Composing the Score: An Interview with Kim Oler

Interviewed by Joseph Whelan

JW: What was your response to Louisa May Alcott’s book?

KO:  I cried on every page.  I believe all us adults share somewhere inside a desire to create a better world, through our lives and through our children.  The March family is a shining city on a hill – Marmee and Father are impossibly good, and the four girls are archetypes.  My wife and I try hard to be good parents, but we fall short of our ideal every day.  Little Women inspires us to be better.  

JW: Did the time period influence your composition?

KO: I’ve always been a fan of mid-19^th century American literature and song, and majored in American Literature in college.  Coincidentally, at the time I started work on this project, the Ken Burns Civil War series was current.  I loved the score and looked forward to drawing on that style in our songs.  But when I write songs for the theatre, even when doing a period piece, I filter the music through my own sensibility. I never attempted to write traditional 19^th century American music for Little Women, except in places in the underscoring for the party scenes, or the song “The Music of Our Home”, a song Beth has written, where I wanted to be true to time and place.  Hopefully our score sets modern audiences comfortably in 19^th century Concord, while helping them relate to the characters and their journeys personally through the play.  

JW: In what ways do you factor in the other theatrical elements, such as choreography?

KO: In every way possible.  One of our producers once said, “Don’t ever play me a piece of music if you don’t know exactly what’s happening on stage at every moment.”  By that he meant staging, movement, choreography, costume changes, scene changes, everything.  We ‘see it all’ in our heads before we’re through with our writing, but we are often surprised, delighted and moved by what a new director, a new cast, a new production can bring to our material that we hadn’t even imagined.  What a thrill that is!

JW: You and Alison Hubbard wrote more than 70 songs for the show.  Not all of them are in it.  Do you have any regrets about some of the songs not included?

KO: We may write what we think is the perfect song for our show, and sometimes it’s a song we love completely.  A colleague once said, “You can only write what you know at the time.” We never want to put a song on stage that doesn’t serve the drama, however good that song might be, because it may be a stone in the path that has emerged since we wrote it.  We did indeed write a lot of songs we loved that are not in the show.  But many of them I hardly remember anymore because I’m happy with what replaced them, and the show works better without them.

JW: There are so many elements to consider—character development, plot, specific moments in each scene—how do you balance all those when writing a song?

KO: It’s a challenge. Alison and I sit across the room from each other for days, weeks, sometimes for a month or more (as was the case with the song “I Will Try”) talking, singing, drafting lyrics and melodies. Little Women is a big book, and we had to be efficient in our dramatization.  The more characters and events are competing for our focus in a particular moment we are musicalizing, the more difficult this can be.  “I Will Try” was a moment in which we wanted to show the contrasting ways each of the four girls felt about their father and themselves.  If we could get the song right, we knew it would be a prism that illuminated them all in a single scene, and would advance the plot at the same time.

JW: How do you know when it’s right?

KO: I listen to my gut, I listen to my collaborators, and I listen to the audience as the show plays. 

JW: Have you found Little Women to be a rewarding experience? 

KO: Yes.  It has brought me more life lessons, both joyful and painful, than anything I've ever done.  Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is an icon.  Serving it has been an enormous challenge, and an enormous privilege.