 Well I So if you just want to make the conversation. So if you just want to make the conversation. Are you? Yeah. Yes. That's true. Are you? Yes. Are you? Yes. Yes. Yes. Are you? Yes. Yes. Yes. I'm not sure if it's because of the transplants. It's so low. Oh, it's high. Yeah. It's high. It's very high. It's very high. It's very low. Yeah. It's high. It's high. It's high. It's high. It's high. No, it's low. It's high. It's low. And that's very low. What's wrong with this board? It's really low. We'll really film it. To recap and see the videos of every panel, it's just been an incredible week. So thank you all for coming and supporting, and please share and tweet and join the conversation. over here is live tweeting so join in on the conversation by following at Mr. Samuel French and hashtag musicals week we are live streaming right now so hello everybody who's tuning in a couple people had to because of the ray instead so hey guys I'm trying to think up please hold your questions towards the end we have a Q&A and right after this we're so excited it's the first Samuel French produced concert at 54 below right after this at 9 30 and we have a discount code for you it's French 35 it's not too late to buy your tickets buy them now it's an amazing lineup we have it's hosted by Vanda Green Charles Strauss will be there J. Armstrong Johnson Emily Skaggs is performing I had I went to the soundcheck today and it is absolutely incredible I was getting really teary and really excited so the musical theater was really excited so you will not it'll be worth every penny I really enjoyed you guys go it's gonna be great and it's for a great cause just for the drama skill fun so yeah that's it I think that's right yeah we got it so I'm gonna pass off I'm sorry oh please silence your phone yes you can tweet but please don't text and check your Facebook and email and all those things so now I'm gonna pass off to our moderator for the night Kent Nicholson who is the director of musical theater at playwright horizons we're so happy to have him he's also a director and he's teaches all over his he has a very extensive theater background so please check out this by so great so thank you all for being here thank you for tuning in just a quick introduction of our panelists all the way over to my left is Brendan Haldine who is the if I get your title wrong excuse me but director of new works for the National Alliance for musical theater which is a terrific organization that is provide services for writers and producers of musical theater all around the country Michael Friedman author of bloody bloody Andrew Jackson composer bloody bloody Andrew Jackson soul juror loves labor's law many of the civilian shows and a sundry others Jackson gay who is a freelance director and teacher at worked at many places around the country including Yale rep the Geffen and currently working on a project called these paper bullets which will be making its way to the Atlantic right later this season and is a highly anticipated new form of musical theater immediately my left is shaking and a back who is the what is your official title executive director founding artistic director of the musical theater factory which is one of the most exciting new developments on the scene in terms of developing new musicals within the last two years now really and it's doing a tremendous amount of work here in New York and I think we'll be hearing a lot more look forward to hearing more about that too so that's our esteemed colleagues my esteemed colleagues who are here to engage in a conversation about new forms of musical theater and what's going on in the development trenches and how the form is changing and and what that portends for the future Michael I'd actually really like to start with you because you are a composer and writer who is probably most of the people on the panel most engaged in the process of creating from the start these works and from for me you've worked in all kinds of musical types I mean you from from the sort of anarchic punk rock populism of bloody bloody Andrew Jackson to the work of the civilians where often what you're tasked with is taking these interviews and sort of as closely as possible to the original making songs out of this spoken dialogue which is a whole other way of writing and I'm wondering how content informs form when you sit down to write if it's when it's your idea is that different than when it's Steve Cossin the director the civilians idea well I think you always start with you always start with a kernel of an idea I always joke that if you're writing a musical they or any form of musical theater at some point you will come to a horrible dark night of the soul hate yourself and hate your collaborators and the work and performers and hate the artistic director at that point you cannot go back and remember what that kernel was what the thing you thought you were making originally was you are going to be screwed so in a funny way for me it's that it's what is the starting impulse and usually I think the form always grows out of that impulse on bloody bloody Andrew Jackson it was that Alex Timbers I met were discussing and finally very early about 45 minutes after we had met the topic of a new Jackson came up and we both had a very different relationship through school with the topic of that period and we both then sort of came upon well he's kind of like a terrible rock star I sort of the influence of populism is of a kind of rock star who can't sort of up the spotlight and is that person and so as soon as that form happened as that idea happened the form of the show in a weird way grew out of that existing impulse when I was working on Love State was lost obviously the challenge there was how do you turn the five act structure of a Shakespeare comedy into a one act structure of a musical and what are you when you jettisoning what are you adding when you're changing and are you completely ruining Shakespeare in the process and with the civilians I think it always comes with a real impulse when we went to Colorado Springs to hang out in mega churches and talk to the evangelical community they are a very year a very exciting year in Colorado Springs the real impulse was to just figure out what was happening in these communities that we didn't know that much about it first and so that that was sort of the given impulse and the end I think the storytelling is what the impulse to tell the stories of whatever that germinating idea was is sort of what creates the form on some other level of likely interests I was thinking about this and realizing that at some point we sort of created the first 20 minutes of the show which we weirdly called Act one even though the show was a one act 90 minute show we always call the first three minutes and in that 20 minutes we sort of at some point said well what if we squeezed all of Les Mis into 20 minutes what would happen and I look at it and I realized I forgotten that I was looking through old notebooks and found that I was like oh yeah the first 20 minutes are sort of like the entire structure of all three hours of Les Mis in 20 minutes and what happens if you do that and it is sort of like well you do turn tragedy into comedy by in some ways the comedy is just a tragedy that has been compressed so that everything has to happen incredibly a lot of that story is actually tragic I mean yes I mean it is creating a sort of ironic comedy out of the tragedy that Andrew Jackson was responsible I will say one other thing about structure which is almost there is a reason that so many musicals one loves are based on underlying material and I will include historical subjects because at least we knew that Jackson would be born would become president would die those things were true no one but the dates in which with that