A year and a half later, just barely the right season to get back in her outdoor bathtub - where she writes lyao, and with co-writer Beverly Stephens off on a yacht in Turkey,  Bobbi Boes is reworking their successful musical in Canyon Lake, Southern California. Her and composer Grande Coles, the penseagrande, are edits, edits, edits. They’re killing babies and stretching characters which isn’t easy to do, not when it feels like months of labor that’s gone down the toilet. But that’s the creative process, and writing musicals is cutthroat pruning. The creatives recently found themselves at ASCAP Foundation’s 2025 Musical Theater Fest at the Wallis in Beverly Hills CA. Among the presenters were Stephen Schwartz, whose Broadway hit Wicked just popped off again with it’s new film rendition starring Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo. A great event with good points but nothing new; if a song’s gotta go, a song's gotta go. “Nutcracker the Mousical”, Beverly and Bobbi’s 30 year old baby, just learned to tie its shoes, but it’s already time to make it run. 

 

“So remember that section of “Into the Cold”?” - Bobbi.

“Yea, I love that section. I worked so hard on it. It's so pretty isn’t it?” Grande

“Well, cut it.”, Bobbi. 

“Oh…Great!” Grande, wiping his tears with a smile and ready to strangle the older white woman. 

 

     But it’s like that when you are creating these massive things… or maybe when you are creating anything. With musicals, screenplays, operas, TV series - all the creatives are in service to the story, and they all go through it. 

 

     Bobbi tells Somewhere Stage: “ I was working with Judy Burns, a writer for the original  Star Trek, and my mentor.. I had written almost my entire screenplay (Sacramento) and when I showed it to her, she said she liked it but the father character needed to be taken out. And so I killed my daddy: which was page 1-80! (ha!) So, I put my dad on the chopping block, rewrote it and wound up winning a Samuel Goldwyn Award.” She says the character arc was just better. Better pacing, better intention. She says it was just better in general.

 

     Coles and Boes’ collaboration is impressive for so many reasons. Grande, 27, a gay mixed, balding savant who lives in his car and Bobbi, an empty nester living in her lakeside home that she bought with the money she earned as headwriter from an overseas TV series out of Lebanon. (beat) Imagine the similarities. Turns out there’s a lot. Somewhere Stage understands that thriving as a creative starts with the self, and understanding your own story as a human being so that you can reflect the human experience authentically to the rest of the world. Any creative collaboration has its struggles but that iron on iron effect, especially when coming from drastically different perspectives, has a way of bringing out intense hues of expression, and a precise and disciplined palate of story. 

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     “No, it’s kind of funny haha.” Grande tells Somewhere Stage, “We are so cut throat with each other. She’ll write something, or me, and then I’ll tell her, “this is terrible”, and then we want to kill each other briefly, and back and forth until this random genius thing just shows up, out of f-ing nowhere. But I’m really not surprised because it’s like that. We’re both professionals and don’t have time to work with people who just tell us what we want to hear. Besides, that usually doesn’t make great art.”

 

     Musicals go through so many stages, renditions, casts, and even writers. Years ago, Don York, a Juilliard prodigy and composer for the Paul Taylor Dance Company in New York, approached Bobbi and Beverly to flush out their songs, and write more for them. The collaboration produced a lot of great things. Sadly his passing left hundreds of Finale Scores and fragments of ideas.(Finale is a music notation software). And then of course Tchaikovsky and York found Coles.

    Great works are these scary things that require trust, and challenge everyone’s limitations. Each update is a snapshot in time of who its authors were, and how they thought, and what they thought they knew about their characters or the stories they are trying to tell. They contain seeds, fragments, and pieces of us as people which is why it is so hard to let go of those great ideas.

     At the ASCAP music fest, Schwartz and Karey Kirkpatrick (Mrs. Doubtfire, Chicken Run)  played pieces that never made it into their world famous productions. They were great tunes (some of them), but we’ren’t right for the story or the moment. Of course, knowing when something isn’t right is tricky, and they talked a lot about that at the event. The only way through it all, is vulnerability, trust, and fearlessness. The creative has to ask what am I trying to say?  And am I brave enough to let go, search out, and be spontaneous enough to let it be said?