 Welcome to the Dramatist Guild. We call this series of events our DG Conservatory set towards our musical theatre writers. We have so many musical theatre writers in the Guild membership that we like to have special mentions for them every now and again. As always, if you have ideas for events, please feel free to let us know and we're happy to try to find who you want to hear from, what you want to learn about, just let us know. Tonight we're very excited to pair with Hal Ewalt and Michael Ian Walker, who set up the very popular series behind the music role, which they did down at the 92nd Street Y Tribeca. It's a very popular series down there and we're really excited to have them here. They're both young Guild members. We have other Guild members tonight performing for you, so it's a very synergistic event and I'm very excited about it. Since this event is actually on social media and media in the theatre, we are asking that you actually leave your phones on. So please silence them if you have a crazy ring that will drive me insane and everyone else. So please put it on silence, but feel free to tweet, check in on Facebook, let everyone know you're here, take pictures, do whatever you want. We're happy to have all of you and we want everyone to know that you're here. I don't think you'll need flash photography. It's very well done in here. I just want to briefly thank all of the performers who donated their time to come help us out tonight. I want to thank Michael Corey, who is on the Guild Council for donating his time tonight to help facilitate this event and without further ado, here are Kyle. As she said, we're really excited to be doing behind the musical with the Drama to Guild and live streaming for the first time. We are super honored to have with us tonight Michael Corey as our moderator, who you may know from such amazing musicals as Grey Gardens, or recently Far From Heaven, Playwrights Horizons. He also, in addition to writing the lyrics for those musicals, writes libretto for a number of operas including Harvey Milk and The Graves of Wrath with Ricky E. Gordon and Dr. Gervago, which is currently in Helsinki, so if any good travel plans, go to Helsinki and see Dr. Gervago, it will be great. He's also currently working on a new piece with Doug Wright and Scott Franco, who were his Grey Gardens co-conspirators, as well as a project with Disney, and is maybe most importantly a proud member of the Drama to Guild himself, because he's on the Council. And he teaches at Yale Drama too, he does lots of things. So we are very lucky to have him with us and he's going to take over. We're going to have a conversation all about the internet tonight and how it's affecting musicals even. So have a seat, gentlemen. Thank you. And for those of you tuning in, we encourage you to send in your tweets to hashtag new play. From there you can do it from the internet. I should challenge will someone do something for you there and go play. So this is the first behind the musical event in cooperation with the Drama to Guild, so let me just begin by giving a few of your credits. Kyle Uolt and Michael Walker are currently at work on two commissions, one from Broadway Across America, which does not, I believe, have a title yet. And Pumped, a facetable new musical about the world of designer shoes. Their show, Bromance the Dudezical, was most recently performed and sold at concerts at Joe's Pub, Cowan's on Broadway, and has been developed by Ground Up Productions. Their work has been seen in Michigan, Toronto and London, and in New York at Playwrights Horizons, Joe's Pub, Theatre Row, Galapagos Arts Base, and many others. And as I mentioned, they are the producers of this series. So before we play a song, just let me ask you, how did you guys meet and get started in this field? We actually met at our eight jobs about seven or eight years ago. You still have their jobs. We part-timed them. Yeah, kind of. We're great. We're halfway there, Michael. We're halfway there. Sort of jobs now. I still have the day job on me. Yeah, so we met at management consultants, which has nothing to do with musical theatre, but I was a playwright by trade and had a play that was going up off Broadway, and Kyle was writing dance electronica music with a dance pop collaboration. And how do you divide the labors in your collaboration? Who does what? Typically, we got to a groove where Michael would write the book to the show, I'd write the music, and we'd write the lyrics together. One of our commissions was actually just for music and lyrics, so it was a new foray to be writing with the writers. Oh, and who are you working with? We were working with two folks. It was J.D. and Nicole Jacobson, and it was a really interesting experience when you bring more folks into the creative process. That's fantastic. Well, we'd like to hear a song. So why don't you tell us about this show of yours, Pumped, and the first song? Sure. So Pumped is all of the music today. We're going to share it from Pumped because we just finished a reading of it a few weeks ago. It's good examples of how we're trying to balance the idea of narrative musical theater and songs that can be shared on the Internet. So the first song is called Little Shoe, and it's a duet between the two romantic leads in the show, although they do not successfully know that they are interested in each other in this song. One of the guys named Raymond, he's a shoe designer. The woman is named Gloria. She is reluctantly working at the shoe store, but has learned a lot more about fashion. It's a devil wears product type of story. And in this song, the reason we want to do this song is that you'll see our second song is also Raymond's song. It's called Lost Little Shoe, and this song is a scene set to music, as many songs need to be. This song is a standalone pop number that we sort of built out of the scene song. So we wanted to show the difference. And who do we have performing here? Jonathan Witton and Autumn Prober. Our host is playing piano for us. Thank you. Thank you very much. Oh, now how are we going to do this one now? Very nice. Team work, Autumn. There we go. Are we good? Yeah, absolutely. He's a shoe designer. She doesn't really know much about shoes. That's what you need. Business person. Business person. Yes. Here's my gift. Surprise. They're shoes. A matching set. So shiny and new. My best design. A bit so rare. My masterpiece. My perfect pair. What do you think? I just mean we make the perfect pair. Good day, Ron. Good day tomorrow. Get your samples ready for the party of your life. Thanks, guys. That was fantastic. Before we get back to pumped, why don't we just talk a little bit about this movement? Would you say that, how do you pronounce it? MewTube or MusicTube is a movement? Oh my gosh, we're creating like a new name for something? We're going to make it happen. MewTube. Yeah, musical theater. MewTube. So we feel like we're relatively new to the musical theater game, in the sense that, you know, neither started out in musical theater, right? Six years ago, when we came together, it was when we started writing. So I feel like as we were getting