: For a musical script, how much stage direction in relation to dialogue should there be? I'm having trouble getting to the page number I want for a musical I'm writing and would appreciate some advice!

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The formatting for stage scripts isn't as strict as for screenplays, but let's assume for the moment that you're using screenplay format, which has the advantage that every page takes about one minute's worth of screen time, so your page total is roughly equivalent to your runtime. Clearly, in that case, adding super-elaborate stage directions might make it look longer, but it doesn't actually make for a longer film (or play). In general, script directions are usually minimal and functional to allow the director/producer to bring their own vision to the finished product.

The situation is quite different than in writing a novel or story, where the settings appear only in the reader's mind, and the descriptions often make up a major part of the writing. Here, if you've put in all the dialogue and actions, plus functional descriptions of characters and settings, your play is complete. Your script isn't the sets and costumes, it's the dialogue and plot. Tweaking the stage directions is nothing but rearranging the furniture. So if your script is shorter than you expected, either you've written a shorter play (maybe a one-act or a sketch) or you need to add substantive material (a subplot, or a secondary conflict, perhaps). For what it's worth, writing a shorter play isn't necessarily bad. Better one solid act of pure gold than three acts of tedious padding.

With all that said, this is a musical. Much of the runtime will be taken up by songs. Depending on how many songs there are, and what the ratio of spoken to sung dialogue is, it is quite possible that your full length script could look quite a bit shorter than you expect. If you include the song lyrics in the script and format them so they generally match that same 1 minute per page guideline, it might help you get a better sense of where you really are.