Musicals Men

In case you're not up on your circle of life trivia, the father of Simba is Mufasa, of Mufasa Ahadi.

We only bring it up on a slow, hot summer day to try and get your creative juices flowing. Why not a musical — perhaps as successful as The Lion King and it's circle — that also deals with your own (or someone newsworthy) daddy issues?

How about the tale of Dick Clark (not the AB/New Year's Eve one)? He had everything. A younger girlfriend; a 45-year-old son he thought he had finally come to terms with after battles that had begun in childhood; and that son's son, a grandson who made him proud.

Then, unfortunately, just like Sweeney Todd (who did end up murdering his daughter ... don't ask), the tale turns a mite dark, with grandson Ben shooting his father as part of discussions with his father, who can't forgive his father for lavishing money on his girlfriend rather than him.

From dark comes light and from death in war comes legacy and inspiration. So for a different kind of tuneful inspiration consider Camelot (an imaginary place inspired by love and war, which in its telling somehow loses Arthur's illegitimate father Uther Pendragon) and the story of Ernesto Nava, the son of Pancho Villa, who had hidden the tale his mother — not technically Mrs. Villa — told for almost all his 93 years.

If that still doesn't inspire art to set feet tapping and larynx crooning, why not take a crack at a story brimming with inspiration? It could be a sort of Sound of Music, with a stern father, but one that grows not from Nazi horrors but from those of the apartheid ways and days of South Africa? Consider what it might be like to be Mandela-Hlongwane, daughter of Nelson Mandela, who barely knew her father — a round-the-world hero — while she was growing up.

She has cute stories of how her dad wanted to impose a curfew after he was released ... and she was a grown woman with children. And she is also ready with the scene of how the great man demanded that to honor his granddaughter's wish his bodyguards sing "Barbie Girl," an insanely offensive song celebrating in lyrics he must not have listened to so much he abjures.

Wait, actually, don't use this one as your own inspiration as Ms. Madela-Hlongwane already has some collaborators on a Broadway musical promised for 2010.