our feet wet and learning more about writing together, we were also like, okay, well, how, what do we see around us? Like who are the people that we sort of want to be our peers? And it was quickly apparent that there is just a second component to being a young musical theater writer, which is that you have to learn how to be a part of the social media world. And that, you know, YouTube has been a big part of our getting known by people, getting known by students at universities across the country, hopefully even online right now, right? That they want to buy new sheet music by young writers, and they find it through YouTube. No, there's definitely a renaissance going on in this field. And would you say, do you have any hard knowledge about how many people are actually tuning in, or any evidence? Are they buying music? Are they... Yeah, I mean, we sell sheet music through our website, and the far destinations where people, you know, it's sort of exciting, sort of international sheet music sale. Sure. I guess very thrilled, right? Everyone from London is like, I found, you know, bromance. We're like... That's amazing. Thank you. But to your point, I wish we had, like, quantifiable data to say, yeah, there are, you know, 14.6 million people around the world that are actively plugged into this group. And I mean, if anybody has access to that, that'd be awesome to know, because I feel like it'd be fascinating. But it does seem to be substantial. No, I know, even for me, I don't do any of this, you know, Ricky Gordon mentioned a concert we were having at Carnegie Hall. It sold out in a couple of days and without advertising. So I know it's very powerful. Would you say it's almost a necessity these days to have an awareness on the web? Absolutely, absolutely. And to be totally honest, you know, it's not the most natural thing to Kyle and I, which is sort of exciting. Right, interesting. So it's been a learning process for us, you know, tweeting and using Facebook and getting the word out. So we just did a concert of bromance at Joe's Pub. And it also, I don't know how the word spread, but the word spread, you know, we got a lot, we got Facebook ads, never had before, you know, and Facebook just sort of exploded in the show, suddenly sold out before, you know, weeks before we did it, which was before we thought it was going to happen. And I think that, I mean, all through the internet. I mean, we didn't do any other advertising. It's interesting. In some respects, theater is always reinventing itself. And yet it's such a traditional field, and the people that work in it do things in traditional ways. And maybe in this instance, the writers and composers are slightly ahead of the curb. I just know from the theater administrators, dramaturgs, people that I work with all the time, are they aware of you and do they go on to the web to find out about you? I think they will occasionally, maybe if they're told through another means, they will maybe check you out. Right, they're some of the least competent people I know when it comes to... I think people will go berserk, but no, absolutely. We feel like it's a two-pronged career attack, right? Like, this is mostly to build support for just general people who are interested in our work and who want to buy sheet music and who maybe want to do a college production of bromance down the road. But you're totally right. It doesn't get us in the door. Well, clearly there have been success stories where I guess roads diverged. Like, the title of the show is one. Are there others that... I think it's also more the composers in there so the big hitters in this space, Kerrigan Loudermilk, Ryan Scott Oliver, Joey Connis, have had successes due in no small part to the fan base they've found online or their ability to aggressively pursue building that up. So I think those folks may be the best examples of how this is... like, there's diving in with it. I think it's aided people who've been around for a while just as a new space. But I do think it's really fascinating that it's become one additional pillar of responsibility as composers and lyricists. So you have writing material, you have networking with all the power players who are not connected at all, and then maintaining and sustaining and cultivating this entire new group of fans, supporters, future producers, kids in middle school who want to become musical theater folks down the line. It's in many ways separate yet becoming more and more necessary. Let's talk about how you divide in your mind writing for YouTube, or MewTube, and writing for the stage. There are two different things I would imagine that what you have to put on MewTube are short clips that work in a clip form. I don't think we... We've never written anything specifically just for the purposes of the internet. Naturally, because Kyle comes from a pop world, we tend to write a number of songs with pop structure which therefore can stand alone. I think it's similar to the audition song. If it's a good audition song, it's a good YouTube song. By audition you mean what you would play to... Actors will want to buy. It tells its own story or it makes sense on its own. So it doesn't necessarily have to be a lift out song, or a lifty song. It just needs to be self-contained. I think so. That actually brings us into cheering another piece. That's absolutely right. Is that where you were going? That is just where I was going. I was going back to Pumped, and we're going to hear two more songs from Pumped. Little Lost Shoe and The Math. You want to tell us about those? Set those up for us? Sure. So Lost Little Shoe is in some way connected to Little Shoe which you just heard. But this is the standalone ballad which can... I was thinking of five for fighting and emotional kind of poppy folk when we wrote this. So in the second act things have gone terribly wrong and Raymond, our male love interest feels betrayed by Gloria and misses her dearly in many ways too. So he's going to sing Lost Little Shoe for you. Good. We'll set up the next one. Let's do this one and then set up the next one. Great. So take it away, Jonathan. We'll do that as Raymond. It's clumped, empty shelf without a soul. To go to pumpkin cause I am lost without a mountain walk. I can barely see through. The next song is called The Math and you set that up for us? Sure. I mean this is when things have gone wrong for Gloria as well. Boyfriend, not Raymond, cheated on her. The company the store has been sort of taken over by company. Lots of things have gone wrong and this is where she sort of figures all that out. And just sort of a side note about Lost Little Shoe and The Math is that like obviously story has to come from... Well, Pumped is the most traditional musical I think we've ever written. It's a big old school book musical. So it was very interesting when we were even talking about this theme and they were like what can we do from Pumped? We were thinking the interesting thing is even within a traditional musical we try to be sort of conscious about not not only for the purposes of the internet but also for the purposes of like how contemporary audiences consume music you