VCU alum John Winn sits in the auditorium of Richmond’s Firehouse Theatre, where the musical “Safety” is premiering this month. (Dean Hoffmeyer, Enterprise Marketing and Communications)
John Winn – son of a singer/instrumentalist/choir director – always dreamed of writing a musical.
Inspired by his father’s music and occasional participation in plays, Winn pursued the clarinet and saxophone growing up amid his interest in theater. He then studied music education at VCUarts, earning his master’s degree in composition in 1995, and he served as a visiting assistant professor, working under Jazz Studies Program founder Doug Richards.
Now, Winn has combined his passions by composing the score for his debut musical, “Safety,” which will premiere at Broad Street’s Firehouse Theatre in downtown Richmond this month.
Before the curtain rises, VCU News caught up with Winn for some insight about the project and his process.
How did the opportunity arise to write the music for “Safety”?
Irene Ziegler, who’s been a fixture on the Richmond theater scene, is also a writer and happens to be a neighbor. I’m a huge Stephen Sondheim fan, and I’ve always wanted to write a show for the stage. I approached Irene because I knew she was working on a play, and I asked if she had any ideas for a musical we could do because I’m not great with plot. She said she was working on “Safety.”
It’s not your grandfather’s musical. It’s not a song-and-dance show. It’s more along the lines of some recent shows, like “Next to Normal” or “Kimberly Akimbo,” that deal with serious subject matter but at times in a more lighthearted, comedic way.
Give us some insight into how you blend music and lyrics with the play’s script.
I am both a composer and a lyricist, but I worked with Irene a fair amount to make sure that the lyrics are working the way we want them to and work alongside the script.
I’ve written a lot of instrumental music and songs over the years, but writing for the theater is a different kind of animal. For a couple of the songs, I took actual lines of dialogue that she had in the original play script and lyricized them. You can’t just sing something from a script and have it sound right, so I take her turns of phrase or whatever action needed to happen in a scene and twist those words to make them singable or to make them into a rhyme scheme.
In other cases, the lyrics are just exploring a particular character’s moment, a thought process, what’s going on in their head and what’s leading to the next action.
Is there a theme or foundation to your creative process when composing music?
I have learned over the years – but especially through this process, which has been about two-and-a-half years – something that Allan Blank, my composition teacher back in the ‘90s at VCU, told me: Write what you’re hearing, put it down, and be willing to throw any or all of it away. The process itself is what’s important. Through that, you’re going to get rid of the bad stuff, stuff you don’t like or that doesn’t work, and you’ll find the good stuff.
What else are you working on?
I have a record coming out that’s original music of mine and a friend of mine who’s also a VCU graduate – Adam Larrabee. We wrote a bunch of chamber music, a piece for string trio, one for string quartet and Adam wrote for strings plus clarinet and banjo.
It’s set to come out this summer on iTunes, Spotify and Bandcamp as an album called “A Syp, A Scuffle, Stasis” under the artist name Loon Lake Live!
“Safety” premieres at the Firehouse Theatre on July 10 and runs through July 26. Previews are scheduled for July 8 and 9.
Article republished from VCU News.
