I don’t know exactly how to answer that question. I didn’t really have a consistent methodology.

I think you are getting at the question of how consciously was I influenced by the musical language of film noir. There are certain songs in the show that I attempted to imbue with a noir sensibility, or at least a noir inflection. "Mr. McGuffin," for example, a number about an almost cartoonishly nefarious underworld character, is very noir. The music is jazzy and smokey, playing straight man to Chris Durang’s lyrics, which are utterly silly --

McGuffin

(Running down the street)

Mr. McGuffin

(He’s there at your back and he’s packing heat)

Be on your guard else he’ll

Knock you down to nuffin’

(Beware he’ll attack Better to retreat)

But there are plenty of songs in the show that really have nothing noirish about them, musically.

The honest answer is that the challenge is always more or less the same: to push myself to write the best music I’m capable, whatever that moment in the show calls for. I don’t know how informative that response is, but it’s an honest answer.

That said, there was one scene in the show that, from a technical point of view, was especially hard for me. We have main two female characters, the new nightclub singer, and the old nightclub singer who happens to be an opium addict and a little over the hill. Early in the show, they have a sort of musical catfight, which Chris and I decided to handle by writing two stand-alone songs that fold into one another, a la "Old Fashioned Wedding." Conceptually, it’s Musical Theater 101, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to do. We started with Chris’s rapid-fire lyric for "Mambo Malaysian," a sort of Carmen Miranda turn for the over-the-hill singer, which I set with an uptempo Latin feel. Next came the hard part for me, which was creating the music for the other singer’s number. In order to work as a duet, this second song needed to have a very different feel, and a longer melody line that would weave in and out of the spaces between the other song’s melodic phrases. I’m usually a very fast writer, but I spent a couple of weeks getting this one right.

When I’m scoring a film, I have a very consistent approach, necessitated by the ludicrous deadlines that go with the territory. I tend to rise very early, around 5:30 a.m., and write for a couple of hours until it’s time to get the rest of the household up. The next hour and a half is family time, getting our daughter off to school, and then I write like a fiend until I break for dinner. Then I write for another couple of hours more. The last thing I do before calling it quits is to add up the number of minutes of music I have written, to make sure I’m not falling behind. It’s routinely an eighteen hour day, during which I will compose and orchestrate between two and four minutes of music, depending on the project. It’s just brutal, but that’s the reality of scoring films.

Writing a show is much more fun and, in terms of deadline pressure, usually more forgiving. I have a sort of regular routine, but my wife and kids tell me that words like "obsessive" and "workaholic" are not entirely off-target. Unless there happens to be an unusually pressing deadline, I’ll skip the sunrise session altogether, beginning my writing day around 9 a.m. I’ll work assiduously until I feel like I’m no longer fresh, which might be two hours later, or maybe six hours later. Along the way, sometimes I’ll put my head down on the piano at some point along the way, grab a ten minute nap, and get back to it. I love to cat-nap when I’m working.

It’s very different today, and I suspect, much tougher. In my grandfather’s day, shows and show tunes existed very much as part of popular culture, whereas today the link between theater and pop music is nearly non-existent. On the other hand, look at high schools almost anyplace in the country, and you get one very good indication that musical theater is still very much alive and kicking. As I understand it, Off-Broadway didn’t really come of age until the latter part of my grandfather’s great years, well into the fifties. Off-Broadway provides a venue for different kinds of shows (like Macao). But today, the economics of Off-Broadway are so tough that one almost has to regard it as a "loss leader" for the post-New York life of a show. Even for Broadway shows, there is more of a chance for a show to make money when it moves out into the country than on Broadway, itself.

The answer probably varies from day to day, but overall I love The King and I best of all, and my favorite song in the world is probably "Something Wonderful." Incredibly beautiful, and so deeply moving.

Leonard Bernstein, Jerry Bock and Kurt Weill come to mind immediately. But there are many others whose work I love and admire…Jeanine Tesori, Stephen Sondheim, John Kander, for example. Currently I seem to have the Spring Awakening score playing in my head on auto-cycle. It’s a wonderful score, and some of the vocal writing is just gorgeous.

Ya got an hour? The Beatles, Philip Glass, the Blues in general and Josh White in particular, Brahms, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Miles Davis, Celtic music…I feel certain I’m forgetting maybe a hundred other important influences.

I like to work both ways. There are no hard and fast rules, but some songs suggest one approach more than the other. Take those two songs I mentioned earlier from Adrift in Macao, for example, that we decided to write so that they would fold into one another in the style of "Old Fashioned Wedding," becoming an intricate duet. The words came first on one of the songs, "Mambo Malaysian, an up-tempo rapid fire lyric that was great fun to set. In order to make the counterpoint work, I wanted the second song to feature longer, more legato melody lines, and it made the most sense for me to write the music first.

There is one song I am particularly pleased with, for which I wrote both the words and the music. It’s from a musical one-act called A Bad Spell which I wrote with Bill Russell (who wrote the book, and most of the lyrics.) The show is about a father and his teenage son, and the song, "Unwritten Thoughts," is what happens when the father tries unsuccessfully to write a letter, consoling his son over the suicide of one of the boy’s class-mates. After a couple of Polonius-like attempts at imparting wisdom, the father puts down his pen, and we get his true feelings. It begins,

I wasn’t always there

Not when you were very small

Though I loved you from the first

I don’t like babies much at all

And I know that’s not the way you should feel…

I’m certainly not comparing myself to my grandfather, but I do think that both Adam and I have - I like the way you put it - an ease with melody. My mother has it, too, so I guess you could say it runs in the family. I think there must be an environmental component to writing melody, too. I grew up listening to my grandfather’s music in a way that largely defined my sense of what constitutes good, emotionally honest writing. Most composers can come up with a pretty melody, at least on a good day. But Papa’s music was never pretty from Central Casting; it was pretty from someplace deeper. Pretty from God perhaps.

I’m working on The Last Smoker in America with Bill Russell, a fantasy about a dysfunctional family against the backdrop of a future America in which smoking has been so thoroughly banned that the tobacco CEOs have been taken out and shot, and recalcitrant smokers have been locked up in smokers’ prison without the possibility of parole. We’ve done a couple of readings, and we’re now starting to think in terms of moving it to the next level. Bill and I are also working on an evening of one-acts including "A Bad Spell" and "Patter for the Floating Lady," based on a Steve Martin one-act straight comedy.

I’m also collaborating with Bill and Cheri Steinkellner on Esther Plays the Palace, a musicalization of the Purim story of Queen Esther. The title, and at least one of the song lyrics, comes from Sherman Yellen, a dear friend and sometime collaborator.

And yes, there is a wonderful book out there that I am hoping to musicalize. Lyricist Mindi Dickstein and I are in discussion with the author right now, and I don’t want to jinx anything by talking about it prematurely. But I am excited and optimistic.

Learn more about Peter Melnick at his official website.

For tickets or more information on Adrift In Macao, visit the show's website