would happen the people we were going to add he was not going to live on in the 20th century he was not going to actually be born in the 18th century and the case of civilians shows we start off usually with having collected this material which creates the world that will make the show out we're not starting from scratch I find musicals that are made completely from scratch amazing in the fact that they can find a structure because it's so frightening when you make something from scratch musicals at some point you often do find yourself saying well we could cut every song we could just we could rearrange everything we could just start over at that point you're sort of like talking about a dark night of the soul so that would be I think the reason so many wonderful musicals are based on underlying material even if that underlying material is just the suggestion of a structure is because there's so many other things you have to worry about when creating right how much do you worry about conventional musical theater writing techniques in other words I want song or the I do those things concern you as you write when I look at shows that I love and when I look at my own work I find that maybe in all popular forms the best things are shows in which people have attempted to shatter the form and try to go off on new directions whatever what's funny is sooner or later the the basic forms emerge anyway at some point some character in the show is going to sing about what they might desire that's going to happen because people tend to open their mouths to desire something and you weirdly might find that happening the first third of the show because that might be and that's sort of like but it is a funny thing that that might come very late after you said don't be no I want songs don't be no certainly in fortress of solitude we were very braced and sort of probably really annoying at first about how we weren't going to do any of these things then all of a sudden I was like no there's a song for the main character second there's a sort of world-building song that's first and look the two main characters me to sing a big duet that's fourth I think those are all part of some but those have been because the story demanded those things to happen so I think you want to in a funny way we all end up speaking in we all end up doing speaking in forms that are recognizable but it's important sometimes to discover why those forms exist in the first place right white cliches in a funny way a cliche isn't a cliche when you discover falling in love is a cliche but when you fall in love it's like it is a new experience right it reminds me a little bit the acting director and teacher Joe Chaykin talks about stereotypes and cliches a lot and his work saying only by working through the cliche and then breaking through that cliche can you find the truth in some thing so that that sounds a little like the writing process for you I hope so I think well I'm thinking about fortress of solitude specifically and the liner notes section of that book which is a very strange mid set midway through the book the whole book sort of changes tone after it and it's literally the liner notes to an album that the main character has written which talk about one of the other characters in the book and thinking about how you chose to dramatize that and and how does the source material then inform story structure I feel like that there's an interesting choice fortress of solitude it's this enormous very wonderful novel by Jonathan Liefam and when I first read it Daniel Ock and the directors he just told me to read it and said I think it might be something here and I read it and called it back and was like we'd been said this is most moving this novel is unbelievable I love this novel I love this story we can't possibly touch this thing and then I called about 12 hours later having I think desperately read it again and said we have to do this we have to do this and I think it was reading it looking at the second time the novel ruptures rather violently halfway through really a little more than halfway through in a way that I suddenly was like oh well that's an act that's an act break and it starts up again in a completely different way which is these liner notes up until then it's been a kind of if not normal a third person a basic third-person narrative kind of structure and then all of a sudden you start this out the second part of the novel and it begins as liner notes written by the hero of the sort of main character the first part and what was most exciting was it's liner notes to an album of songs that Jonathan's describing but that don't exist which felt like the greatest gift that you could possibly give as a songwriter is to read about a song half a describe and then have to figure out what would that song be and so for me that was sort of the first place where I got really excited about what is it to create music that exists in this fiction but didn't exist in history and just start and that was sort of the that was sort of that hope you sort of find a tone for the rest of the piece it did that at the beginning which was the idea of everyone on Dean Street in a particular moment right a particular day and what all of that sonically how you could create that sonic downstage almost like street scenes those two sort of the liner notes and Dean Street were the two things I had in my head as we started writing Jackson love to turn to you real quick as in a sort of moving from into the creation of these things moving to production and direction which obviously that's your bailiwick and thinking about I also know that you're a director of a lot of new plays as well and wondering if you notice or how you feel about the new play world versus the musical world and are they sort of coming together in a weird way are they intersecting in different ways how are they different colors in the same I guess that's the essence of the I like the name Bailey I think to me they are very similar or they're becoming more and more similar to the way that you approach them or the way that I approach them I should say because kind of what Michael was talking about how you kind of go back to you find yourself going back to just basic things you know it's the same and a new play and in a musical in my experience because you're you're trying to story tell you're trying to figure out what's going on in this what's going on this piece what do people want you know what's at stake what are you trying to say and sometimes not completely but it's sort of irrelevant if it's words or a song you know and that's the way that I look at it when I'm when I'm looking at those things but also it's just harder and harder to to say what something is because you know I feel like so many things I worked on in the last couple of years I have a hard time describing what it is you know I it's not a musical but it's not a play with music necessarily it's not a chamber opera you know you just try out lots of different answers and try to figure out try to land on the thing that it is but writers that that I work with or that I just know and talk to you about this stuff they're all in some ways interested in music and trying to reach people more with whatever they can use you know and also something that just distinguishes what we all do from watching a movie you know so I yeah it's it's I don't even think about musicals as musicals anymore in a weird way like I do but I the other and the other part of me just seems sort of normal for it to be not normal you know again like I said like in the last couple of years I feel that do you find that the writing of musicals approaches plays with the idea of subtext and and the way the dialogue works and that they might be more headed in that direction I really do yeah I mean there of course