Madeleine Skye

Musician. Friend. Leader. A nervous twenty-something who runs into their ex at a furry convention and then gets mauled by a bear. An older sister who reconnects with her sister by creating elaborate, comedic murder mysteries. A 15th Century witch who glues herself to a chair and curses llamas to talk. All of these can — well — some of these can be used to describe me, some are characters I’ve written. One is both. But I’m not telling you which is which.

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I started writing songs at the age of two, acted in my first musical at seven, and fell down eight separate sets of staircases when I was seventeen. It was only after that that I decided to write musicals. But I truly fell in love with the stories and the worlds that I found myself allowed to create.

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My first narrative musical project followed a sea captain’s journey through an underwater afterlife, with his fate and future in the hands of the sister he once sentenced to death. When I got to see my first draft of the opening number on a stage, complete with six singers, a company of dancers, a rhythm section, and dramatic lighting all around, I saw musical theater in a way I never imagined it before - larger-than-life.

 

Since then I have leaned into the larger-than-life side of musical storytelling. I have told big musical stories from the perspective of a tiny little ant, a grieving sister grappling between her dead brother and the embodied Lamb from “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” and a runaway who ends up with a ghost in her backseat. The music I create always has to be the most evocative and nuanced thing I can create, but a part of me always tends to make it big and over-dramatic. I love creating sweeping orchestrations and funny lyrics.

 

I want my audience to leave thinking, “that was a big time and a good time.” Wit and humor are paramount into making an engaging story for me and drive me to create the most intriguing characters and situations I can. I don’t want an audience to have to think so hard about something I’ve written that they come out depressed. Any deeper message in my art must be accompanied by a sense of hope or humor (or both). That puts the audience in a good mood, and it is a freeing, happy feeling for me. Hope and humor are the reasons I keep coming back to making art. I want to erase any feelings of pretentiousness. Odds are, if the art I create makes me happy, it will make other people happy as well.

 

I love telling stories through music more than anything in the world. But other forms of storytelling - whether that be in prose, poetry, interactive media, and occasionally visual art (I can’t draw to save my life) - excites me to create as well. Stories are what make life fun. And I strive to continue to make contributions to that kind of fun, however big or small they may be.