Oklahoma!

This morning I noticed in the Globe & Mail word of the revival of Oklahoma! coming to Toronto. This would be a touring edition of the Tony winner of 2018. I have the cast recording--a gorgeous acoustic rendering of the classic Rodgers & Hammerstein score. 
The show promises to be popular, says the Globe, with those who like their musical theatre classics given a fresh treatment. What matters in such a treatment is what the singers and musicians do. In this revival, they do beautiful, committed work. Sure, it's stripped down, but the pipes on those singers . . . man, they're trained, they're at peak power, they believe in what they're singing.
I've heard the staging is radically updated--including, eight shows a week, fresh cornbread prepared and served on stage. The original staging (1943) was already radical. Until then, musicals began with overtures. (Who knows, maybe this was because Broadway audiences were notoriously slow in settling into their seats, like Dodger fans or Canuck fans.) Oklahoma! opens with a cowboy, Curly, saluting the day.
Here's a taste of a later song . . . performed by Damon Daunno and Rebecca Naomi Jones.

For the Audience

Dial M for Murder, the stage play, is set, almost entirely, in a single apartment room. For his movie version, an interviewer suggested, Alfred Hitchcock would "open up" the piece, wouldn't he? "No," said Hitchcock (according to the Peter Bogdanovich DVD commentary). "You don't open it up, you just shoot it." Of course, "just shoot it" is something one can do only after thirty years of film-making.
Anyway, how would I stage the ending of my Charlotte's Web. The book is note-perfect: Charlotte and Wilbur are alone the day after the big climax at the Fair. Soon it's time to go back to the barn at Zuckerman's, but Charlotte knows she won't make it. Wilbur is heartbroken but acts quickly when they come to load him into the truck. He gets the rat to snip Charlotte's egg sac from her web and deliver it to Wilbur for safe-keeping in his mouth (the sac is waterproof, we already know) all the way home. Their final good-byes consists of a wink by Wilbur, a weak waving of a few front legs by Charlotte. The truck drives away, the Fairground empties, and Charlotte dies alone.
There's one more chapter. Wilbur cares for the egg sac all winter. In spring the 514 eggs hatch and all but three of Charlotte's daughters drift away on their little silk balloons. (He hears their weak "Good-bye, good-bye," the poor guy.) These three build webs around Wilbur's pen. They pledge friendship to him and he to them, and he tells them about their mother.
There is no reason I can think of, at least for now, to open this up. 
How I'd love to be part of presenting this moment to an audience. 

Charlotte's Hour of Triumph

happens to somebody else, of course. She's been moody, tired, "languishing" making an egg sac. In "Hours of Triumph," the last-but-two chapter in the book, we don't even hear of her until after a dazzling sequence involving Wilbur, Mr. Arable, Avery, Mrs. Zuckerman, Mrs. Arable, the loud speaker, Mr. Zuckerman, Fern, and Templeton. Then Charlotte, "silent and alone," front legs embracing her egg sac, taking courage from words of praise for Wilbur she hears over the loud speaker. That's all we get from her in this chapter (except for a brief indignation when she hears that "spiders cannot write").
If it helps to imagine the staging and design of a scene when writing it, then yes, go ahead and try it! 
We're at or near the climax of the piece, or one of them. We're at the Fair, the ultimate moment of joy and release for every character, human or animal. Charlotte is going to die, but somehow her egg sac will make it. Wilbur will find out what comes after the spotlight. Fern and Avery have left/lost their childhoods. The Arables and Zuckermans will go home and put their work clothes on.
I wonder if a turntable would help. To literally bring the voices around for their moments. This might help reinforce or create the sense of order this story implies which is, I'm tempted to say, that things happen again and again for familiar reasons. And that nothing can go on beyond its logical limits. 
Except Charlotte. How would we make this happen in the scene?

Killing

The other day I saw Frozen 2, a Disney animated film that manages to both set its hero a choice for which the stakes are high--she must sacrifice her own city for the greater good, which she does--and let her avoid any actual sacrifice. What's the good of that?
Give me Charlotte the spider any day. While she's waiting for a plan to save Wilbur, she's moody, distracted. She kills a horsefly or two. A second later she's smiling sweetly at Wilbur, singing him to sleep. Charlotte, for all her qualities as mentor, organizer, elder, friend, protector, and magician, is a skilled killer. This troubles Wilbur, but that's just Wilbur.
The rest of us need not turn away from death, as Disney tends to. Whatever joys and education and inspiration we get out of life can be fully realized only when the facts of death are respected and observed. 
That's Charlotte's Web, as I see it anyway.