there are some that don't you know and there's the big you know spectacle look at all the sets you know all that kind of thing which also has its place you know I wish that it maybe wasn't all over the place but you know but there's that but I find that people that are attempting to work on those kind of pieces do tend to be very focused on a real form and a real care and and and all aspects you know of it whether they ever get it to a place where it's up on its feet is very hard to do but yeah how much does form inform your directing so the storytelling form the architecture of something so you know as Michael was talking about fortress of solitude how does that inform your approach to a new musical it informs it a lot because that's another way that it's very similar to working on play straight play a lot of you know new playwriters like for instance you know David Ajmi or Victor Lodato or something like that you know people like that they write even though it's not a musical and it has no music in it it's it's like a spore you know it's and it's really hard great work to do because it's so challenging because you don't have notes you know so you you know actors are not required to you know seeing something that somebody writes so and you can't you know so it's hard to find the music at the piece as it is in somebody's head you know and also allow the actor to you know be bringing themselves and everything that they have to offer to it form the form it you know it causes everything to happen you know because if you are not paying attention to it and you're not embracing it even if you think oh this is I think it would be better the second way or you know you have to embrace it whatever it is you embrace it so that it's possible to find ways that maybe you could break from it but you have to go for it first before you can you know try to do something else you know yeah do you find yourself leaning on on traditional again we have you know since we're talking about new forms musicals I'm sort of interested in the dynamic between what we would think of as a conventional form of musical you know whether that's where I was hammer signer or low or gypsy or whatever and how those operate versus how something like fun home which feels very new and fresh to me or Hamilton but they still share things you find yourself you think in that case that the form is new or the content and I mean well the question is how the form survive and that what's interesting is how much amazing new kinds of content and that's where I was fine I never sure what I say that yeah what I what is a new form I mean Hamilton certainly fits into that in my opinion you know is that it's is that it's a very actually sturdy storytelling technique that's being used it's just the musical form and vocabulary and the idea of this diverse cast that's new new and quotes for that you know but it feels different but that's why I'm interested in that dynamic and how much you find yourself leaning on what what a director you know who's directing gypsy would like the intersection where the songs start you know and how much of that informs your work and how much of that you find you have to leave behind and create your paths you know what a lot of it just I'm sure I have a feeling this is you know an experience that a lot of people have you just know certain things because you've also done you know them in your body you know because you you cared enough to you know know about history and and also from we just experienced doing something over and over again so a lot of things you don't even know that you're leaning on but you lean on them and also you just recognize things without even being able or being required to say it out loud and again some things just work you know some things work and so you are desperate for things that work so you you know you at least explore that and try that and then other things that come come from that that maybe step step away from that that's just that's a fun of making theater and the fun of being in the room but I feel like if you don't have that here you're a solid ground you know under under you those things tend to not really actually be possible you know you have to start someplace and then yeah and problem-solving right and problem-solving and be open you know be very open and not actually let go of all the rules that's what I mean I think you know what they are so you don't actually have to say out loud oh this this I can't do this but you know you just know it and then you let go of it and things happen coming back to Michael's comment about discovering suddenly oh you have in Fortress of Solitude you sort of did follow the rules even despite the fact that you the form sort of the content sort of dictates the form a little bit and because you are writing a musical on some level it's going to be a musical right otherwise something else I guess interesting Shikina you musical theater factory you work with a tremendous amount of artists and check out musical theater factories website it's incredible how many people are moving through there but you also intersect with them at all different points in their writing process and a lot of them are very early so wondering if you know how much the writers that you see who also tend to be early career if that how much they're paying attention to traditional forms are they how much are they wanting to break form or are they concerned about it at all or you know how what sort of the birds eye view as you watch all these people come factory I think there are I think there are a few groups of artists that are gravitating toward the factory there's the founding artists that were the group people that I called up who wants to build a theater in a porn studio those folks a long tradition and that group I think those folks are our dear friends of mine who are really interested in exploring form and shattering convention and trying to make their own intervention into musical theater and then there are sort of a large group of other early career writers who saw what we were doing and wanted to get involved and have since gotten involved who I think just looking at sort of the broad strokes of the kind of work that's been coming through our development programs some of them are in that boat of wanting to want to rock it and then some some folks are really interested in making the next great American musical and I've always tried to program like against my personal bias so that I'm doing work that feels important to me but also doing work that I think has a broad broad out for for different folks to come in and find something that's appealing to them and then there are there are a number of early career young folks young in their in their in their creative projects not all in age who I think are attracted to the the like myth of the great Broadway musical and wanting to capture that in their own work but but don't have yet a sense of structure and form and are really just figuring out how to make their idea live in a way that involves music and storytelling and learning that it's really hard to write a musical which I think people don't maybe because of like the tap shoes and jazz hands people think like oh this is like I just have an idea I want to make a musical out of it and then like well welcome to 10 years so so but then looking specifically at this group of folks who who were the founding artists of the musical theater factory one of the first things that we did well first of all our spaces the black box which opens itself up to new form and then the first thing that we did when we were building the organization was have a discussion about what sort of what sort of obstacles that early career writers are facing in the development of their work and the thing that was the clearest is that nowadays most writers