This was our musical (far less hopeful than I generally do the past decade, but more in line with work I did mid-1990s) about the Afghanistan war, a musical drama but as musicals mostly seem to need, always with a thought to leaving the audience with a feeling of optimism and hope for recovery - we wrote and recorded it 2015-17, and had set it in 2008 - but somehow, even four years ago when we did it on Long Island (we called it "on location in Mineola") August 2017 -
It's almost eerie, yet also logical given how most wars end or don't end - the show's plot and main characters in the plot are about inability to finish something before needing to jump to another. Somehow, even we musical theater writers just writing a story about a family touched by tragedy in this war saw this metaphor coming from what was in the news - that "we" would one day leave it unfinished, and abandon it someday and move on. (I guess that's said about theater also. That musicals are never finished, but abandoned once you're frozen or open)
http://fred-and-the-economy.blogspot.com/2021/08/family-music-copyright-july-21-2017.html
Two highlighted numbers at https://youtu.be/hLFfOPBzmag More demos from this show at https://youtu.be/0ha6R1Z2yQo and https://youtu.be/_vLnGZVtRc4A
As we were writing this in 2015-2017, it was a war that the US knew was not going to be won, and the sons had enlisted with the knowledge that the war would always be unfinished - and the show was about characters that were unable to finish anything, but always moved on to other things. The grieving Mom in the show will not open the cardboard box that came from the Army with her son's belongings, and Marian's original idea (as of when we started) was the fear that once the box was opened, and she knew what was in the box, after that there would be no more to discover about her son - and that as long as there was something left to discover, that son's ending wasn't final.
