Some honest feedback

I've had about enough of being the Great White Hope, so I thought I'd share some home truths for my peer group and young people that have the mistaken belief that I'm some overprivileged pussy that fluked it with the help of an old pro. My advice to all the young Asian New Zealand musicals writers is fairly simple: rather than satirising white boys, write something that is authentically felt and resonates with your own emotional landscape. Otherwise you'll always be following the trends rather than inventing them. - It wasn't fashionable to write 'New Zealand music' when I was a student, and I reckon that's probably still true today. Everyone's learning funky rhythms from the East or from the Pacific, but writing music that comes from our place isn't a focus in classical composition (or musicals). New Zealanders are often that way... obsessed with our supposed impartiality and thinking that we have some kind of secret knowledge as to why the rest of the world is falling apart. Myself included! 🤣 Ultimately, our degrees are a gateway to the US or UK or Australia for most top-flight musicians, myself excepted. That's why we have this surface-level cosmopolitan style that is equally at home in New York or London or Melbourne. - You're the ones who are subordinating yourselves to my myth by doing things like M'Lady or In Blind Faith. Then why are you whinging that I'm more famous? I'm not trying to be mean: this is honest feedback. - If you've never done it, write a bunch of basic song forms. Verse-chorus, AABA, ABAB. Sometimes 32 bars is enough. There's nothing wrong with an ugly sound. Lean into the natural sounds of yelling: that's one of the key elements of musicals! Write songs for natural voices as opposed to trained voices. Yes, it will be embarrassing if you tap into your real feelings, but that's what the audience actually wants! The audience doesn't want some clever smartarses showing off all their fancypants New York knowledge and putting themselves above the audience. The audience wants to know what it feels like to be a young Chinese or Japanese or Taiwanese or Malaysian woman, and that's really not something that I can write in the same way. Ultimately, Jo is my lead in that Shipwrecked story, and Pandora is a supporting character. That's likely to be the pattern in NZ musicals/opera (unless you break it). - Musicals don't have to be teleological. Songs can do things other than move plot forward, and a lot of the best songs in the R&H or Sondheim musicals are for minor characters that aren't important to the plot. Gesture is as important as dance, but they're completely separate. - Choruses are the enemy of suspension of disbelief. That's a Sondheim truism. His individualised choruses are often quite effective, but that's stage rather than screen, and on the screen it's even more likely to hinder the suspension of disbelief. However, that's not inherently a bad thing: it's essentially a Brechtian effect, and therefore has dramatic uses. But yeah, I don't think that a romantic two-hander needs some stupid chorus number plonked in the middle of it to get an easy hand. - Personally, I'd focus on projecting. I'm not a classical singer, but I can project. People in NZ like that sound.