are writing for music stand readings or 54 below concerts and because that's how they get their work out there that's they end up actually censoring their creative brain and outputting material that lives successfully in those formats and there's a whole other aspects of musical theater writing and creation that get left behind choreography the body in general and they're not getting used to working with directors on the director's territory and not getting no that's yeah so so one of the things that we committed to doing was was like our 4 by 15 program which you know about we we nearly monthly invite for writing teams to submit a 15-minute excerpt and then we give them five hours of rehearsal space to stage it with a director and a choreographer if need be and so that before they even have their first act written at times they're going to see some of their work live on its feet and understand how it exists spatially and how characters and story are developed you know by staging and not just at a stand through really good you know words but but then I think beyond the 4 by 15 program we're also we have like a writers group you know we're trying to cultivate I think some voices who both in in structure and content are bringing something unique to the scene what's out there in your musical theater and sometimes it's the quest to buck the form that creates the next great idea sometimes it's the quest to to say my point of view is like Michael Jackson said last night I'm I'm like a downtown point of view with uptown aspirations so why shouldn't we bring this material that's usually relegated to the fringe and try and infiltrate the structure of the great american musical and tell our story so I think both those things are happening how much do you find music in forms that I guess and I guess what I mean and this is sort of coming back to Michael's earlier comment about whether or not it's the content that's new or the form that's new you know so you know I mean I I'm working on right now an afro-cuban musical and a bluegrass musical and a rock musical and you know on and on so you know really to me that the a couple of those musicals are formally very different and a couple of them are formally not different at all it's just the fact that the music is different that's changing is that how much of the music informs what you feel the differences versus the actual structures that's a really good question I like that you ended with what you feel because I do think it's a it's a feel like it's a you can map it out in so many ways but there's a sense about especially in the in the chaos of new work like you have to really trust your intuition a lot of things I'm thinking I don't know where this is coming from but I'm thinking of the dance form butto which is like my my discipline my training before coming into musical theater and there was a huge rift in the butto movement between the two founders where basically one believed the essence came before form and one believed that form could only come from essence and like the butto split into two schools of thought and two practices and the disseminated in that direction slamming angle versus nyu but I think that's a really good question because you know we have folk operas we have rock operas we have electronic fantasia is coming through the factory and so if if if someone's point of entry into a story comes from a place of wanting to make an intervention with a specific kind of sound then I think the world that's built around that is going to be driven by by the music but but at the same time if someone comes into the work of making a musical specifically because there is a specific story they need to tell that represents a person or a community or a culture or a moment in time that has sonic specificity then that story is going to then that's going to dictate how the music has to function and be created I don't know if I answered your question yeah absolutely I think you did sort of chicken or egg you know a little I think so why do you find that to be true Michael you're well it's fine I take us whenever I'm feeling pessimistic I take a long view but the history of music theater a music theater that I love and where the music exists but sadly we do not have the great music so it's it is lost to us we don't know but is actually of this chicken egg amazingness which is that like motes are coming upon opera bufa and then the sinkfield and exploding both those conventions through and yet maintain and in some ways transcending them while living within them of already fighting against every stupid convention of italian opera that he inherited but weirdly by the end still loving to live within that convention in fact defending it to his death even as he's basically exploded it and falls down at the end of his life and then like the beggars opera which is really a parody of humble operas but it actually events an entire new form and then becomes magically the three penny opera when brecht adapts it which then explodes the whole idea of a street opera in a whole new way and sort of events a whole new way that american musicals can steal from that and half of us I mean every musical you love a blast 50 years probably steals from brecht and vile so including vile himself which is only to say that those moments when it when it's like well there's this form that I'm stuck with I want to break it but I have to live within it or I this form but what if I take this and throw it into this form tend to be the two all over and over even beyond the musical the musical as we know it into sort of the longer view of musical theater as it's existed I think that's where sometimes I wish that we could talk in a moment where performance art is so vibrant and explosive in New York in this country and globally in a moment when I think what we used to call classical music is more vibrant certainly in New York that it's been a long time and when young classical composers are much more excited I think about narrative and about narrative forms of music than ever before what makes me kind of bummed is how much there we've let walls break down and when the the popular music scene is so is fragmented by the way that's amazing that it's so easy for people to work in any of those disciplines and have no idea about the others so you get sort of comical moments when like performance art discovers narrative or vice versa when like musical theater people discover dance like as if it's like I didn't know this thing was out there and we all do it and it's a little embarrassing and how we can because that's where the forms that's when when people from this different disciplines meet each other's forms and discover all before you know that every discipline has its own formal rules or its own haptic forms that could use fresh air there's a really interesting collaboration that we're forging with the factory right now which is with a downtown company called poetic theater productions they operate out of wild project and they they work with poets spoken word artists and hip artists who are interested in making theater and playwrights who come from a poetic background and i've seen a bunch of stuff there it's always involves music and storytelling oftentimes dance and they do not consider anything they do their musical theater and then we have a bunch of writers at the musical theater factory who are really interested in you know the the avenue that's been opened up by limo moranda with hip-hop and musical theater and they're they're trying to write rap and bring in a whole difference and spill it to their work so we're we're gonna have like a a mixer basically where we bring poetic theater and musical theater factory together just to be like what could we make using each other's you know points of departure yeah i've been involved in