know it's nice to have a moment where your leading man just gets to have his time in that sort of pop way and The Math is less pop and more traditional, I don't know swan song, not swan song like Fire and Burner angry song but still again it's her 11 o'clock and was that one his I Want or further on in the show? Yes, I mean it's late in the show so it's not a setup I want but I sort of I realize that I lost what I want. I see, okay. It's a really fun big show we're giving you the two, that's true. That's true, it's very funny. Okay, so now Autumn Harlevard is going to perform The Math for us. That was wonderful. We have a few more minutes together. Suppose somebody listening to that wanted to get that music and put it in their act. Could they and where would they go? Not that yet. But soon, soon that they can go to our website e-mailtonwalker.com where we sell she music that is ready and available for sale. That is a new show and we're developing it. We tend to be rather conservative. Good thing, yes, I'm going to get to that. But there are websites now I guess called newmusicaltheater.com where one can buy music directly from the creators on that website. Absolutely. And I think there's a lot of great young writers on it. How does one get on it? If one has is it I mean, we are not on it. But I believe that I think it's through the people who run it who are composers themselves and incredibly talented composers who have been at the forefront of this internet movement in many ways. I mean, I think what's cool about that site and cool in general about YouTube is that it's a very democratic way of making musical theater. And it's sort of perhaps to producers chagrin and taking them out of the equation at least of communicating with your potential audience. A potential audience directly. And it's not there, but it certainly lets people hear your music and like your music. It almost seems like a new kind of tin pan alley. A new kind of romance. It used to be before popular music and theater music diverged and went on separate paths. They were the same and audiences came knowing the songs. Maybe we're getting back to something like that. Do we have any tweets? No tweets. Okay. I think we're going to open it up to questions to this group at the end when we'll bring everybody back. So before we move on to Zach is there anything else you'd like to tell us about your work? Where we can next see it? What you're aiming for? Well, we're working on the Commission for Broadcast America which is about lottery winners and that's the next thing that has to happen very soon. Okay. So we're sort of nose to the grandson. Let's say knock on wood that gets produced. Is this a continuing thing that you'd like to do? Try out your work. Put it on YouTube. Or is it a means to an end? No, absolutely. I think even creating this series behind the musical is a lot about us. One, creating a space to share the stage with other emerging writers which is a great joy and not that many opportunities to do to sort of all be in a show together but also to help create a forum to put things on YouTube to get, to communicate with younger audiences. When you use the term renaissance I'm really excited by that and I like this idea of a community that's kind of building off of each other and feeding out that energy of the actors that are getting established and have their own followings and writers and then other folks in marketing and the theater world all coming together and building something up. It feels very exciting. I think there's no doubt about it. Compared to when I began writing musical theater it was considered antiquated. All the English had locked up on Broadway. It's so different today because of the internet. It actually drives people back to the theater in search of live entertainment and connection and its ramifications are so interesting with shows like Glee and Smash which are still mythologized. Nonetheless it brings back romance to the field. I think the next ten years are when this is going to play out too. It's exciting because I don't know that producers have been convinced that this will drive tickets out. They're usually the last to learn if you can figure out how to bring all this excitement down in price out there to the public. It's spiraling which is cool. Let's move on to the next composer lyricist that we're going to be speaking with. We're now going to be speaking with Zach Zadek. Here you are. Did I pronounce that correctly? Very close. Okay. Let me give a few of your credit. Zach. Zach Zadek is a singer-songwriter from Long Island and a composer lyricist. His work has been heard at Joe's Pub, Le Poisson Rouge Galapagos Art Space and as part of In the Valley, the songs of Zach Zadek at Laurie Beachman Theater. Zach sold out musical Six was an intimate telling of six New Yorkers who by six degrees of separation unknowingly changed each other's lives and that was selected by the New York musical theater festival. His current projects include the Crazy Ones a new musical about Steve Jobs and Apple. That's what I wanted to start asking you about. How did you arrive at that? I mean I've always sort of had like a general fascination with Apple and with Steve Jobs in particular his, you know, his very interesting story. And sort of it was just a matter of deciding that I wanted to sort of turn into a project. I thought that it was the story that touched me and that I thought would And of course every musical is a huge investment of time. Did anyone advise you not to touch him? That there were rights issues or did you feel that? Yeah, I mean I actually consulted with a lawyer where I started writing the piece to make sure that it was worth that investment and it turns out it looks like. So in other words he's a public figure. Exactly. And what about his actual language? Of course. That's where you could run into some issues. The piece more deals with his story his accomplishments and sort of a character study of who he was. So it's less about maybe specific things that he said but more about his journey as a person in relation to Apple. Well that's fascinating and so that we can have some context. Why don't we move right into hearing a song from this show if we can? I believe the first song is Something There from The Crazy Ones. Will you set that up for us? Yeah, absolutely. So back in the days the distant days before there was YouTube and Internet the idea of a personal computer was even sort of a revolutionary concept. So this song takes place in the very beginning of the show and Steve Jobs has just stumbled upon an innovation that was revolutionary at the time that we all pay for granted nowadays, the mouse. And this is about his moment of realization that oh my god this could be huge. So who is going to perform this song for us? You know, I think I'm going to perform it. Fantastic. Okay, so take it away, Zach. Trust me, there are sheets. What do you do? Just carry these wherever I go. It's an illusion of strength. Thank you. That was Something There from The Crazy Ones about Steve Jobs. You know it's fascinating how music just crosses the boundary. I can totally see that I have no trouble