Songs flow from 'The Medium at Large' creators
Author Julia Cameron has spent her career helping others recover lost or forgotten creative powers. This is the topic of her best-selling book, "The Artist's Way" - and of the many follow-up books and tapes. But she never dreamed that her work would lead her to writing musicals. In fact, she thought of herself as the nonmusical member of a very musical family.
But here she is in Chicago with collaborator Emma Lively, working on what will be the world premiere of her new musical, "The Medium at Large," which opens in previews Oct. 17 at the Village Players in Oak Park.
How did it happen? About 10 years ago, "I literally was walking one day and I started hearing music," Cameron says.
Soon after, Cameron bought a small Casio keyboard and started "transcribing" the tunes she was hearing. Without any musical training she found herself composing. More than that, she found herself writing a musical.
"The first songs I heard were musically linked to Merlin," the wizard of Arthurian legends, Cameron says. "I thought it would be fun to do a musical about Merlin. So I just plunged ahead."
The result was "Avalon."
Lively, Cameron's writing partner, entered the scene soon after when she came to the opening-night performance of a show that was clearly a work in progress.
Lively and Cameron recall they were thrown together through a series of amazing coincidences. Lively was going to school, studying music in New York, but that summer happened to be in Cameron's then-hometown of Taos, N.M. It was there that she saw "Avalon" and liked it.
Fast forward six months to New York City. Cameron had relocated and found herself living in, of all things, the same building as Lively. The two hit it off. Cameron hired Lively to be her literary assistant, but for much of the time the two have been collaborating on a series of musicals.
"The Medium at Large" is the second show they wrote together. (Lively helped Cameron turn out another version of "Avalon".)
"'The Medium at Large' was my idea," Cameron says, "Emma and I gave a dinner party and we invited a man name George Firth (author of the book of Stephen Sondheim's "Company.") I told him, 'I am going to do a musical in New York about ghosts.' And he got all excited and he said, 'That is what you have to do next.' I woke up the next morning with the first song in the show. And the music just started tumbling out of me."
"There is something magical about New York," Lively says. "There are ghosts everywhere."
According to Cameron, she and Lively "do everything together" on the show - the music, the lyrics and the story.
The story Cameron and Lively tell concerns a medium named Bruce who, according to Lively, interacts with living people and with ghosts, who sometimes harass him because they are having "trouble with their transitions into the other world."
Lively feels like she has found her calling working with Cameron. "It feels like this is what I am supposed to be doing," Lively says. The two New Yorkers have been in Chicago for six weeks, tweaking their new show.
"Just 48 hours ago we wrote (leading man John Herrera) a new song," Lively says during our interview. "We saw a moment in Act 2, a moment where we would sing instead of speak. A song was what the moment needed."
And when you are as in touch with your creativity as Cameron and Lively are, songs come quickly. Sometimes, as Cameron discovered, they come without being called.
"The Medium at Large" opens in previews Oct. 17 (press opening is Oct. 19) at the Village Players, 1010 W. Madison St., Oak Park. Call (866) 764-1010.