two separate productions one where it was clearly a musical by anybody's definition and the writers did not want to call it a musical because they don't come from that background and i said you wrote a musical don't be a self-loathing musical theater writer you know so call it a musical and another one where they were like i don't know i think this might be a musical and i went i think if you call it a musical the audience you get will not be the audience you want to be in the room right so sometimes it's an interesting dynamic of how you label things and what expectation gets created by that Brent you as a director of New Works for national lines musical theater the alliance produces this fantastic festival every year of new musicals which basically becomes a showcase for producers around the country and you get scads of entries for that from all over the world really and from all level of writer from advanced career to early career so you i feel like you have this incredible bird's-eye view of the industry and of writing in general that's going on from music musicals and i'm wondering if you have noticed any trends over the last seven eight years that you've been in that job yeah absolutely one of the things that let's talk to someone about this a couple weeks ago the when i first started in 2008 there were a lot of musicals based on pre-existing material but more commonly known so mostly well-known books or movies almost all of our movie scripts are gone now and that's just naturally because all the movie houses thanks to wicked and kinky boots and a bunch of other shows have realized hey there's money in our properties so almost every single movie house has their own theatrical division now or their own buy a movie house that has a theatrical division so those have basically gone away which is great because they were pain in the rear end to deal with just from a logistics and license underlying rights standpoint we had many shows we were very excited by we could never get the movie house to release the rights fully they want to release the rights for the next step and then make a decision the next step make a decision so that's actually very happy to get rid of those not because i don't love movie musicals musicals based on movies but it's just it made things open up a little bit a lot of people are moving a lot more towards adaptations of lesser known material or in the public domain so jane austin really popular right now we're heading to a period where some of its gerald's work if not most of it's entering the public domain now so there's a lot of that or random articles people have read short stories are easy to get your hands on is very common for writers who want to work around something this or a structure is already existing like michael said it's part of your work's done for you otherwise it really is very difficult but we're seeing you know we you know we got over 200 we got 223 submissions it's here for eight spots the festival which isn't two weeks and you know the thing that we're not seeing game kind of centered around anymore are kind of big traditional splashy commercial musicals i don't think that's because they don't exist i think it's because those are the shows that tend to get a commercial producer to snatch them up very quickly and early on in the process because it's something that almost any commercial producer can go oh that's just like blank meets blank meets blank had a baby and it's this musical and i know how to sell that and done well it's harder for a commercial producer to want to pick up you know hostage song that we did in 2009 which is very not structured like musical and is about two people helicosage who don't have happy endings at the end uh commercial producers can snatch up it's easy as the toes happen right do you think that do you as a somebody who also has a lot of interface with commercial producers do you think that's changing at all with things like fun home i'm thinking of fun home and natasha pierre i think both sam france properties uh i love you guys you know i think about shows like that or uh the david burn show that was at the point where i realized love um not a sam french property so i couldn't remember the title so do you feel like uh the success of those sort of non-traditionally structured informed shows has changed producers minds at all or absolutely is there's some producers who are able to look at a property and figure out how to uh whack their way through weeds and create a new path for it and there's brilliant producers who do that there are a lot of producers who need someone to do that for them and honestly that extends to regional theaters so sure that extends to most people in the field a lot of them need someone to whack their way to be like oh i will follow the men this path and i will do the men this thing with it but there are shows you know i love our show come from away with first time i read it i was like this is amazing if someone were saying to me that commercial tonic award winning for commercial producers would pick it up within a month of the festival and it will have a two to the before theater a pre-development track opens up in november at seattle rep i'd have been like seriously this is a commercial and now i'm like of course it is yeah because someone was the people who picked it up junkyard dog productions producers in that fist are smart and they knew how to take that show and do something different with it right so it just kind of depends there's shows of ours that i'm always you know the sandman which is a very unique german style scary sort of opera how richard and robert are probably watching this is going to kill me for not being a right but it's a very different style that has commercial producers so i find that they're also picking up the slightly otter properties because there's something about being unique and doing something new with a new property that picking up something that's you know you can go oh that will go to this well known regional and this one known regional and i know it will sell to this main Broadway audience i think for law them there's a sense of success to take a fun home or to take a hamilton basically not that well it's funny there's three shows you mentioned though uh i think you said fun home uh natasha pierre and hairless love all three required specifically more actually specifically a very successful recent shows required specifically creative producing at almost every stage and hairless love went to i remember went up to williams town but actually performed at mass mocha in a very interesting collaboration between a museum and a theater company and then it was obviously in a crazed amazing production but that was completely environmental and required and then when it became a commercial production required them to really think that through a fun home transformed from confusingly a proscenium show when it was downtown to a show in the round but it moved uptown which is not historically what you think of happening it really required everyone to reconceive the production from the ground up and the producers to support that and uh natasha pierre obviously is well known for the complication of its production and how much that informed the show doing it at its end i think anyone who makes musicals knows that in a funny way whether it is a and we're all very lucky what happens but whether it's not for profit or a for-profit or actually a festival situation um that it is a creativity of the producers as much as of the writers and obviously the directors who often are the handmaid of that creativity between writers and producers it's it's interesting too i i often wonder if um and this is something that i feel like i learned in watching spring awakening from well before it was even supposed to happen at the round