You highlight a part of the requirement that is overlooked (by some): that it is intended to apply to songs written for the specific show, which would seemingly exclude trunk songs. That is very hard to regulate though. A composer might say, for instance, that a song written decades ago was a diddle with this show in mind. Likewise, unless it had been performed, how would anyone know it was a trunk song. I have a friend who is a novelist who mentioned one time that he had about 20 "chapters" in his file cabinet that were untethered to any book (but the one we were discussing included such a chapter). Richard Foreman, in his heydey, got up every morning and wrote randomly for (I think) 2-3 hours. Later, he would pick up some of these scraps and write a play with them. It is kind of a chicken and egg situation.
It does seem inconceivable the producers would not have kept their eyes on this ball particularly with the effort to keep everyone's eyes on John Kander. |