believing that Steve Jobs could sing that song. Thank you. Well, I think it has something to do with our culture that TV has speeded up the whole process of mythologization. I mean, frankly, which has been going on since Shakespeare, Hamlet was once a Prince of Denmark, I'm sure it didn't come out a thing like the play, but this happened faster now and even faster thanks to the Internet. What is the plans for The Crazy Ones and how far along with the project are you? Yeah. So we did our first reading on that for you this past summer at the New York Musical Theatre Festival. Great. Which is great just, you know, as writers through them it's speed, you know, it's very different off the page in the real world. And now we're working hard on a new draft of it and putting it up in Connecticut with a wonderful theater group up there in the next few months. We're really excited about it. Okay. And given the theme of this discussion tonight, have you been using the new music media to explore the creation of this show as well as the awareness of it? Yeah. I think that really interesting thing about because The Crazy Ones is intended to just sort of be a standard musical. And it's interesting because, you know, it's still in development but at the same time to stay fresh, to stay part of all the stuff we're talking about you have to put some stuff out there even sort of like the song that I just played, you know, the show is definitely still being written, it's still being refined. So the interesting thing is, I guess, finding the balance between what we put out there and, for instance, the bridge of something there. While we were, like, I need to show in development or workshopping it for this reading of the summer, you realize, you know, this bridge is really not right. It hasn't yet happened. So if you go on YouTube, for instance, you know, that was a song that you could find a recording of two years ago with a totally different bridge. Right. And it's out there forever. It's out there forever. Hypothetically, you know, it could be tried to be taken down. But I think if maybe it makes, I don't know, a song creation process in a way that they might not, it would be just, you know, in, you know, 35, 40 years if it ever goes into production. That was one of the things that I was interested in because, you know, I was it was always my belief to keep everything private as private can be because it was subject to change until opening night and perhaps beyond. Come to think of it, it doesn't really matter, does it? To have varied versions, you're almost like your own archivist. It's very interesting when I started out something like this never would have happened. My songs were played as part of a showcase that Lehmann Enkel sponsored from the BMI workshop. A couple of years that Lehmann was running it himself I wrote a couple of songs and instantly got offers from agents and producers, but it was an industry only thing and nobody would have ever thought to involve the general public or the national constituency of writers, which is something that the drama skill is vitally committed to. Do you hear from people? Do you get feedback from people on the things that you put out there? Yeah, I think it's by the nature of what you said just putting it out there and set it in that closed BMI container. Very close shop. Yeah, and it's an interesting it's an interesting shift that a song is you put it out there. I think so much of this has to it's so intertwined with concert culture because these videos, the ones that I think all of us are really talking about are not, you know, the YouTube videos of someone in their bedroom with a guitar and some kittens around. I love a kitten YouTube video. You don't need to pretend. So in other words you try and pick concert venues. Well, these videos are coming from new musical theater concerts which itself is a totally I think a new form of exposure. It is. What are the costs I'm interested in associated with this? I mean when I make we just finished making a original cast recording it's prohibited. It's enormously expensive. What are the costs and do you pay performers and do you pay musicians who appear on these YouTube's? Yeah, I think it's sort of it depends on each particular situation. But at least speaking to my first concert that I ever tried to put up I really couldn't. I was a I'm still a college student with limited funding for this kind of thing and I had performers and musicians who I basically said to listen, this is the situation and I really I appreciate your work. I think I want to work with you and trust I think there that that there's a community of people helping each other try to get to the next level with their work. And are you concerned with issues of piracy or intellectual property rights with your ideas out there? I mean it's a great idea. Steve Jobs as a musical. I mean I think the interesting thing is correct me if I'm wrong but I think that ideas themselves can't be copyrighted only the execution of them. Or so you know I feel like the idea for Steve Jobs musical is not well I hope it's somewhat innovative. I don't think it's particularly no one could steal the work that I've written because it's you could be copyrighted. So I feel like the idea itself well you know it's no more than the idea for Bill Gates musical or I think you're exactly right. It's all about how you do it. Anyone can do it but they're not you. Exactly. Speaking of which, why don't we hear some more songs I believe from the show 6. Tell us about the development of that show. I started writing 6 going to my freshman year of high school I was coming out of theater camp on an island and I decided you know what I would love to you know I didn't get cast in our camp production at the modern milling. Oh well that's how Madonna started. Exactly. So I realized that you know I really like piano and writing my little songs. You know what I love musicals I'm going to try writing a musical so I worked on it sort of throughout high school and we did it at my high school in our high school show. And then as I moved to the city to go to school I kept working on it and kept revising it and it finally ultimately started at the New Yorkers Theatre Festival last year and we're still working on developing it. Fantastic. And tell us about the first song that we're going to hear from 6. Sure. So the song Blinded sort of comes at the end. So 6 is the six individual sort of stories of people going through their individual lives you know sort of isolated and what the show attempts to do is connect let you view as the audience the connections and sort of show how actually one of these isolated people affects another, affects another, affects another. So this character's test this is the last song that she sings This is said now? This is said in the present now. And it's her last song for her individual journey and she's basically gone through a brutal divorce with her husband which the audience is aware of that another character is partially to blame for but she doesn't really have that insight instead she just feels like she was blinded or sort of you know from left field this thing