about initially and then uh september 11 happened and they said we cannot do the show uh maybe rightly so but um but watching it go from a developmental piece and everybody's sort of scratching their head and going there is no way this will ever be a commercial project to and ending up in the hands of tom bolson ira pitleman who were like it's absolutely a commercial project and then worked for seven years trying to make it a commercial project and then it became a commercial project and then nobody knew it was a commercial project until suddenly it was one and when it was a commercial success then of course it was a commercial success we all moved all the time uh you know that we don't know what's commercial until it's commercial or commercialized in a way well i said tom and ira didn't make a commercial no they figured out how to sell it to theaters and to investors and the audiences and i doubt they ever you know took aside the writers and said oh we're going to change this and here are tattoos right you know they figured out a way to to find their own path to develop the show which is very brave all the producers or theaters would possibly said right you know well we can't have intermission people won't come back so now let's squish it down to 90 minutes and although i think about yeah i think about bloody bloody for example on this sort of or actually let's go back to fortress because that's the one where you specifically said we're going to break the rules you know and but then how much did say daniel have say in that i mean i think about spring awakening with michael mayor who directed the original production had a huge influence on the final shape of that i have never worked this is my dirty little secret i've never worked on a show ever ever ever ever ever a director was not involved from the first day so i don't actually know i just don't know how that works because back to my opening point which was i don't know how you go up dark and it's all in words and what you will definitely want to do is hire your director because it must be their fault and what's really nice is when said director is so a part of it partly because at some point your director will direct it badly and you'll have a second preview and be like oh my gosh all of act one is in a stage that does not mean they're not a great director it means they tried something and what most of the directors are the ones who actually are like we're restaging all of act one tomorrow and i assume that happened and it's an amazing thing to watch and actually it's sort of depressing because you watch and go like oh you've solved all my storytelling it's not like i i have no power here you're the genius here but that to me is that it's nice to know that the director is part of the storytelling through day one and is thinking about how the storytelling will be on stage as you write so it's asking questions about how do i stage the scene as part of the process as opposed to looking at your finished script and asking that question at which point you say i we can't work together i don't have it that's just how i jackson as a director how how when you're negotiating that process how where are you of it to me it's the writer does that get confusing uh how you negotiate those conversations it gets very confusing but in a great way you know it's like what michael's saying um i mean i just did that on on these paper bullets in la saw the an entire chunk of it i mean a lot of it and it was horrible and and the next day i came in and redid the entire thing and immediately things started working you know but uh the writer of that case uh ron johns he he helped me you know do that and then i also you know get in his business you know what i mean just because at a certain point um it's a brand new thing and so if you trust the people that you're working with um you're fine trying to figure it out together honestly i mean nobody wants exactly the same thing you know in a good collaboration so um i know that musicals can be baby groups among these people who hate each other and never speak again but i don't i actually i believe that's from a day when musicals took less time to develop yeah every you can't work in five years for people that you just buy right now i mean maybe for another month but there's not it's actually not enough money in the world but i think that there are also legendary stories of writing teams that continue to write together that who just did not like each other that much well it's like michael's saying like watching somebody that he's working with do some not great work on something and not have it be personal at all just be like oh they did that tomorrow they're gonna you know there's a trust thing um that goes both ways too so that you know you're you're you trust you trust right uh i think we're at a point where we should open it up to questions could inevitably go to a little bit about development because you know about new forms happen you're not about how those new forms are created yeah i have a question for jackson um with these favorite bullets i haven't seen it so uh this is an obvious question listen to spilling your arms strong uh and with american idiots that was music from the album this is new songs correct yes do you feel like that has been different than you imagine traditional musical theater conversation to be as you're developing those new songs how is the process working is he just sends you songs in a vacuum like what is the relationship there um it is um it's what i imagined it would be because it calls the it calls for a specific thing um it's it's inspired by the Beatles and so um i there's a certain sound that he's you know really captured very well um he does just send things you know um but he's also been with us you know and actually it's been uh it's been a great experience in the sense that i didn't um he maybe would hate me saying this but i didn't expect him to love theater as much as he does you know what i mean so he's very he he really gets into it you know he has it's a certain joy joyful uh thing for him um and a great thing watching him try to uh help us figure out what we need for just good old storytelling you know something that just just pushes it that action forward you know i mean that's the thing it's that that's that's what he talks about just like we would all talk you know i think that's probably why he's good at what he does because he also goes back to the basic things and doesn't actually worry about am i trying to do something new or not you know he's back with us you know so but this one's primarily diegetic in that meaning that they're they are performances because it's a story of a band essentially right yeah for the most part they are the band performing uh but then um there are a few songs uh the last songs and the piece are character action driven uh so it kind of um well it breaks out of the performance into hero slash higgy on our show please come out of the bathroom i'm so sorry i called you a whore battle battle so um so i guess it changes in the middle of it yeah other question guess what's the first musical that each of y'all saw it was either i either seen i don't know which came first but it was either the music man or by by bernie at a dinner theater my grandparents took me to when i was like four i think it was annie but i might be wrong or peter pan it probably was peter pan on a some tour of peter pan you know for me it was either annie or music band and i was in the music man but i don't remember which came first but i went to see the original annie on broadway or what was in the music man as a kid singing belzberger wagon no i didn't i didn't get cast in that moment but the albums in a weird way i know more i think that's true of just about anybody that it was listening which is an interesting