INTERVIEW WITH DARLING GRENADINE WRITER DANIEL ZAITCHIK


Education Dramaturg Ted Sod spoke with writer Daniel Zaitchik about his work on Darling Grenadine.


Ted Sod: Where were you born and educated? Did you have any teachers who had a profound influence on your decision to write for the musical theatre? Daniel Zaitchik: I was born and raised outside Boston. Music was a big part of my childhood. My family would listen to everything from opera to gospel. I feel lucky to have been exposed to a wide range of music from a young age. I think it must be why I never think much about genre or needing to fit into a musical box.


I started writing wordless songs at the piano when I was a little kid. They had titles like “The Magic Ferris Wheel” and “The Gnomes’ Party.” So while I didn’t know I’d end up writing for theatre, it seems storytelling was a big part of music for me from the beginning. My parents also introduced me to poets like e e cummings and Wallace Stevens. Before I started writing my own lyrics, I would set poems to music.


As a teenager, I was drawn to singer-songwriters like Billy Joel, Leonard Cohen, Simon & Garfunkel, Nina Simone, and Tori Amos—storytellers who painted vivid scenes with their words and melodies. So they were sort of my teachers living inside cassette tapes and CDs.


I studied piano pre-college at The New England Conservatory. Although I loved the music I was being introduced to—especially French impressionists like Debussy and Ravel—I never felt comfortable in that world and was nowhere near as technically skilled as the other students. Theatre was where I felt more at home. I had an influential high school drama teacher who trusted us to handle complex material and encouraged us to write our own stuff. So I became passionate about theatre in high school and ended up studying acting at Boston University. During my time there, I continued to play and sing, and I developed my first musical.


Although I never studied writing musical theatre specifically, being an actor and a singer-songwriter naturally led to that kind of storytelling.


TS: What inspired you to write and compose Darling Grenadine? What do you feel the musical is about? DZ: Darling Grenadine came about from an instinct to write something personal—something about the kinds of people I know and the world in which we work together: the world of music and theatre. When looking for subjects to write about, I’m often drawn to long-ago time periods, myths, and mysteries. The otherness of characters and events removed from my day-to-day life tends to inspire words and music in me. But with this project, I instead looked around at the people and patterns closest to me—the things happening in the rooms I’m in, the relationships I observe, and pieces of myself.


There’s a long tradition in cinema and music-theatre of telling the backstage stories and personal journeys of artists. I wanted to play around with the tropes of that tradition—embrace them, challenge them. I started by taking stock characters we recognize from old tuners—the up-and-coming Actress, the charismatic Composer, the witty Bartender—and attempted to let them be real, substantial people. The people I know.


6 ROUNDABOUT THEATRE COMPANY


Daniel Zaitchik


I was looking for the humor and fizz of a starry-eyed MGM classic that simultaneously examined contemporary people struggling with serious situations we can relate to. The inherent escapism of the romantic musical comedy form seemed like a fitting vessel for the themes I was particularly interested in exploring: denial and charm.


Life is a constant seesaw of light and dark, hope and despair. I wanted to find that balance in this musical and explore the complexities of being human within a story that still allowed for laughter and joy.


TS: How did you decide what the score for Darling Grenadine would sound like? DZ: When I write, I tend to just sit at the piano and see what happens. This was especially helpful for this piece because Harry, our main character, is also a piano player and composer. So I think the sound of the show just started to reveal itself as I went along and got closer to the characters.


I found that although the show is set in present-day Manhattan, I wanted to infuse some of the songs with a bit of an old-fashioned flair that matched Harry’s charisma and the kind of throw-back “backstage” story we’re telling.


There have ended up being three categories of music in the show: 1) Non-diegetic music that the characters sing in the context of the story 2) Diagetic music that the characters perform at a piano bar where much of the show takes place, and 3) Diagetic music in Paradise—the


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