Blog: Data And Doctor Doom Progress Report

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Work progresses on the writing of Data and Doctor Doom: THE MUSICAL, the new show which I have belatedly realised I can promote to people as "A musical adaptation of my PhD Thesis". I have tried this out on numerous people and the risk of facial hair inflation from the amount of RAISED EYEBROWS it has generated is EXTREME.

Despite the fact that it's only going to be ME doing the show I'm writing it all out as a SCRIPT, mostly as a way to work out where the SONGS are going to go. This turned out to be dead useful a couple of days ago when I did a TIMED RUNTHROUGH of everything so far and found that I'd written 29 minutes of material (hoorah!) but had not yet actually started sharing any RESULTS. I'm hopeful that people who like both Data AND Doctor Doom will want to come and see it so I'm highly aware that not EVERYBODY will want an entire half hour mostly about statistical methodologies and data cleaning.

THUS I need to do some rejigging of various sections, and will probably have to cut an ACE song called "Eyeball The Data" and replace it with me just saying "I cleaned the data" instead. This is a shame, as it's a LOVELY song I reckon, but I can always save it for the West End run and/or Original Cast Soundtrack album, right?

I've also cut a lengthy JOKE about the mini-series Spider-Man: Reign which I REALLY liked, REAMS of opinions and another song called "Why Don't We Talk About Comics?" which will probably go into the same buckets of STUFF as "Eyeball The Data". On the positive side though there are LOADS of other songs pretty much falling out of my BRANE on a daily basis. This process is made a bit easier by the FACT that in many cases I've already written a whole PAGE of text - itself boiled down from whole CHAPTERS of PhD - which I can then use as the basis for SONGS.

I've given myself a sort-of-rule that I can't have more than one page of TEXT without a song coming along, in order to avoid what me and Steve used to call "A LULL" in the show where the audience is sitting around waiting for you to do a Good Bit again. So far this has lead to me writing NINE new songs, including the two what will be excised, which I think is pretty good going. I think I'm now about halfway through, so I'm hoping to get the full script done by the end of MARCH, which will give me APRIL to work out the slides and somehow LEARN it ready for some Work In Progress shows in MAY and then off and out into the world in JULY.

That's the plan anyway, and so far the practical side of finding gigs is working pretty nicely. I've currently got FOUR shows sort-of-pretty-much booked (only one to the extent that I can talk about it on the show page as yet though) and another four or five being applied for, but then I'll be on the lookout for further places to do it - I'm going to try and stick mostly to fringe shows, comics festivals and data events if I can, as part of my Krazy Plan to NOT LOSE MONEY on this (it's never happened with anything else, but there's surely got to be a first time, right?), but if anyone knows of any of those types of things, ESPECIALLY data events, do let me know. In the meantime I must get back to the ROCK WORKSHOP, I still have half a show to write!

posted 27/2/2025 by MJ Hibbett

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