. Through her daily newsletter, bestselling journal series, and podcast, she encourages others to pursue their most meaningful work.