ShowbizU: How to Write a Jukebox Musical- Joe DiPietro & Tim Kashani

And then you did Nice Work If You Can Get It, which— that you've got the music and the lyrics are done. That's a jukebox.

Yes.

So now you're going to wrap a story around that. How do you approach that?

Well, you're writing backwards when you're writing a show that already has an existing songbook. You're not writing the story first and then being very specific about— like in Memphis, the first scene takes place in an underground nightclub, so we wrote the song Underground. Now no one else probably would write a song called Underground about an underground nightclub, but we did, so that's a perfect setup for our show that takes you into our world. When you're writing a jukebox musical or one with pre-existing songs, you need to write backwards. So you need to almost say, okay, if the story takes place in this milieu, what type of songs that exist here can we, you know, can we write about? And you basically have to let not only the songs, but more specifically the lyrics of the songs guide you, which is very much writing backwards. But you have to say, I have to write characters that when they start singing, they're singing about these topics and their language matches the lyrics. So, you know, if you have very colloquial lyrics, you need characters who speak colloquial. So it's just really writing backwards. I mean, it's fun, it's a bit of a puzzle. And also what I try to do in a jukebox show is try to make you hear those songs in a way you don't expect it. So if it's a ballad, it's not just a head-on, you know, I'm in love, pretty girl, I'm in love, I'm going to sing a nice ballad about how much I'm in love. And there are a thousand of those songs, but you know, you want to really write something that twists it a little bit. So, oh, she's singing a ballad, but there's something else going on there too.