If you’ve been to a King’s Players melodrama in the last eight years, you’ve seen Malachi Miller.
He started performing at age 10, filling in at the last minute. Before that, he helped his parents Bryan and Amy backstage, building sets and doing anything else that needed to be done.
When he reached high school, his on-stage roles expanded. And this year, his role expanded even more. Miller is a senior this year and wrote this year’s show, “Adrift in the Wicked City, or … the Miser’s Secret.”
“I always wanted to write one,” Miller said.
The melodrama as a genre comes from temperance plays, designed to show how terrible alcohol was. The villain usually drinks, while the hero and heroine do not.
“You generally start with a clearly defined villain, hero and heroine. It’s easy entertainment,” Miller said.
The genre’s popularity has fallen off in the last few decades.
He reads 10-20 melodrama scripts every year, helping search for the next year’s show. He looks for casts of 13-30 people.
“The formula is ingrained,” he said. “Once you know the motivation, the rest falls out. It’s natural what happens.”
The idea for Miller’s story began to germinate when he discovered Jacob Riis. Riis was a real person who took pictures of the destitute in New York City and published them in his newspaper. He was also friends with Teddy Roosevelt, Miller said.
The police inspector, Thomas Byrnes, was also real. He popularized the third degree, a method of questioning suspects that included physical and psychological torture.
One of the villain’s henchmen, Mike McGloin, was also based on a real person who was part of the Whyos gang in New York city.
Miller said once he found Jacob, he knew the main theme of the program would be helping the unfortunate.
Jacob’s love interest, Idabel Treason, is a fictional person. Miller said he chose names for his characters that were not as contemporary.
“The character emerged in the editing process,” he said. “She keeps talking.”
One of her lines, “too much,” was not supposed to be in the dialogue, he said. As Miller and his mom edited the play, they wrote notes to each other next to lines.
“It was supposed to be a note to my mom,” he said. “But it got one of the biggest laughs.”
One of his favorite lines in the whole play was one Van Cleevfs said.
“You know what they say. Moral absolution doesn’t feed the cat,” to which Idabel replies, “No one says that.”
One of his goals was to give every part something good. For example, the character of Ophelia, whose mother is the neighborhood gossip, had some of the play’s best lines.
“Every line I made funny,” Miller said.
Choosing names was pretty easy, he said. When it came time to name the villain, Miller wanted an unpronounceable last name and chose Van Cleevfs.
“It’s a classic gag to get the name wrong,” he said.
The character is pretending to be European as he attempts to escape his past. Miller wanted alliteration because it’s funny, he said, so he chose Clarence and Claude for the character’s first two names.
Miller decided to write the show after last year’s finished. He said he started writing one when he was eight and recently reread it, describing it as bad.
Once he started Adrift, he worked on it every day. He and his mom edited it on a trip to North Carolina for a banjo camp in August. During the 17-hour drive there and back, they passed the laptop back and forth, making notes and changes.
Although Miller has been part of the King’s Players for many years, he didn’t write parts for specific actors.
“By the time we were done, I knew who the top four would be,” he said.
During his four years of high school, Miller played the villain twice. He likes the part because it’s the only role that can break the fourth wall and talk directly to the audience.
“My favorite part is improv,” he said, adding that the comments yelled his way are often replied to.
The challenge, though, is that the villain is onstage most of the time.
Miller also wrote three songs for the play, but he found songs he liked better so they didn’t make the cut.
He didn’t tell anyone he’d written the play until show week, he said. To that point, everyone thought the author was Basil M. Corbin. He put his own name as author on the show’s t-shirts, but no one noticed right away, he said.
Corbin is a family name, and he picked Basil because he thought it was funny. M is his initial.
Even though he’d written the show, “it didn’t come alive until there was an audience,” he said.
The energy picks up with a crowd, while practicing can get boring.
“Even with a smaller crowd, it was a good crowd. We feed off the energy,” Miller said. “This was the best run we ever had.”
Miller currently works for Wissmann Enterprises, a construction company, and is learning how to tune pianos.
“I’ll learn about business that way,” he said.
