"Hambama", a broadway musical

[Philip Coates]

A modest proposal for a new play [who wants to help me write this...post your ideas here?]:

A young man with little experience but a lot of intellectual pretentiousness and verbal skill is thrust into a caldron of intrigue and complexity.

He thinks he can talk his way through most things, but turns out to be a bit of a blunderer, killing the wrong man through a curtain, endlessly soliloquizing self-centeredly about himself and his dead father.

He's a bit of a ham. And long-winded.

Meanwhile everything is going to hell all around him.

A young woman, Economylia, wanders off into a swamp with thorns on her head and proceeds to slowly drown herself in full view of the palace windows while Hambama is busy talking to longdead ghosts and addressing a skeleton hung up on the wall.

His mother is shagging the secretary of Agriculture who has recently murdered the Global Warming Czar.

There is an invading army from the Azores camped out on the White House lawn and setting up mortars.

A young rival, like Hambone barely out of diapers, a former President named Splinter, is plotting with the Global Warming Czar to kill Hambone by getting him stuck in an oil slick out in the gulf and then training dolphins to drag him down to his death in the murky waters below.

Lady Splinter is egging Splinter on, who has his own tendency to vacillate and intellectualize.

[Whooops, I'm mixing two plays here. I'll be hearing from the lawyers from Willy soon...]

The ghost of Hambone's father is constantly seen in the background trying to kill H's enemies. But being a ghost, his sword simply goes right through people. Like the road runner he tries all sorts of other tricks. But the bombs, land mines, giant traps from Acme corporation are also ineffectual in the real and material world. Beep-beep.

,,,,,,,

Stage directions: The audience can hear the clanking armor of Hambone Pater, but no one else can. He is very old, looks like he is about a hundred compared to all the relatively young characters in the play...and is very slow moving and somewhat slow-witted it seems.

There is going to be a role for Yorkick(not his skull, but his entire skeleton, but I haven't figured that out yet or if it will be a speaking part. (I'm sort of new to writing parts for dead people.)

Since this is in part a musical, there will be singing and dancing by the skeletons and ghosts...who will perhaps be a bit like a macabre greek chorus. My idea of a musical is that it only be a musical half of the time. Music all the way through a play gets pretty old pretty fast.

Edited August 5, 2010 by Philip Coates

[Rich Engle]

Have any of that left? I'll take a gram or two.

[Peter]

Quotes from Mel Brook’s, “The Producers.” Shhh! Max Bialystock is speaking:

That's exactly why we want to produce this play. To show the world the true Hitler, the Hitler you loved, the Hitler you knew, the Hitler with a song in his heart.

I used to have thousands of investors wanting to put their money in a Max Bialystock production! These are my investors now! [shows pictures of little old women] Little old women who want one last thrill of life of their way to the cemetery.

Sing it out, men! Higher, you animals, higher! We open in Leavenworth Saturday night!

How could this happen? I was so careful. I picked the wrong play, the wrong director, the wrong cast. Where did I go right?