And the Beat Goes On by Martha Reed

Last month during a friend’s birthday jaunt I had great fun visiting the Big Apple and catching two Broadway shows. First up was Cabaret starring Adam Lambert, an American Idol TV star and a replacement frontman for the rock band Queen. The following evening we enjoyed Moulin Rouge featuring Culture Club pop star Boy George.

It had been years since I had visited New York City and both shows were spectacular. For Cabaret, the entire August Wilson Theater was transformed – entrance lobby and all – into a seedy Kit Kat Club pre-war Berlin setting. The Moulin Rouge set design at the Al Hirschfeld Theater included the iconic spinning windmill and the larger than life-sized blue elephant.

The storyline in both shows shared a similar and familiar plot: heartbreak, human foibles, and the pangs and consequences of love. Being a writer of course I needed to dissect both shows to see if I could learn something valuable to use in my own creative work.

From the incredible set designs I re-learned that setting is a key supporting player across all genres. Add a ‘wow’ factor like an enormous blue elephant and readers come into the story already knowing they’ll need to suspend their disbelief to be transported into an alternate reality and/or an alternate world view. The opposite is true for anyone seeking a comfort read. These readers crave a familiar setting they can easily recognize.

My second and bigger takeaway came when I realized that these stories were being told to me musically through spoken song lyrics versus being interpreted by the visually written word. This key difference challenged my brain. Instead of anticipating plot points, I found myself following the stories based on choreography and on each song’s up and down beats.

For the record I attended both shows already knowing their major characters and their overall plots. Spoiler alert: I recalled that both Cabaret and Moulin Rouge ended on downbeats. The Kit Kat Club gets shuttered due to Germany’s fascist march toward Hitler’s totalitarian rise to power. Moulin Rouge’s female lead Satine dies of consumption after confessing her true love, a genuinely historic trope found earlier in Alexandre Dumas’ Les Dames aux Camelias.

For me, the major insight came during Moulin Rouge’s encore. Boy George and the entire cast came onstage and after the standing ovation Boy George stepped out of character as Emcee Harold Ziegler. After encouraging the cast to ‘can-can,’ he broadly winked at the audience and started singing snippits from his Culture Club songbook. Responding to the inside joke, the audience went nuts. Theater patrons poured back out onto Broadway on a happy, positive, and upbeat note.

Which made me wonder: How have I been using up and down beat endings in my writing? Reviewing my mystery novels I determined that after each denouement and my final twist I’ve finished all of them upbeat – usually by sharing an enticing promise of the next book with even more alluring danger and exciting adventures to come. My shorter fiction endings are what surprised me: these seemed to be more neutral and final.

Which gave me a homework assignment: the next time I draft a short story I’m going to consider deliberately ending it upbeat (and without breaking character like Boy George did which may be writerly cheating). I’m curious to see what that change gets me.

How about you? Do you knowingly end your stories on an up or a down beat?