There comes a point in the development of a new musical when you have learned almost everything you can learn from the page.
You’ve rewritten it.
You’ve heard it read aloud.
You’ve talked through structure, character, stakes, songs, pacing, and intention.
You may even have had an industry reading.
And then you reach the next question:
What happens when this actually becomes theater?
That’s where we are right now with LITTLE THINGS, a new musical with book by David H Smith and music by David H Smith and Tom Fosnocht.
I’ve been working with David on this show for almost three years, beginning with an early draft he brought into CreateTheater in 2023. In 2024, LITTLE THINGS received an Industry Reading at the CreateTheater New Works Festival at Playhouse 46 in Manhattan. Earlier this year, we held another table-reading workshop to look closely at the newest draft.
Now, on August 29, the entire musical will go in front of an audience in a workshop production in Philadelphia, directed by Michelle Tannenbaum.
And at this stage of development, I’m not primarily interested in whether people “like” the show.
I want to know what the show does, what it says when it’s onstage.
A Personal Story Has to Become an Audience’s Story
David began writing LITTLE THINGS partly as a way of processing the pain of his own divorce.
That personal connection is one of the things that gives the musical its emotional truth.
But it also created one of our central developmental challenges.
When you are writing from lived experience, there is a natural impulse to say, “But that’s what really happened.”
And my response, again and again, has essentially been:
That isn’t the most important question.
The question is whether what happened serves the story you are trying to tell now.
Theater is not a deposition. It doesn’t owe the audience a transcript of reality.
It owes them a story.
That can be difficult for writers working from autobiography because changing an event can sometimes feel like changing the truth. But dramatic truth and factual accuracy are not always the same thing.
Our job was to preserve the emotional truth of David’s experience while building something larger than one man’s divorce.
The musical needed to become a story that could belong to other people, too.
Not simply, “This is what happened to me.”
But:
“This is what it can feel like when life falls apart — and what it might take to build a new one again.”
That distinction changed the development of the show.
What Is the Audience Supposed to Leave With?
Divorce is not exactly an inherently cheerful subject. A musical centered on the collapse of a marriage can become emotionally heavy very quickly.
But thankfully, David was never interested in keeping the audience in despair. Instead, the deeper idea behind LITTLE THINGS is that life can continue after enormous disappointment.
Relationships change.
Families change.
People hurt one another.
People surprise one another.
And sometimes, after the life you had planned on disappears, another life can begin.
David and I had to think not only about what the musical was about, but about the experience we wanted to give the audience. If the destination is hope, the journey cannot be two hours of relentless pain followed by a hopeful final song. (God help us.)
The hope has to exist somewhere in the DNA of the show.
So, part of our development process has been continually looking for opportunities to bring more fun into the storytelling.
More humor.
More theatricality.
More buoyancy.
More songs that give the audience a chance to breathe, to laugh, and to have some fun.
More moments where the musical remembers that even during very difficult periods of our lives, absurdity, joy, attraction, friendship, surprise, and laughter still exist. The music is upbeat and pop-inspired, with numbers like, “Get a Test,” and the villainous attorney Beatrice Otch’s (Bea Otch) song describing how “The Ends Justifies the Means.”
That doesn’t make the painful material less truthful.
But in many ways, it makes it much more human.
When you’re going through a divorce you have to see the humor in the situation sometimes, right?
Now We Need to See It
This is why a workshop production matters.
Some questions simply cannot be answered around a table.
One of the things I’m particularly interested in seeing in Philadelphia is how the flashbacks in Act One function in performance.
They do important work.
They establish the world.
They give us history.
They help us understand the marriage, the characters and the relationships that have brought these characters to the present moment.
But much of that material is expositional and world-building rather than actively driving the present-day plot forward.
On the page, you can analyze that intellectually. You can ask whether every scene contains necessary information.
You can cut.
You can rewrite.
You can rearrange.
But theater is experienced in time.
The real question is:
What does it feel like to sit through it?
Do the flashbacks feel theatrical and revealing?
Do they deepen our emotional investment?
Do they create momentum of their own?
Or does the audience begin impatiently waiting for us to get back to the present-day story?
That is something I want to watch very carefully.
The same is true of the choreography.
Do the transitions work? The musical pacing. The comedy. The tone.
Does the integration of the songs and the scenes work well?
Does the cumulative experience of watching the entire show – instead of hearing isolated sections in a development room – payoff at the end?
A workshop production exposes the architecture, especially for new musicals.
Development Is Not About Protecting the Show
There is a temptation for writers in development to keep refining.
One more draft.
One more reading.
One more conversation.
One more rewrite before anyone really sees it.
There is safety in that.
But eventually, development has to become exposure.
You have to let the work encounter actors moving through space, music filling a room. transitions happening in real time.
Design elements beginning to appear.
And an audience responding — or not responding — where you thought they would.
That is where your musical will start telling you things you did not know about it.
That’s when the work gets real.
And, after three years of development, that is what I know LITTLE THINGS needs now.
Not another theoretical conversation about whether the show works, or where to tweak this moment or that line.
It needs to be experienced on stage.
Why Philadelphia?
Philadelphia also happens to be exactly the right place for this stage of the journey.
David is a Philadelphia native, and the city is very much part of the musical’s personality.
There is even a cameo appearance from Gritty, the wonderfully unhinged Philadelphia Flyers mascot — which tells you something about the tone we’ve been trying to build.
After developing the show in New York, bringing it into David’s hometown gives us a different kind of audience and a different kind of room.
That matters.
Development is not only about improving a script.
It is also about discovering who the work is for and how people experience it.
This Is Why I Believe in Development
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why any of us continue to do theater.
It is an unreasonable profession in so many ways. Especially right now.
It asks for enormous amounts of time, energy, money, patience, and faith. Faith in the writer, in the director, and in the audience to resonate with the material you’re trying out.
There are very few guarantees.
But I keep doing it because I believe theater matters.
I believe stories placed onstage can enter (and even change) the cultural conversations.
I believe they can help us understand people whose lives are different from our own.
I believe they can create recognition.
Empathy.
Argument.
Catharsis.
Joy.
And occasionally, a different way of seeing the world.
That is also why I care so deeply about development.
If we believe stories can matter once they reach an audience, then we have to care about how those stories get there.
We have to give writers enough room to discover what their work is actually trying to become.
We have to ask what experience we want the audience to have.
And eventually, we have to stop protecting the work and put it in front of people.
That is where LITTLE THINGS is now.
Three years into the journey, we are ready to find out what the musical teaches us when it finally gets up on its feet.
Because development is not about keeping a show in development.
It is about preparing the work to meet the world.