In this ShowbizU interview, playwright Joe DiPietro and collaborator Tim Kashani discuss the fundamental differences between writing a straight play and a musical. They explain that while a play is primarily a writer‑driven, dialogue‑focused work, a musical expands the creative team to include composers, lyricists, orchestrators, choreographers, and a host of other specialists. This larger collaborative structure influences how stories are shaped, because music carries emotional weight and can dictate the pacing and placement of key moments. DiPietro and Kashani share practical examples of how they structure scenes, develop character arcs, and decide where songs should appear, emphasizing that the presence of music changes the writer’s approach to storytelling, timing, and emotional beats.
You write a number of different things.
Mm-hmm.
There's— differentiate a play from a musical.
There are two big differences between a play and a musical to me. One is just on a musical there are much, many more people in the room both when you're writing it and when you're talking about it and when you're producing it. So there's, you know, the writer, there's more than one writer generally, there's director, the director needs an assistant, there's a choreographer, there's a music director, there's a dance arranger, there's a vocal arranger. There's invariably more people in the cast. I mean, it's really, you know, it takes a village to do a musical. A play, it's you and the director and the cast essentially, which could be, you know, 2 people, 3 or 4 people, or, you know, whatever. So it's much more of a community, and you have— because there are more, generally, at least with me, there's always more than one writer in a musical, like, you have to be much more collaborative because the music and the lyrics and the book have to really coalesce in a way, or otherwise it's just not going to work. And also the difference between a play and a musical is in a musical, the music adds your emotion, and in a play, it's all you as a writer. Like, I'm writing, I'm writing the big dramatic moments, I'm writing the small moments, I'm writing the transition moments, I'm writing the comedy, I'm writing everything. And in a musical, you have to give that over to the music. So when you write a scene, your big emotional moment can't be in the scene because generally there's nothing to sing about about then. So you have to— and I think some writers, some really incredibly talented writers, get frustrated writing musicals because they're used to writing the meat. And you're sort of— you're writing meat, but you're sort of not writing, you know, the entire meal there. And that's real. And what music— the emotional balance that music adds to musicals is amazing to me.