hit her that her marriage wasn't what it was that her husband was cheating on her and that you know that she was wearing sort of rose colored glasses about the whole thing. Great. Okay. And who's going to be performing the role of Taff? The wonderful Hannah Ellis who sang the role last summer. And are you a company? Fantastic. It's live. Before before I ask you to set the next song up for us let me just say to those watching on the web if you have a question you can send to hashtag new play. So the next song also from six is called Just Me. Can you set the scene for us? Sure. So in the show another character, Emma who ironically was the young lady who did ruin her marriage has just finished this brutal affair with her professor as you would have it and she's finished medical school and she moved to the city sort of bright-eyed and I'm going to take the city by storm and got sort of dejected along the way and now at the end of this whole journey that she's had in her first six years in New York she realizes you know what I think I can do and I don't really need outside assistance it's sort of I have it in me. But sort of interestingly enough you know talking about YouTube I feel like the song out of the show sort of has its own context of just all of us people in New York whether you go to medical school or have affairs you know just trying to make our own our own way in the city. So this is a standalone song that could work out of context too. I hope so. Fantastic and who's performing it for us? Great fellow classmate of mine Darra Orland. Great so Darra Orland is going to perform Just Me from Six. While he's setting up how did you two meet? We have a lot of mutual friends we're both involved in the community at NYU and yeah. Fantastic. Actually through Facebook I guess. Oh good. That's another drama in this series. Thank you. That was a real tour de force. Fantastic. So Zach that's wonderful. Can I ask you to come back at the end with everybody and we'll open the floor to questions? Sure. Super. So we're talking with Joey Contreras. Joey, hi. Let me just give them a few credits. Joey Contreras is a musical pop songwriter. His musicals include All the Kids Are Doing It was just received a workshop production at the Provincetown Theater with the Steinhard School NYU. He's also created the song cycle This Thing Called Love. Joey's original compositions and arrangements have been featured by Joe's pub, Lincoln Center, La Poisson Rouge, Laurie Beachman Theater and the Duplex. Performances of his music have stretched as far as Australia, Germany, South Korea and the UK. And his first album Love Me, Love Me Not the music of Joey Contreras features performances by Broadway talent and is available on cdbaby.com. Yes. So before we go to the performance, how has this new music video been of assistance to you? Are you talking about the Playbill series? Well, I was going to get to that later. In general. YouTube and the whole social media world has played a huge role in my success as a writer thus far. I was right when I was graduating college for musical theater is when a lot of the new musical theater was starting to come out there on YouTube and what not. I was one of those fan girls listening to Karrigan and Lautermilk and Pasek and Paul and I was just like, I'm writing music and not only do I relate to what they're writing, but this is kind of the style that I'm writing to and it kind of created this, I don't know, immediate like that felt made sense. So in the immortal words of Ed Cleveland I can do that. I can do that. There was a little bit of that and so it was exciting and inspiring and when I was graduating college is when I started really writing musical theater related stuff and I started having people sing it and started putting it online. Fantastic, so let's hear some music. The first thing we're going to hear is I could fall from this thing called love, your song cycle. Would you like to set that up for us and introduce the performers? I also want to say hi to my mom and my stepdad who are watching over there. So this first song is I could fall from a song cycle called this thing called love and Natalie Weiss and Eric Michael Krap are going to come sing it and this thing called love is essentially a song cycle so there are a bunch of standalone songs that are strongly gathered by a common theme and this is also the first song from the album Love Me Love Now. Hey. You ready? Yes. Joey, if we were to look you up on YouTube, what would we find? Goodness. On YouTube you would find a lot of songstorm concerts that I've put up there and also thankfully a lot of performances from kids across the world, honestly. Which has been really fantastic. The college musical theater scene has been really wonderful for me and towards me and they really just have embraced my music in a really lovely way and it's kind of been the thing that's been pushing me along. And you also have a CD out there, correct? So do these things feed each other? Yeah, when I first moved to New York I went straight into concert world and then once I had my first concert in the city I was like, well what am I going to do next? Why don't I just throw myself into an album? It was in the city for three months and I didn't know anybody I didn't know any like I didn't really know exactly how to start it but I just started meeting people and thankfully a lot of incredible people wanted to be a part of the record including the music on it and the amount of talent that I was able to get immediately was fantastic and I think working with those people that I've established fan bases already as prominent and up and coming Broadway performers really helped expose my music to a lot of other people too so people that were searching for Natalie Weiss got to hear my music and people that were searching for Caldeen Massey and Jeremy Jordan you know are hearing my music as well so it's been such a lovely experience okay and will this song cycle eventually take a dramatic form? Do you think? You know that is something that's a good question because right before I moved to New York I did have a workshop production of it and that was the first time that I was able to see how it lived and breathed as that as a stage song cycle but then once I recorded the album those songs started living on as like as an album versus a staged production and then once the album came out I went to the NYU grad program for musical theater writing and I knew I didn't want to get stuck in song cycle or concert land I wanted to write a book show that was really the reason why I looked at that program and and since then now a lot of the stuff that I'm doing is working on the book show that I wrote through that program which is all the kids are doing it and now I am working on it on a second album but that's kind of going more into my love for pop music as well so I'm kind of balancing my two of my loves which is pop music and that and writing book shows because that is something that I don't want to lose I don't want to get stuck in concert land you know Right. You know this is so interesting I remember when I was starting out how theaters and producers