"Sin" Scene 05

Adults only!

“Your Place Or Mine.”  Faith has finished her song and gotten a huge round of applause for her amateur-competition performance and is packing up with her band.  Santana, unseen by anyone, is waiting in the wings and urges Devlin to approach Faith and start his seduction.  He makes a routine effort only to have Faith turn it around on him…she is more than happy to go home with him—she just has to check in with her parents.  This leaves Devlin confused and intrigued—his would-be seduction has been reversed on him, leaving him unsure how to proceed, particularly after they spend an intense night together. The next morning Faith begins to suggest she now wants more than just a one-night-stand after all, since they seemed to get on well.  Devlin is already feeling trapped and confused.  Santana, unseen by Faith, steps in to remind Devlin he’s on a mission and to get on with it—the goal isn’t for him to get a new girlfriend, it’s to get her signed to a soul-damning contract.  The scene ends with the three characters we’ve been introduced to interacting, each voicing their motivation over the top of each other:  Faith declares her love, Devlin tries to deny his interest, Santana repeats it’s time to get on with her plans. 

This scene was a really exciting moment for me as a writer and composer.  It was the first real moment of sung-through conversation, the first moment the audience realizes that there won’t be any talking in this show and any dialog/exposition will come through in song, so you have to pay some attention to the lyrics.  You can find a similar moment in Evita, “Eva and Magaldi” inspired it to some degree anyway.

I also was excited to do another “build up” song, where it starts with a quiet, calm 70s-style electric piano and builds up to a near-screaming, overlapping trio with a blasting (sampled) brass section, a driving synth bass (the whole show took on an 80s pop feel eventually, just by chance) and flailing (theatre) rock drums. 

The song began as my first collaboration with one of my oldest, dearest friends, now departed unfortunately.  Craig Harrison and I both had synthesizers and drum machines, a rarity when we were 19 or so, and decided to try to put our resources together to write a song.  I don’t honestly remember who did what—I don’t know if we really collaborated or if Craig just did what he did so often with me—acted as a wonderful cheering section, urging me on to keep creating, one of the greatest gifts he gave me, over and over again throughout his life until his untimely demise in 2017.

I do know the original intent was for it to be a “Prince”-sounding song.  We had dreams of putting together our own “Vanity 6” or “Apollonia 6,” or maybe “The Mary Jane Girls” ala Rick James—a female, multi-ethnic funk trio.  That neither of us had a drop of funk blood in our veins didn’t concern us, at least then.

I tried the song a couple ways over the next couple of years but never was able to do anything satisfying with it, particularly without a vocalist to help me experiment with melody lines.  From the start I had an idea that I’d do the “siren song”-esque background “aahs” that I’ve used about a million times in other songs, but that was the only part that came with the song from the start.  I think the chorus was inspired by the old song “Come Go With Me” by the Del-Vikings, but it’s been so long I hardly remember.  The “Then the next thing that she said to me…” refrain I got from the song from Brigadoon, “The Love of My Life.”  I really liked the way the song keeps bringing back the “REAL love of my life” refrain to humorous and ironic effect and tried to grab a little of that formula for my own piece.

 When I was trying to find melodies to fill out an entire 75-minute rock opera in 2010 I was grabbing anything I could find from my vaults that I could flesh out into a fully-realized song for the show, and “Your Place or Mine” fit—it was bland enough to be used for an exposition piece but catchy enough to be worth including.  It had never had lyrics so it was easy to theme in, and the lack of strong melody in the verses meant I could stuff the verse lines with exposition. There were some nice back-and-forth opportunities in the song to create something resembling conversation and Santana jumps in for the final repeated chorus, in a simple madrigal that seemed to be a fun singing challenge.

Narratively, it seemed to work really well to further the perhaps-overly-complicated story, bridging the songs of the first act, all of which were setups for what would come later, into the heart of the story, where all the action takes place. 

In terms of character, it was meant to solidify the personalities and motivations of each of the leads…Santana steps back to watch her plan unfold but keep the reins on things…Devlin realizes he’s in the position of being a pawn who will actually have to start examining his integrity for once in his life, and Faith, a strong-willed, ambitious young person whose only weakness is her lack of life experience.

One part that confused people, at least at the demo stage, was how quickly the seemingly naïve and devout Faith turns the seduction around on the world-weary and savvy Devlin.  She’s just been presented as “faithful,” crying out her love to God in an overly-sincere performance moment in the previous song, then, as one person said to me jokingly, “She acts like a slut.” 

We had to work hard to figure out how to keep that impression from surfacing, it was certainly not my intention.  I wanted to show that Faith may be religious but she’s not a nun…her moral convictions are strong enough that she can justify her actions, “I don’t think that feeling good is ever a sin,” meaning she sees the physicality she has with Devlin (and has likely experienced before with someone else) as just another expression of a kind of “love” that her God gave her to enjoy while on the planet, and nothing to be ashamed of or hide from. 

Well, it may be a bit of a stretch, but I desperately wanted to avoid any notion of a “virginal innocent” cliche around a devoutly religious person in this show…I’ve known plenty of people who had strong religious beliefs who were kind, nonjudgmental, open-minded and happy, and used their beliefs to further a cause of spreading good will rather than using them as a restraint mechanism to temper their unwanted, potentially uncontrollable natural instincts.  I wanted to create a female character that was strong but modern, passionate and human, and someone who comes out on the other side of her challenging experiences stronger in her resolve.  And, yes, I also wanted to hold a devout person up for examination by an audience likely to have preconceived notions about such things, to explore that contrast between expectations and reality (I highly doubt anyone going to a late-night show in a grungy bar in the middle of Hollywood to see a show called “Sin” was expecting a sermon). 

In terms of staging I never figured out how to do it with the limited space we always had, and in both the sing-through in 2011 and the more realized Fringe version in 2015, we had to work around the mic stands and the tiny stage spaces.  A fully-realized production would have, at least I would expect, stylized set pieces, a digital screen or some way of creating actual locations. Then again, it may be that the show was never meant to be more than something “in concert” ultimately.

 For the Fringe version I re-used our “Censored” sign from the third scene (“Give Me What I Want”) and it created a really nice running gag…again, I’m sure the audience would have gone for even more of that kind of naughty, vaudeville-style humor but I didn’t want to make a farce out of it lest we lose the impact of the more serious elements I wanted to bring in later. 

You get the idea that Devlin and Faith have had a night together, that it was highly charged sex, it’s clear what happened, makes the point and the show continues on—I couldn’t think of any better way to do it, and it was a crowd-pleasing moment. 

Again, out of respect for the cast in both versions, I’m just sharing a hint of what the scene was like.  In truth, I don’t know that the secne truly ever worked too well anyway—visually it’s kind of stagnant and without sophisticated microphone equipment the audio mix  was never what I was going for (the madrigal section at the end gets muddy live).  For that reason the original demo version with Chris Maikish, Kehau Gabriel and Tricia Ridgway remains my favorite version to listen to, even though I love all three versions equally otherwise…and again, I am truly indebted to the fine performers who brought this very old song of mine to dynamic life at last.

2010 demo version: https://youtu.be/_amrk-BrMvY

2011 version:  https://youtu.be/E-Do6SZjQ8w

2015 version: https://youtu.be/lGPPqNKor7A