Whether you’re telling a story orally or on the page or on the stage, you’re still dealing with a beginning and a middle and an end. You’re still overcoming a conflict of some sort or solving problems. You’re still exploring relationships and ideas and themes and messages and so forth. They are completely related to each other. I like to think of them as wonderful complements to each other.
One of the things that excites me and my mother when we write together is thinking creatively about how each of those disciplines can support each other with a particular idea. For example, can this book be adapted for the stage? Might there then be another opportunity for a young person to experience the ideas in this book or in this story from a different perspective?
We had this experience recently with one of our books, Simeon’s Gift, which is a picture book that we wrote together. It happens to be a book about music or about a musician, a minstrel who goes on a journey in search of his craft and his muse in order to win the love of his lady and I should say the approval of her father. The love isn’t a problem, it’s whether they are allowed to be married.
We had the extraordinary experience of adapting that original story and book into a play for a stage and then a musical, I should say, with songs that were inspired by the story and by the characters and so forth. Then taking that one step further, we were asked to develop the piece for a symphony. Those songs and that score were then extended that much further for an 82-piece orchestra. And we developed it for symphony.
At the same time, we also explored creating a Web game around the journey that this young musician takes in the book where children can go online and make their own mini symphonies from the sounds of nature which is essentially what Simeon does in the story. All of these pieces were wonderfully synergistic with the book itself.
Our fantasy and our dream was that the young person who read the book might then come to the theatre or to the symphony and have different senses and different ideas awakened and then go back to the book with that new perspective and new awareness and then perhaps log on and experiment with creating their own symphony online. It would be a real sort of multi-dimensional, multi-creative experience that starts with the book and ends with the book but goes all over the place in between.