used to hire directors of development ostensibly to find new writers but I often felt that they were the guardians of the gate and I remember in particular well I'll name names I was called in for a meeting to the Niederlanders and the person in charge of development took me into the room and said do you want to know how much stuff we get and he showed me these three huge tables laden with scripts and on the first said stuff we hate and the second said stuff we really hate and the third said send back immediately and I said where's the stuff you like well there was none but it seems that the people associated with this movement you're in are taking control of that situation not waiting to be discovered who may or may not want to discover you but putting the work out there I think you know they're starting to try to label what this generation is in general not just specifically musical theater but you know this is this whole do-it-yourself generation where we are all kind of you know if someone's we're not going to just sit and wait for the opportunity to come to us we're not just going to sit and wait for you know the record label just the major record label to sign us and so I think the creation of things like YouTube and SoundCloud and Facebook all of these social media networks have encouraged people to be more creative and to give in to their creative urges and to get it out there and then start developing communities within that and I think that's the exciting thing about it. I would agree and I know Bill Finn on the Dramatist Guild Council spoke up and said you know there's no great big deal about having your workshop done by an official theater it's nice but you don't have to do it you can do it in your living room you could do it anywhere you want and that's how you develop it and that's how you learn I think we'd like to hear another song now before we talk about the Playbill series from your song cycle can you set that up for us? This song is called Love Me, Love Me Not and it was the first song that I put on YouTube actually and who's going to be doing that? Natalie. Great. The next song we're going to hear is from an online series called the Playbill Series can you tell us about that? Yes the Playbill Series is actually called Hot Up for the Ivories and this idea is as a new writer and embracing this world of putting your music out there a lot of writers understand that there's a lot of pressure when you do concerts because when you're filming it then you have you are praying that nobody messes up and that the performance is great and you're premiering a song and you're like no pressure but you're premiering the song you know and so there would be concerts where I would be doing this and then hoping that the video would turn out great so I had this idea that I wanted to kind of have a little bit more control over how my music was going to be premiered online and one of the things that I mentioned earlier that I've been so lucky to have is such incredible collaborators on all different roles but actors especially people that have sung my music have really been such a huge part of the development of my music and so my idea was to bring writers together with incredible Broadway performers incredible vocalists, incredible people and have a couple cameras and shoot these music videos essentially of new musical theater and it's like a sleek and intimate presentation of new material So how was that film? Well I've been this is the first time that I've kind of stepped into the producing role so it's been a little bit of a learning experience I have an incredible videographer and we've been going on this journey together and thankfully Playbo was very supportive of it we the first time I did it I wanted everything to be live I wanted, because I wanted to capture the nuance of performance I didn't want to have any lip syncing at all of the equipment music and that can be very effective depending on what kind of mic and equipment that you have I am still a struggling writer of course as well and so my budget is not necessarily at smashed budget never believed budget but we finally figured out a way to make it so that we still can capture the performances and have the highest quality sound and so we do record it a few times and then we have lab mics we have overhead mics we film it and then they sing and hot off the ivories the destination is at Playbill.com Playbill.com there's already been a couple episodes of some of my songs and then we've also premiered songs from Tyson and Miller and Zoe Sarnak and we've taken a little bit of a hiatus but we're going to premiere a new episode I think hopefully in the next few weeks wonderful so can you set up the situation for the next song which is actually on that series it is this next song is called Great Cool and Eric Michael Krap is going to be singing it with me and this was the first the first video in the series overseas you're under we have a couple of tweets and I of course like to open the field to questions but I was hoping that all the writers up here can we up to questions we've been hearing about new media putting songs out there getting excerpts out there but we may be given a little short drift to books and of course we know and especially at the drama skill how the book, the playwright is the spine of this whole thing once it gets into the theater to many writers and audiences these days it seems that the score is almost secondary to the Zeitgeist the meta of the whole show and yet this movement seems to bode for a little bit of the yin to that yang that you are developing followings based on songs do you care to comment on that and how you feel that this experience will help you when you get into the theater the show has to be performed I thought it was funny because when you said that I was like let's fight more for a panel of well I think that it probably helps you get into the theater that's fine but I think it is interesting the art form will only be pushed in the direction that it should go if people are on both sides of that I think and are developing both sides of that for the maturation of book writers to have their finger on the pulse of what audiences want from the book side I think that I'm not saying that you guys are only in a camp but it's important to be ready with great music and lyrics as well as I mentioned I also wrote operas and I think some critic and some review said it's all well and good to have a good libretto but operas aren't the opera were the best music as we remember not you don't go out singing the libretto but as you say there is some balance Joey I think I think it's very easy to create a serviceable score and then you show us a garden bar with that exactly and so I think that that is something to always keep in mind is that is this music serving the show great how can we go above and beyond so that it is a tuneful score it is a memorable score it is an exciting score this and that because I think when you're creating a show things sometimes a lot of emphasis goes on book because book meets the most work in that moment and the music falls to the side and ultimately you want it to be