Just who takes the time to read Harry Potter and re-work lyrics of old or new musicals to make them Potter-esque? Musicians and non-musicians, teens and adults...just Harry Potter fans putting their interest in musicals together for a bit of fun.
The person whose Internet moniker is Caius Marcius and is the webmaster for "Harry Potter Filks" the Internet's largest collection of HP song parodies is a Gilbert and Sullivan fan, but also a 56-year-old consultant who trains staff to deal with behavioral problems. With a masters in clinical psychology, Marcius has been working with disabled populations for 25 years.
As to why write filks, Marcius wrote:
Those of us who write HP song parodies agree that the ultimate challenge is to successfully render every song from a given musical into an HP format.
Via email, Marcius (a pseudonym) wrote:
I’ve written over 600 Harry Potter song parodies, including 11 full-length musicals...It features over 3300 songs, including nearly five dozen full-length musicals.
HMS Dumbledore, which I wrote 2004, is the first of two G&S/HP musicals I wrote (the other being Trial by Wizengamot, based on Order of the Phoenix, Chapter 8). I wrote HMS with the intention of creating a play that could be actually be staged using fairly modest forces – e.g., the Gryffindor-Slytherin Quidditch match takes place off-stage, while the audience remains on-stage to observe, comment and crane their necks. In addition to the parodies of the songs, I also tried to write dialogue similar in spirit to the whimsical pomposity of Sir Gilbert.
About a year or so after I wrote HMS, I was contacted by a Mr. James Patterson in Australia. He wanted to stage the play for a group of very young children, and he submitted his own version of my play with drastically simplified dialogue. I gave him my OK, but never heard from him again, so I don’t know if he ever actually staged HMS. Although I did not care for most of Patterson’s revisions, he had about 10-12 bits of revised lyrics and dialogue (e.g., Petunia’s comment about the lighting change indicating the passage of time) that I enjoyed enough to incorporate into the 2006 revision (which is about 99% mine and 1% Patterson). My 2006 revision, is in two acts instead of three (Acts 2 and 3 are now linked by a brief soliloquy for Argus Filch). Its most significant change is that Lord Voldemort actually appears on stage - I originally had him as a disembodied voice, but I decided that theatrically, that was too anti-dramatic, and that Voldemort needs to actually appear in person (he can’t be suitably confined to the back of Quirrell’s head on stage, as splendidly as that works on page or on screen).
I’ve had numerous inquiries about staging HMS but I’ve not yet seen documentation to show that it was performed. Beside Mr. Patterson, faculty at the Clark School- a private school in Danvers MA - tell me that HMS was performed by them in the spring of 2008, but I’ve seen no reports-photos-etc. of the performance, and my e-mails went unanswered. There are restriction on staging HP musicals that prevents professional theatre groups from performing them.
As I said earlier, I’ve written 11 HP musical-parodies altogether, including one for each book (except Book Five, for which I wrote two musicals). On the Musicals page of my site, you’ll see we have full-length parodies Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, Sondheim, Kander & Ebb, Lloyd Webber, etc. (Since this is all copyrighted material, none of this was ever written with the intention of performance). My personal favorites of my works is the 2004 A Vast LEPHT-Wing Conspiracy, based on A Chorus Line, in which Lord Voldemort holds auditions for the Death Eater who will be privileged to join him in defeating Harry Potter in the final book (LEPHT is the acronym for The League of Extraordinary Potter-Hating Troublemakers), and the 2004 Snape-Specific (based on South Pacific), in which Snape become the Hogwarts Headmaster 20 years after the end of Rowling’s cycle.
Chloe Ewer who goes under the pseudonym R.J. Lupin wrote:
No, I'm not a musician. I've played some piano, take voice lessons, and have been in a ton of musicals, but I wouldn't consider myself a musician. However, I am a giant musical fan; I look forward to the Tony Awards every year to see what new musicals there are, and I still love the old classics.
I wrote the musicals for Harry Potter because when I first saw a HP filk, I was inspired to make up my own. Of the four musicals I made, I did the first one ("Harry" based on "Annie") merely for fun and to see if I could do it. The other musicals were, of course, also for fun, but inspired mostly from listening to the musicals and being reminded of events in Harry Potter by the melodies. I like seeing if I can make character and plot comparisons with some musicals to Harry Potter, and Moulin Rouge always reminded me of the Marauders from Harry Potter, so I decided to do one on that. When Half-Blood Prince came out in 2005, I'd been listening to the musical Wicked a lot, and I liked the book so much that I decided to begin filking that book to Wicked.
In real life, I'm headed off to college in the fall, where I know I will become extremely busy. I wish I still had the time and inspiration for filking that I used to, but these days I just enjoy listening to every musical that comes by me. I'm 18 now, but I wrote my Harry Potter musicals between the ages of 13 and 15.
Yet some musicians did take interest in Harry Potter, enough to put him into a musical format. Imagine, Harry Potter helped connect a musician to musicals according to JustLivePosthumously:
Well, JustLivePosthumously is a penname for Jonathan Posthuma. I am a musician, composer, arranger, and play piano, trumpet, various woodwinds, and sing tenor. I am 19 and a sophomore at Dordt College in Northwest Iowa. My major is Secondary Music Education: Choral and Instrumental. I would like to teach high school music but perhaps get a masters in composition and direction. At Dordt, I also minor in theatre and have a love for Broadway musicals. (This love is in many ways a result of my experience at HP Filks. But more of that later.) In early 2008 (about January), I had this brilliant idea that someone should be writing a Harry Potter musical because of the popularity of the series. After some research, I discovered that many people already had my idea and that there were entire sites, like HP Filks, dedicated to these things. At the time, I was a senior in high school and was playing Oliver Twist in the musical "Oliver!" I drew some connections between the orphaned Harry and little Oliver and decided to try my hand at filking the entire show for Book One. Caius Marcus was very welcoming and his encouragement led me to create four more shows in this order:
"The Chamber Man" based on the The Music Man (original) finished Spring 2008
"My Fair Harry" based on My Fair Lady (film) finished Summer 2008
"Harry, Get Your Wand" based on Annie, Get Your Gun ( 1999 Revival) finished Fall 2008
"Crazy But True" based on Crazy For You finished Spring 2009
Many of these shows were only vaguely familiar to me, so I did a lot of research, found the soundtracks and lyrics, and plugged away. Most full musical filks take me about 3 months. My favourite part of filking is finding which songs to apply to different scenes in the books and finding the connections between Rowling's plots and characters and these Broadway classics. One of my favourite combos is Gilderoy Lockhart and Prof. Harold Hill in "The Chamber Man."
I have become much more of a musical fan and had never seen many shows before. Now, I consider myself a student of musical theatre and have tried my hand at some original compositions. I plan to continue writing HP filks until I have finished the books and satisfied my desire. I have about 3-4 more planned out but not completed. The closest to completion is "You're A Good Man, Dumbledore" based on "You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown" for "Half-Blood Prince." Hopefully, I will have it posted by August.
As for normal life, I live in rural Wisconsin on a hog farm. I like gardening, reading, and drawing (besides music!). In fact, I have an account on deviantArt.com and am hosting a drawing contest to create illustrations for my first five musicals.
The person who goes by Schmergo Weasley, Megan Fraedrich, also has a passion for musical theater. Not a musician, Fraedrich also draws not just from Sondheim, but also Weird Al Yankovic.
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