Recycling – Because We Care!
Actually, because we have only two writers, and one of them is exhausted. For three years, I've wanted to get some comedy into my podcast. The closest I guess we came was "Dead Aaron." I'd really wanted to create a series about some 1930s ghost busters. I imagine I still will create that series, but... with all my other projects, not now. Series creation takes a lot of time, as you can imagine. Aaron Spelling notwithstanding.

So, how to introduce comedy? Well, Prometheus Radio Theatre is a direct descendant of a comedy troupe (the Usual Suspects) that has 21 years' worth of material piled up. So I decided to start adapting some of our SF-Fantasy parody stage shows to audio. I'm beginning with one of mine, to make myself the guinea-pig for this. There've been at least a dozen writers associated with the Usual Suspects over the years.

I picked a show that I think got short-changed when it was originally presented – Planet of Dark Shadows. We staged this in 1991 at a convention called OktoberTrek. We lost cast members at the last minute, the understudies got sick, and some of our cast did not then (and still don't) believe me that rehearsal is crucial to success, and that you must rehearse using the lines you're going to say during performance, not whatever cutesy stuff pops into your head because you're tired of the lines.

Actually, this show had already been adapted once. It began as a prose serial – "A Star Trek / Dark Shadows Crossover" – in a fanzine my brother and I published for about a year back in the 80s. Seven years later, I turned it into – God help me – a musical. And now I'm adapting it yet again. I'm cutting the songs. If I don't have time to write a new series, I certainly don't have time to beat music out of our meager facilities. Which means that the plot point that were advanced in lyrics have to be turned back into straight dialogue. Oddly enough, there's one passage of lines in rhyme by Spock that I kept intact. Aside from the rhyme, the words as dialogue fit him to a tee.

Interesting challenge, this. It's very consciously written for the stage, with lots of visual humor. For audio, you paint pictures with sound effects, and most of your humor must be spelled out in dialogue.

I'm getting the chance to go back to the source material and restore some funny bits that didn't make it into the book of the musical. Not only do musical books necessarily need to be spare on dialogue, but the audience the Usual Suspects perform for has never seemed to enjoy the kind of dialogue which I really love to write. So, when I write for them, I gut stuff that I feel is very amusing and has good rhythm. (Okay, that, and that I know my cast is somewhat... er... approximate... when it comes to remembering lines. So rhythm gets shot all to hell anyway.)

So, anyway, it's more of a rewrite job than I thought it would be. I imagine it'll keep my busy for the next week or so, at any rate.