a marriage of book music and lyrics but you want it all to and everyone to be kind of giving their aching when I saw the fairly recent revival of West Side Story and the audience heard that music live I heard people saying to each other aha this is what theater music sounds like and that score it's just it's beyond beyond that period what are some of your influences theater shows or any of you well I just tweeted today that whenever I sit down to write a song I think what would Leonard Bernstein do what would Sarah Bareilles do and what would the Dr. Luke who is a major pop producer in Brittany and Katy Perry's camp those are my three inspirations as a writer and they're very eclectic but that is what I'm saying just to be on the edge also ask yourself what would Marcel Duchamp do we have a couple of tweets here that we'd like you to answer are you guys making CDs or only digital like physical digital yeah I mean my album comes in both physical and digital format so I guess I can make a quick departure into dance pop land not necessarily we're hoping to bury that in a coming project we stopped doing physical CDs about three years ago my dance pop collaborator and I it's so cost prohibitive to deal with art and constructing and distributing iTunes has really changed the game on how quickly you can get something right now we go from mastering to online sales in two days and it's so that has allowed us to put out five albums and four singles between in rapid succession now they're not going on to sell thousands and thousands of copies but they're selling fairly well I think you've also to plug them a little bit they're called Kaiben Kaibenmusic.com they've become more and more popular in the three years in the two years without physical CDs so it's not like CDs, sales physical CDs were a part of the you're going to put art directors out of business we have another tweet here do you writers knowing that performers will want to use your songs for auditions do you actually think in 1632 excerpts I always chose that I wanted to write like an album of just 1632 bar cut songs I'm totally going through our catalogue right now and trying to see if anything fits into that I don't think we've ever thought in cuts I think we have certainly thought of sort of the use of a stand-alone song but I'll tell you sitting on the other side of that table I never cut somebody off at 16 that's what the assistant casting goes by the time they get to me I hear the whole thing if we talk about a recognizable pop hook or a chorus that lends itself to that so if you go right into the chorus and your chorus is pretty manageable then that's your 16 or 32 cut and I think maybe more so now this movement has gone in the direction of traditional pop which makes it easier I think Joey says something interesting when you were having your discussion about you said the phrase getting caught in the concert thing it's an interesting thing because while we're all talking about how YouTube has held their careers and YouTube and the new concert medium I think it also is a double-edged sword in the sense that that phrase I don't think you'd say that before this whole thing began I think we have to sometimes as writers at least me personally keep your eyes on the endgame and for me that's musicals the interesting thing is that is a trap I feel like and I'm cognizant of that it's something that I think all of us are on our minds to get caught as fine and dandy is to write a song for a 16 or 32 bar cut to write a song for YouTube that hits and gets us traction for sheet music sales in the end I wanted to be about writing a score I wanted to be about writing a show about your question about the book you know books don't really factor into these concerts really at all with very rare exception and there's been a few that I've seen that people do it successfully but you know that's it's a tricky one there's no second best to being in a theater and connecting with the audience but I somehow feel that this experience is going to be very valuable to you when you get there we have a few minutes left why don't we open the floor to questions from our friends here would you like to say your name and stand up? I just wanted people to know that there's another website as well contemporarymusicaltheater.com contemporarymusicaltheater.com yeah I think it's contemporary musicaltheater.com and they also are have an educational component they've gone out to schools all over the country and actually even internationally now so be great I just think writers and performers ought to know about this one as well because it has a little bit of a different target audience go put it together and he's a composer good yes hi my name is Stu Green I know what had come up was that I forget which one I'm sorry that you had put your work out there and people were performing it and you were able to see that work have you and this is to everybody seen your work performed that actually gave you ideas for the next project that you were working on that you wouldn't have had had you not put it out there in the first place do you mean do you mean performances that we were a part of or someone else like doing a like you put your stuff out there you see what people do and how they adapt and how they translate it and how they personalize it and then in seeing that that kind of comes back to kind of refresh your thinking and then maybe give you new ideas that you wouldn't even have thought in either your piece or future work that you're working on I think there's a little bit of a feedback loop you were almost saying that where we've seen a couple people perform the phone call which is from romance and just saying that was an interesting way to interpret that line but meaning in a really great way we had never worked with an actor who delivered the material in that way and it does cause a little bit of a rethink a little bit about the relationships that we've all had with actors who are kind of on their way up in the world as well and it truly is collaborative when you're hearing what's being done in front of you and taking from it so I think that it is in tandem that stuff is coming from online that's inspiring as well I mean the other part of that is that when something is getting traction it is confirmation that perhaps an idea or a story or music is so again if you look at the phone call we it's exploded online it was the first song of ours that just sort of took off and it's from this wacky show about dudes called bromance it sort of moved that show to the front of our priority list because suddenly there were 100,000 hits on the song and you're like whoa give the people what they want so that's not like we put out the song it was a person that we had and he had his own following but it certainly there is a confirmation of that and it has to be about the story which is what you're saying and it has to be about the eventual show but there is something in that it informs where we spend our time because time is finite we're talking about pursuing concerts and how many hours a day do you have to write for something that you hope will be stage bound seven years later