Advice

Heeding the advice of one Stephen Sondheim--that in writing for the stage, one should imagine the staging right from the start--I see Mr. Arable, in the opening scene of my Charlotte's Web, in his no-nonsense stride toward the hoghouse, ax over one shoulder, to do in the runt piglet. If it's to be a scene I sketched in my previous post, he'd keep striding, on and off the stage, long enough for a few verses ending, "Where's Papa going with that ax?" He breaks stride finally for Fern, his 8-year-old daughter, who convinces him, against his better judgement, to spare the poor critter.
Among versifiers in this scene would be the pig himself, Wilbur, and his barn-mates a goose, a sheep, and the nasty rat, Templeton. Not sure if Charlotte would make an appearance at this point. While I'm at it, here in the earliest possible moment of this journey into a musical version of Charlotte's Web, what will these animal characters look like? I'd like to avoid animal costumes. How, then, will we know the goose is a goose and the sheep a sheep? By what they say--partly. But this book works because, in part, the animals are real animals. They kill, they die, they must eat, they must have shelter. In general, they respond to their environment in naturalistic ways. So how do we--hello, vast team I'll one day assemble!--show them as the animals they are, even though they talk (for those humans with sufficient imagination to hear them). Masks? Puppets? Simple prop/costume pieces--something tail-ish for the rat, neck-ish for the goose? Species-specific movement?
Charlotte herself--yikes. The few times she leaves her web she travels by threads which she spins and "casts" (my shorthand for her realistic spider transportation system). She's tiny but has an authoritative voice. She edits her own web, stripping it down to its structural elements to compose text within it. Text or not, her magnum opus, as she calls it, is her egg sac which, once created, signals her own death. How would we design and stage all of this?
Here I remember advice the playwright Sharon Pollock gave us all in the writing program at DTUC almost forty years ago: if you want a thousand birds to fly up, do NOT say "well, that's impossible, they could never do it." If you want it, say so in your script. Your designer and production team will make it happen.

Where's Papa Going with That Ax?

So begins Charlotte's Web. 
What if in the musical version, which I'll write, the line becomes a refrain in the opening song. Characters step forward one at a time to tell us who they are and what they want, ending with, "Where's Papa going with that ax?"
We'd see and hear from Fern, the 8-year-old with the imagination; her principled but loving parents, the Arables; her weapon-toting older brother, Avery; Templeton, the amoral rat; sheep yearning for freedom; geese looking for something, anything, out of the ordinary; the doctor, Homer and Edith Zuckerman, the preacher and of course Charlotte herself--they all want to know where Papa's going with that ax. 
The song ends with Papa putting down the ax, thanks to Fern, sparing the life of the runt pig for whom Fern comes up with "the most beautiful name she could think of": Wilbur. 
And we've activated the world of the play. 
Maybe, but tonight I saw 1917, a movie in which the first thing we see is a field of wildflowers. The camera pulls back and we get the characters. The characters get up and go.
Though gripped into the movie, for a moment I thought of opening Charlotte's Web, the musical, with nothing but sensations from the natural world the characters inhabit.

Sondheim and Lively (the writers, not the roots band)

In explaining his Finishing the Hat--first of two volumes of complete lyrics, with commentary--Stephen Sondheim suggests that "the explication of any craft, when articulated by an experienced practitioner, can be not only intriguing but also valuable, no matter what particularity the reader may be attracted to" (page xi of his Introduction). Only if written well, I might add, which his book is, though you wouldn't know it from the above quotation.

Delving into Life in the Garden by Penelope Lively, I become that reader. I'd picked up the book, in its pressed-flower jacket design, while browsing the memoir stacks at RPL, between "English fiction" and "English essays" in the Dewey Decimal system.
I'm no gardener, but Lively's literary, socio-botanical tour of a single word, garden, caught my eye and hasn't let go yet.
As in Sondheim's book, it's the writing, of course. So skilled, so beautiful, you can't stop reading.