Picking up from yesterday –
[And again, noting: spoiler alert both on The Good Place, and on our presentation. If you wanna just watch the video without all the spoilers, you can see it here.]
If I remember correctly, you could only perform things in the final that you’d already done a version of in class. So, think once you got to the end, if you didn’t have 4 songs you loved, you just had to pick 4 that worked as best as you could. I don’t think you could have a surprise the day of.
So, this last song was our last chance to get something usable.
And basically we had two options. Rewrite the “Don’t Kill Me Song” that they generally liked. They liked a song for Janet. They liked musicalizing that moment. The gave clear notes. So, that seemed very doable.
Or, write a new song from scratch. And then just hope they like it enough that we don’t need to do a re-write to clarify things for us or them.
While we both obviously had moments we thought could be musicalized, there weren’t any that either of us felt exceptionally strong about – especially any where we both felt super strong and on the same page about musicalizing a new moment.
And we liked the idea of a song for Janet. We thought of her as a very major character (though Tahani (or Jason) would’ve been pretty writable, and are major characters of their own).
But since we didn’t have any ‘brilliant ideas’ for other moments, we thought we’d try to salvage the one we had.
And looking back on it, it’s not baaaaaad. People laughed at parts of it. It was fine. It just wasn’t as elevated as I thought the rest of the songs were.
So, we presented it and it went fine. They liked it and gave a few notes on the new version.
So, when push came to shove, we still could’ve picked any we wanted from the year. Meaning(!), “It’s Better to be Bad” was back on the table. Even though I thought it was a fun song, we wanted to do what they liked more than what we liked. (As, ultimately this was basically an audition to get into advanced.)
Also, in a show as diverse as The Good Place, were we gonna have 50% of our presentations be songs for white men? (I mean, maybe, if they really had liked it that much. And I recognize we still had 2 songs for white women.)
But yeah, that’s how we got to what we got.
And we’ll pick up here tomorrow!