as you know this is a totally patience involved process but also keep yourself relevant and you step and be hot and be at Pope's Enrush ready to go how do you balance those worlds but this reaffirmation of oh you're doing something right kind of steers your ship in a direction which will then eventually lead you on a stage we have another tweet when you are looking for a vocalist you lean towards pop or Broadway styles do you differentiate between these depends on the song depends on the song depends on the song depends on what is the difference between a pop sound and a Broadway sound increasingly less I would think particularly training how much American idol the person much better right now we're going to be all like 1-8-6-6 I don't 7 I think that for me you know I like to write both theater songs and pop songs where the line is interesting but for me the most important thing is acting for theater material it's finding someone who can convey the again it's about the story first and foremost in the theatrical setting for the pop setting it may be more about who can just sound the best and who can just convey the emotion I think it's about also for me a performer who can command the song and not let the song command them so a lot in pop music what I found interesting recently was I was reading an interview with a producer and how they would audition a certain track with different singers to see where it just fit where it was just in the pocket like it has nothing to do with the person's technique it just it's that perfect fit and sometimes it just comes down to that you know we have a few more minutes I was interested in knowing about your relationship with theaters and how this might affect that you know theaters the types of theaters, resident theaters they have development departments and naturally they want everybody on their staff to be involved from the inception it's your ideal scenario that someone would hear your stuff and call you in and say do you have a new idea for us or would you rather that something get developed that you have already begun you're good either way fine with that I wouldn't mind somebody being like hey we want to commission you to write something and I'd be like cool great I will great it's the sequel song that's the one that's coming I'm so open to just to writing period and so that's a conversation that would need to be have of course but I would be excited to either A get a phone call from a company to be like we're really interested in you and in your voices or writer and we want to see what this could be or we already having something I think it kind of adds a level of when you know that there's a commission commissioning commissioner involved it kind of adds a little bit of flexibility with the writing part because then you know you're comfortable in that well that's good to know and for theaters and development departments all across the country that may be listening let's not be New York centric about this I'm sure you would go anywhere to develop a new idea I'm sure for you to write them stories that you become passionate about that you want to tell and then projects that you find the passion I have to fall in love with the project in order to really write a show about it but not all the shows that I've fallen in love with have been generated by me I've fallen in love with other people's ideas so I've always interested in talking I'm not necessarily interested in following through it's interesting that you do us I feel like we in some ways are the do-it-yourself generation can go out and do it but in other ways still are at the mercy of where some people want to go I was having a conversation with a pretty well-known director who was leading his own projects and was far off on his own career where he was calling the shots and would call the composer to come in and work for him to get something this is why you must all join the drama to skill if you are not already a member because that is the really wonderful organization formed by playwrights and creators of theaters and composers really look out for our rights it's an organization that is just growing by leaps and bounds and we have a wonderful quarterly that we put out and a website that everyone should tune into and find out about people in your position and what your rights are because the director cannot come in and treat you that way do we have any more questions? just a quick question is there any value to putting this on the viewers on youtube just the music without a video component? I think that there are better services for that than youtube so while we this panel is youtube centered and I think largely this new musical theater thing is youtube centered soundcloud would be when I think audio and finding new audio for upcoming indie artists that's the site that I go to that being said there are still plenty of people who put up just audio tracks with a still photo of the performer or even better really really elaborate lyric presentation if the line is I just woke up on Sunday and it's like I just woke up on Sunday it looks amazing and there are 400 people in the world that know how to do it but it's not that hard or a slide show of kids we have another question oh sorry I think the reason that videos are more popular is again going back to the fact that a lot of this movement is really tied to actors who have fans so I mean like not to call her out but Natalie it is very successful on the internet she's an incredibly talented actress but she also has a very dedicated internet following so like if she's in the video people watch the video for her and for the composer okay we have time for one more question this is our final question very interesting how much does it cost you to put these up on YouTube or rather what sort of orchestration were you planning to use I think normally in concerts we have a band that I mean four or five pieces is normally what it is otherwise you might be recording in a studio in your apartment on garage band or you have a studio connection for my series on Playbill I keep it very bare bones just piano, piano, guitar singer, acoustic I think we have to in a lot of ways keep it basic and pretty folks will use their imagination knowing that there's greater things to come even incredibly established composers these days are saying oh yeah I'm just doing a piece for key space drums and guitar because we can't afford a full stream section and it's not if I want my project to succeed we need to be more contained so and that's not just relevant to us as new musical theater composers it's the establishment that's going in that direction I mean I'd love nothing more than for all of us to have huge 40 cast big boat musicals with 50 person pits but we do have to think about this reality until there comes a time in a way in the right group of investors to put something more time together I think we have to wrap it up now Terry well this has been behind the musical the form formed by Kyle and Michael and we've been talking with them Zach and Joey here at the Dramatist Guild thank you all we're doing it again in February February 11th keep an eye out thank you