5/6/2023 0 Comments Hundred days musical![]() Sometimes you have to really wrestle and beg and plead a song into existence, but this one came into the world pretty fully formed. We did a very early workshop of it with our friends in Seattle who had a theater company called The Satori Group and we wrote this song in their International District loft space. “Hundred Days” We’ve been working on this show for over a decade and this song came pretty early on. The other thing that is nice about having worked on the show for so long is we’ve built up a pretty ridiculously large body of tunes and now we’ve gotten to pick and choose the best bits. The music here is actually the bridge from a song that was cut from the show. We like how the driving 7/8 beat ramps up the intensity as the idea for the hundred days “game” is formed. “The Ramp” A big part of figuring out how to tell this story was finding new ways to weave the text and the music together. When we then went to make this version, to be performed live in the show, we had Jo Lampert sing the second of the Abigail vocal tracks and it’s really exciting to us the way they interweave and trade off with each other. When we put together “Lift Me” for that record we stripped it down to just an acoustic guitar and two layered recordings of Abigail’s voice. “Lift Me” Part of the development of this show was making a kind of concept album version with our Z Space band (plus Colette Alexander, from this cast!) at Tiny Telephone in San Francisco with the engineer/producer Jay Pelicci about four years ago. There was a time when it was a longer and more involved piece of music, but we liked the starkness of doing it a cappella like this. “Creature” This was actually one of the first bits of melody that we wrote when we started working on this show. Also, we happen to really like making weird electronic beats and sounds and it’s exciting getting to play with those textures here. The show moves between waking and dream worlds and the music leads us through those portals. “The Drop” “The Drop” is when we first introduce the fully electronic sound of the drum pads and the weird synth textures and all that. We actually managed to make it through the first three or four years of our marriage without spending a night apart from each other, so when we finally were pried apart for a little chunk of time by work we were both pretty pathetic about it. If you can’t tell from the fact that we wrote a whole damn show about our relationship, we really don’t love being apart, we just do better when we are together. “Lie Next to Me” We wrote elements of this song separately while we had to spend a couple weeks apart from each other. She always finds her way into the music and makes it her own. Jo Lampert is our beloved sister and has been working on this show with us since the beginning, and she is just such an inspiring singer to get to write for. When Abigail and I fell in love I had to bail on one of my best friends and we were in a folk punk band together, so it felt right that this song be in that style. “Marching in the Wrong Parade” One of my favorite kinds of music is folk punk, I just love that combination of super fast drums, high energy and acoustic instrumental lines. We’ve always thought of this show in terms of its set list, and needing the music to feel like it’s landing at the right moment and is also surrounded by the right pairings on either side. It’s also a satisfying third song of the show for us, a nice mid-tempo kinda thing. We like how the Shaun verses and the Abigail verses weave together. “I Will Wait For You” This is one of the more “musical”-y songs in the show. “My Skin Is Made of a Thousand Doors” We liked positioning this song here, second in the night, so right away you get a little sense of some of the range of music you’ll hear: the layered choral lines and poetic/abstract lyrics. It took a while to get the right feel but when we decided to put it to that chugging train beat the whole song snapped together. It starts out with a big wail and then when the full band pops in you get this blend of cello, accordion and bass synth together. “Vows” Our wedding vows! It feels like a good letter of introduction to the show, with a lot of the big musical elements that we’re playing with throughout. ![]() White, who reprised their performances for the cast album (available at ).īelow, Abigail and Shaun share their thoughts on and the process behind their eclectic score. The New York Theatre Workshop cast was made up of Colette Alexander, Abigail Bengson, Shaun Bengson, Jo Lampert, Dani Markham, and Reggie D. ![]() In Hundred Days, real-life married couple Abigail and Shaun Bengson (the duo behind Ars Nova's The Lucky Ones) detail the story of how they fell in love and embrace life as if they only had 100 days to live. ![]()
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