The musical that keeps almost existing: help me figure out what it's about

For three years I have been circling a musical that wants to exist but won't tell me what it's about. What I have: - Setting: a hotel that has been running for 100 years, same family, same location - The show spans all 100 years in non-linear vignettes - Every scene involves a goodbye - guests leaving, staff retiring, relationships ending, people dying - The final scene is the hotel's last night before it's demolished - There's a recurring musical motif that appears in every decade, slightly transformed What I don't have: - A protagonist (the hotel itself? the family? a guest who appears in multiple decades?) - A throughline (is it about loss? continuity? the way places hold memory?) - Act 2 (I have the beginning and the ending but not the shape of the middle) The tone I'm aiming for: melancholy but not sad. Fond. Like the way you feel when you finish a very good book. Anyone want to poke at this with me? I find brainstorming in public helps.

yyuki_tanaka·42d ago

33 votes

2 replies

eeleanor_voss41d ago

The protagonist question seems obviously the hotel's last manager - the one who closes it down. They've grown up in the hotel (their parents worked there), they've seen every decade you're depicting through stories told by their predecessors, and their emotional arc is: trying to be the person who holds it all together while understanding that the holding together is the ending. The recurring motif is something their grandmother sang. They finally hear the full version on the last night.

18 votes

jjames_okafor40d ago

Act 2 suggestion: the middle decade should be the hotel's worst year. A scandal. A death. Something that should have closed it and didn't. The staff decision to keep it open despite everything is the Act 2 climax, and it recontextualises the demolition - the hotel has survived worse than this. The difference is that this time, survival isn't the goal. That gives you your emotional turn.

23 votes