and tricky way to talk about that i learned about musicals from the albums which is interesting because then at some point you confront books which are these weird sometimes you see a musical and i'm shocked by what it actually is that you never you you only know this hour of it from the album uh and so that is a it is a very different thing to first meet a musical on stage than to listen to it and discover that actually there's only places where people talk that there are characters you've never known more in the show because they do not say yeah it's very disconcerting my first show i saw a bunch of shows at a local theater in minnesota called the long old long theater yeah the bunch like chill like stair versions no white um i grew up seeing those but my first show i to remember was lay miss which no joke my mother brought me to because my sister got the flu and decided why not bring this one and that was a horrible idea because look at me now i think um i didn't grow up um watching or seeing musicals or theater really for that for that matter um but i think i was the wizard of us i'm pretty sure like a musical version of um yeah taxon one of the things you talked about earlier was talking about how the work that we do now is inherent to the form itself to the theater and what makes the theater different than other forms of expression in our world today when we have a world in our pocket we can get on our netflix q can see who plus we can watch a youtube video we can see as harris broke the live stream so as you're all exploring what it means to mark on a new form in the theater how are you finding people are embracing the definition of what a theater experience is versus an experience that has a hybrid or that is meant to be delivered through another medium i can speak to that by virtue of the fact that our theater is like a 60 seat black box um one of the things that's really huge for the artists working at the factory is is the issue of intimacy uh and um and actually one of the new forms that i think is really uh coming out of this like the the natural progression from the music standard reading and concert series is this new immersive song cycle phenomenon that is uh like we did boys who tricked me um and zoe said that was by ben bum and then like uh zoe sarnach the years between uh and um there's this idea to like actually do theater that involves eye contact like being this close with people and saying we're i'm telling a story i'm playing a character but i'm also a person that's right here with you and i think that is a direct response a theatrical response to the distance that we feel culturally with all our social media and other forms of entertainment they're carrying him brian lotterman are also tuning uh tales from a bad year which they wrote just as a song cycle into a massive immersive house party yeah house party it's huge just rooms and you go it's like sleep no more but not with songs songs yeah and i said part of that i'm starting out in a conversation with people where they talk about sleep no more as a reference and that tasha pierre as a reference i think is the same thing for a lot of writers to have a grave to be brave enough to do something that's different they need someone they need to be able to compare it to something or go oh well work because natasha pierre did this or fun home was able to do it around um but i think one of the bigger challenges going down the line is that the vast majority theaters in this country overseeing us so future life is like great natasha pierre right now lives in a tent it's awesome to attend but the future of life is really going to be judged when people start putting on percenia and can't have percenia sure certainly once it starts getting licensed it's interesting though to me because what i what i sort of notice as a underpinning of all of this is that the necessity of an off-broadway scene right because there is no off-broadway musical theater scene anymore we've been moaning about it for years that it's simply too expensive it doesn't make economic sense anymore so shows that should never go to Broadway suddenly have nowhere to go maybe some regional theaters can do them and but then how do they have a continued life and i think this is one of the things that writers are responding to is they're suddenly going oh but if we don't do it in a traditional space and we call it something else then we suddenly have created a musical theatrical experience that can exist somewhere that doesn't need all the bells and whistles that are perceived as dictates which i think is really a large part of what natasha pierre created was a sense of oh you can do that and so then suddenly you can start to think about creating shows for alternative spaces which i think is actually important i mean there's another model that is which is i mean it's one person's name is jason robin brown which is to say the two of most produced musicals in america are shows that have been our last five years and songs for the world which is to say shows that have had near productions and good good ones but where their lives were weirdly not necessarily based on those they did not go to broad let's put it simply they did not go and therefore their lives actually now are entirely based on their lives now that they are they are now self-generating in a way that's very interesting to look at and it's the question of i think that's where there is a question of glory which is that you want to win awards you want to be on the broad way you want to many things that you'd like to happen and there's a question of i mean weirdly in the age of social media you go to college campuses or high schools and theater is so alive i i mean i grew up in america and theater there was not this much theater being done so there is so much live theater with live humans with live people watching those live humans it's more than ever ever ever before on campuses and at high schools and things like that so the question of i mean the problem is there's a question of like the lord theater scene there's the question of the new york theater scene it's a question of broadway and the off-road way scene all those are important but there's an entire other level of culture off of which you can actually make quite a lot of money if we're actually worrying about whether the creator is going to make money but that is not thought of which is called everything else correct it's all those i mean the same french nose that's the basically which is called licensing right um and the interesting thing is that question of how to how to maybe make works that aren't going to make you win you a tony award or a pollitzer or run on broadway but that are going to be i mean songs for songs for new world are in the culture more than almost any show currently playing on broadway if you just mean that an entire generation has grown up knowing those songs right and last five years as well anyone who goes to auditions knows that young men are in a position with those songs and so they love those songs and those songs are in some ways more meaningful and those shows are then a lot of the things that we're making in new york for a very specific scene and there is a translation to proscenium stage and ability for some of those like i've seen you know last five years done on college campuses in very strange places and and also you know in a traditional off broadway stage at second stage so you know there's a mutability to those forms that allow it to exist and i i think because of the absence of an off-roadway scene where writers can make a living and can sort of have that spotlight shown on them but they're not appropriate broadway shows because they're too small too intimate too weird headway is another perfect example of that which finally made it to broadway but didn't