Beating Broadway: How to Create Stories for Musicals That Get Standing Ovations

by Steve Cuden

Characters gain and lose power, sometimes many times during the course of a story. Great scenes flow back and forth in power. This power exchange is an important function of drama. It keeps the audience interested in the characters and in the story. It makes the telling of the tale fluid and dynamic rather than static. It keeps the stakes high, which keeps the conflict high. Throughout a story, power should shift—particularly for the protagonist. Power ought to swing between characters from scene to scene, sometimes within scenes. And whatever power the protagonist possesses at the beginning of the story ought to wind up just the opposite by the time he reaches the resolution of the tale. Howard Suber expresses it this way in The Power of Film (296–298): “1) If the central character has power in the beginning and loses it by the end, we call it a tragedy. 2) If the central character has little or no power in the beginning but gains it by the end, we call it a comedy. 3) If the central character has power at the beginning, never loses it, and still has power at the end, or if the central character has no power at the beginning, never acquires it, and still has no power at the end, we call it a flop.”