What Is a Musical Audiobook?

Act one. Scene one. 1920. Washington, D.C. (beat) The interior of a grand banquet hall. A purple, white and gold banner reading “VOTES FOR WOMEN!” hangs from the proscenium rafters. (beat) LUCY BURNS, CARRIE CHAPMAN CATT, IDA B. WELLS, CHRISTABEL PANKHURST and other “SUFFRAGISTS” cheerfully enter from the wings of the stage while toasting and sipping from their champagne glasses.

Adapting a live musical theater production into an audiobook is an exercise in reimaging a stage experience for a new audience… the listener. This is what we had to do with 19: The Musical. And with no blueprint to work from, we had to make up our own rules as we went along.

In order to tell the story of the audiobook, we have to tell the story of 19: The Musical.

(A Starter Guide to DIY Audiobooks.)

For us, it all started after listening to the Hamilton soundtrack. Of course, like millions of people, we were enthralled with the show and inspired by this spellbinding portrayal of American history. However, there was one line in Hamilton that stuck with us and set us on the path to creating 19. Angelica Schuyler, a character in the show, says that when she meets Thomas Jefferson, she’ll “compel him to put women in the sequel.”

At the time, back in 2016, with the hundredth anniversary of the 19th Amendment fast approaching in 2020, telling the story of how American women fought and won the right to vote seemed like a timely endeavor for us as writers and directors.

However, there were significant challenges: Neither one of us were musicians and we’d never written a musical. All we had was an idea and a never say quit attitude. This led us to finding a composer to put our lyrics to music while we wrote the book for what would become 19: The Musical.

We are also not historians and like most people, the high school textbooks we had studied long ago barely touched upon this topic. To get up to speed, we had to educate ourselves by researching from quality sources. We read a lot of biographies, scoured history books, and spoke with academics. Then we had to decide where, when, and how to alter some historical events and people to fit the sprawling story into two and a half hours. It’s a musical after all, not a documentary!

After more than 30 public workshop performances between 2017 and 2019, including the premiere of the full show in Washington, DC, we were gearing up to bring 19 to New York in early 2020. But our dreams were cut short by Covid and the theater closures that happened around the world.

By the time the world opened back up completely, we had to reevaluate our game plan. With theaters still facing intermittent shutdowns, we decided to explore new possibilities. Instead of immediately returning to the stage, we began exploring ideas of how to make 19 even more accessible. Eventually we settled on a solution that was not dependent upon seeing it in person: an audiobook.

Creating a theatrical audiobook is like building a stage and a set in someone’s mind.

In order to do this, first we had to think about how to focus our script more on the imagination and less towards what one could actually see on a stage. We found ourselves running into obstacles because so much of the show relies on the actions of the characters, the set design, and the use of props. For those who aren’t familiar with the American suffrage movement, there were lots of protests, marches, and physical altercations that we’d been able to creatively portray through choreography. Now, we had to think about how to recreate a melee for audio that would convey the intent of these scenes. There were many elements like this that we had to take into consideration for the audiobook. We found that creating an outline to address all of the ‘stage to audio’ transformations was key to refining the script.

Through each draft of our audiobook script, we would engage our remarkably talented cast of actors on Zoom calls, having them read through iterations of the script while we took notes on what was working and what wasn’t working. A bonus for us was that we were working with our original cast, who were all familiar with the material and understood our new goals and the changes we would have to make. As directors, we had to listen as though we’d never heard the material before; we had to put ourselves in the place of someone who had no familiarity with the stage version. Could we envision what the actors were doing and describing? Did a description of force feedings and the brutality these women faced convey through audio alone?

Sometimes the answer was yes and sometimes the answer was no, but we were always buoyed by a cast that was dedicated to telling this story. They acted as real-time editors and beta-readers (listeners) that could help us fix any shortcomings.

Quickly, we began to understand the importance of sound design and how that would elevate our ability to tell a story for audio only. We wrote sound effects into the scripts, everything from the “clink” of toasting with champagne glasses to the roaring of an angry crowd. We wanted to create an environment that made the listener feel not just as if they could see the action, but that they themselves were truly immersed in it.

After many readings, it became clear that we would need a narrator to provide the audience with a sense of time and place. In a stage script, you have acts and scenes and settings described for the actors, so they know where they are and what is happening around them. We decided that having a narrator read those lines of the script would help the audience orient themselves to where they are in our story–as well as in American history.

And then of course, there was the music. So much of musical theater is the set-up: Why is this person singing instead of talking and who are they singing to? We had to make sure our lead-ins to songs were solid and would make sense without visual cues. This meant adding in extra lines of dialogue for actors or having the narrator give a description of the setting before a song began.

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Recording in a studio is a different animal than performing on stage.

When the time came, we recorded everything at a studio with our pianist and the whole cast together in one room. We did this so they could react and play off each other, almost like in a live performance. Of course, without the action and movement they were used to, it was challenging at first, but they quickly got the hang of it and production picked up speed.

Each scene was recorded like a chapter unto itself. This means that the actors would read their scenes and sing their songs and essentially bring each piece of the show to life, chapter by chapter.

For those who’ve written a musical or any theatrical production and want to adapt it to an audiobook, there are several things they can do to be successful. First, casting! Make sure you have performers who understand the medium and can modulate for an in-studio production vs the expanse of a stage. 

Next, when re-crafting your live production, think of all of the elements you lose and how you can reimagine those through sound design. Even a set of heels clicking along a floor or the sound of a door closing can go a very long way. 

Last, don’t shy away from over-explaining via scene-setting. Describe what’s on stage and where an actor is standing before the scene starts. This gives your listener something to imagine as they hear the magic you’ve created through audio alone.

Adapting 19: The Musical has been an incredibly satisfying experience that has taught us that theater can exist in so many forms and can reach more people than we ever imagined. We are thrilled to be able to share our lessons and the work of our incredibly talented cast and crew with audiences around the world. A little creative thinking goes a long way to successfully bringing musical theater to the world of audiobooks.