Stagecraft: The Overlapping Techniques of Writing Songs for Musicals and Legal Advocacy

When writing a song for the stage, the stakes of the controversy must be kept in mind at all times. The same goes when advocating for a client. After all, the courtroom as a stage is no strange metaphor to our theatrical profession, but there is something more to this comparison beyond the standard tropes that we are already familiar with. Writing songs for musicals, a discrete theatrical art in and of itself, relies on the same techniques as legal advocacy. Both implement effective writing – whether for the stage or the courtroom – to explain to an audience of someone’s wants and needs. Both rely on a systematic structure as a means of persuasion.

In this Briefing, we will study the comparison between the legal and theatrical traditions and uncover the key similarity between the two. We will consider the concept of a theme to find the central idea for both song and argument, as well as the importance of topic sentences as “leitmotifs” for driving our theme. We will identify the client as a character, central to both musical writing and legal writing. We will explore the similarities of writing a brief as notating a score and the process of editing work. We will then compare the art of lyric-writing to the art of oral advocacy. By evoking the musical writing structure, we can better organize and present our arguments by properly considering the underlying emotional push. Only then can we effectively tell our client’s story before the curtain falls.

Topics will include:

• The uncanny overlap between the legal profession and theatre (5 minutes)

• How strong advocacy and strong musical writing stem from a central idea or a theme (10 minutes)

• Understanding the client and understanding the character (10 minutes)

• Crafting strong topic sentences as a motif to remind the readers of the theme (5 minutes)

• Turning topic sentences into melodic paragraphs to carry the reader through the piece (5 minutes)

• The science of scrivening and notating to translate complex thoughts into direct words (5 minutes)

• The techniques of test-driving through editing (5 minutes)