depend it's an existence and depend on that you know thinking outside the box of what venue is and what the experience of the audience has become important to understanding that just for context Natasha Piel which was done environmentally in a tent is now having another life at ART in a proscenium and we'll come back to broadway you're from now in a proscenium and i imagine fun home which started in a proscenium and now is in the round when it does get licensed or when it goes out on tour we'll probably go back to the proscenium yeah and actually it's probably right for them that they've experienced in the proscenium so they have some no i think having i mean that's the exciting thing about it shows that can exist in different i mean that don't have to be it turns out Oklahoma is great as we've heard this summer in an environmental lab it also you know Oklahoma is quite great do you need the corn apparently other questions yeah so it occurred to me that you had two conversations about new forms and having to talk about technology at all which seems strange for a conversation about innovation well we're all luddites in the theaters well we are we're not like i think the way that like promises promises didn't exist until the mixing board existed yeah and like you can't do a miz in a world without microphones and i'm wondering like you know what are the technologies that are enabling us to create new forms today that aren't the like oh we're going to do projections and have tweets on the screen but like things are actually like you know i mean yes maybe that but like but things that are like maybe a little more native to the theatrical experience that i i know of one one writer in particular who's made this bit of a mission which is Duncan Sheik actually because Duncan comes from a music background and a touring background not a musical theater background necessarily although he's embraced that whole art of late but the thing that always and continues to drive him crazy is the sound in theaters is generally very bad if you're approaching it from a concert aesthetic yeah right so he has chosen to start creating scores using ableton live and electronic looping materials because battle of it's an instrument you know it really is a skill and you have an instrumental skill to be able to create those and so using people running those the new sound technology that exists allows him a lot more control over how it's going to finally sound when it's in the theater. American Psycho is an example of that so you'll be seeing it very shortly but but most of the scores there's a piece in the national master musical theater festival this year called Noir which also he does that in and it's a very conscious effort of mixing live instrumentation with these electronic instruments for lack of a better word right now because i don't think we have a word for them really but it helps him control the sound and create the sounds he wants to have the audience here within the context of the new book so that's one way for sure. There's also Val Vagoda from Groove and Lillian from the City of U.A. since right in 12 has a one woman show two one one one one one one one one show two person one one one show two people in it that are both her looping singing and playing all instruments herself which is something she's really started exploring which is amazing and inspiring and you kind of part of the show is watching her do it all herself and it's truly just her time. It's either currently playing in Boston or just finished in Boston at Art Emerson, Ernest Jekyll Taros man. Grace McLean is a great artist doing a lot of the work. True that's true. At the factory this is maybe not more in terms of development rather than production but we're really excited about a new program that we've we've just been gifted 15 tablets which has allowed us to have completely paperless development processes which if you've ever worked on a new musical you know you spend hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars and a lot of trees to going through drafts and new pages and so we were piloting this through there's a musical that we were developing called Junk that was a a lot of ways about consumer excess and we started trying to do this paperless development process and after doing two full 20-hour reading processes where not a page was printed we wrote a proposal and got funding to get 15 tablets so we're working with our writers it's tricky and they're not like glamorous tablets so they're not like we don't have all have you know ipads so but but it's really incredible the kind of things you can do in terms of notating on a score if you're an actor and you wanted to make notes on your music or if there's changes made just having a PDF like instantly reinserted and also the freedom it opens up you can't do this if you're doing equity reading because there's no staging allowed and you have to have books in hand but when you just are doing a workshop and you don't have enough time to get off book but you can just hold a little tablet that like scrolls rather than a clumsy binder it opens up a lot of room for exploration can i redefine technology or at least just say one thing that happens in the theater that is i'll call progressive even like really old progressive which is just called i especially when you work on Broadway but in any new theater i get to work with three maybe four proud unions that are actually for all i can play about them and for all the problems they may have and their members may complain about are succeeding and doing their jobs really well and keeping people employed which in this country is so unbelievable uh and not to be sniffed at i actually uh i get very concerned when writers and directors are among the worst at wishing that everything would just be easier and faster which generally means that people would work more for less and i think the fact is theater is incredibly good at one of the great things in new york is that theater the theater industry is unbelievably good at employing humans for salaries that aren't upholding and that is a really it's a thing that we forget it makes art but also how prince has one of those people things when asked what he's proudest of it his whole life is that the fan of the opera has employed blank people for blank years and he had he had the number in his head because it really doesn't that in the end the thing he is proudest of is that he directed and produced a show that has been responsible for the kind of employment at the levels of employment that you think of like a large company and that is and all union members who all in that in that theater get along and have worked together for years and years and years and then that as we speak of technology i think as we speak of progress the danger is that we forget that part of it which is the human beings make this yeah and then when you make a musical especially it's not just the you may write it and you may produce it and you may direct it but there are even on the smallest musicals 100 people who are keeping that thing though yeah i think that you know when i was talking about dunkin one of the important things to understand about the way he's using this technology is he's using it as an instrument yes right and so it's not meant to replace anybody it's actually meant to be a musician no i think dunkin has been i think that's what's exciting is as how the technology and the unions can learn to accept each other and understand each other's issues and move forward that way rather than thinking of technology as always being disruptive i think we like to think of it that way which generally means job cutting great amazing i'm sorry we have to end here we want to keep the conversation going thank you so much to our panelists and our moderators all at 54 below