Oh boy, you’re all in for a treat with today’s Friday Script! I am thrilled to present “This Girl is in Choir,” by Katie Simon and Michael Hartney, which was performed as part of Legs for Days at @ucbny and directed by Benjamin Apple. Musical accompaniment by Matt Starr.

Part of what’s been fun about these Friday Scripts is picking sketches where the magic of the live performance comes through even in the filmed recording. And this sketch definitely shows that magic! The writing is so tight and, obviously, the performance is INCREDIBLE. Like, truly unreal. A GREAT writer/actor collaboration. Also, having the whole team on stage makes for such a great stage picture! (Eventually I’ll talk more about staging and sketches.)

I particularly want to call attention to how impressive the sketch is as a musical sketch. Musical sketches can be really hard to pull off for a couple of reasons:

1. Music can move slowly, which means you can run out of time to explore.

2. Sometimes when people write musical sketches, they forget to have a core unusual thing that drives heightening — and instead kind of fall into a Weird Al pattern of just swapping one set of specific lyrics for another. (Though to be clear, Weird Al is marvelous. Just — different from sketch.)

But in this sketch, the lyrics AND the fact that it’s musical at all are BOTH driven ***by the unusual character’s point of view***. (Namely: wanting to be the center of attention at a moment that’s really supposed to be about the kids.) So the moment he starts singing — and, frankly, well before (“A list is so dreadfully boring, don’t you think?”) — we’re already digging into that character and playing their game. And from there, there’s plenty of time for surprising moves and heightening. 

This sketch is also a great reminder that a character’s unusual behavior is only PART of what makes a sketch fun. You get to be more playful if you’ve tapped into the motor behind that behavior — sometimes called the “justification.”

Enjoy this wonderful sketch!