 That was landing day from the concert version of a new rock opera called one-way trip to Mars that was performed in Bath this fall 2016 and has been reworked into a full-length musical Rock opera that will be performed at the Waterville Opera House this August August 24th through 27th With a New York cast and I have here with me Peter Alexander and Johanna Harnes Harkness who is who are the composers of this this Fantastic new musical that's gotten the attention of some celebrities at the Space Center Well, NASA knows about it Boeing and Lockheed Wow, and all these folks know about it because we went down and performed some of the songs for a big conference Wow on the Humans to Mars conference, so it's it's really become something very big with a New York cast and at the Waterville Opera House How did this idea get started? I? Went out and sat down at the piano and wrote the first song which is called it catches up to you But the reason I got inspired to write that song was because we've been hearing about the Mars one mission to send people to Mars, and I started thinking about The adventure of that how exciting it would be to be the one going to Mars, and then I started thinking Wait a second people all over the world are signing up to go and Leaving their families and their children and their spouses, and I started to think of how it would be if you were the one left behind and I had a lot of emotion around that and so that's where I started with that perspective of a woman being left behind Anyone mentioned just before that it led to the creation of the last song Yes, and that is the this and the very last song is called it catches up to you and That song inspired the rest and Peter then got excited about the idea and started writing Songs from the perspective of the the male perspective of using agency to go on this adventure And I started writing from the female perspective of wait a second But the cat it catches up with you was the original song that started this whole thing wrong, right? Did you like to play a little better? So so now you you said that you started thinking about this because it's a very personal You know some kind of connection to this whole idea of going off to Mars So what was it like to write a musical where you have some of your own feelings? You're the reality part of it and then science fiction part of it blending those two together Well, we actually explored the science fiction part and decided to jettison science fiction We we actually when we first started thinking about the rock opera We thought it can be a love story this beyond time and face space you'll be cryogenically frozen And you know they'll meet up some centuries later and like then we decided no, that's too complicated Let's make it reality-based and there are real plans. NASA has plans to send people to Mars in 2033 Elon Musk with his SpaceX is trying to get people to Mars a lot sooner than that I mean these are real things that are happening in our society in our culture So we thought let's write about the first mission where the person is set up to set up the infrastructure but he's not going to be coming back and The story developed from there and went through a lot of different iterations and a lot of different plot ideas and we sort of narrowed it down to something that actually could Really truly happen It's a little bit of fantasy involved in it too because we we have one character who is a flamenco dancer and she is the personification of Mars and So the idea was that she is this passionate fiery character who seduces Mars out to Mars and Later when we talked to about our director. He did the same Pierre he really took our narrative and Created a book so that it became musical theater and It changed it from a concert with a story to Having a script and really being a rock opera. No, I'm curious when when you did do the concert version Was there an intention to take it further or was that just your right your concept right from the beginning and then not then you You grew it into a rock stage version We kind of hope it would go further but the standing ovations at the end of each performance in this is that we probably should but at that point it was It was a little bit narrow in terms of character development. We there was a lot of gaps in The the relationship between the two principal characters. There were other characters who had not yet been developed and That's when Donna St. Pierre came in and joined us He helped us develop a whole lot of new Material we actually started off with 18 songs and now the rock opera has 28 songs All original material and those songs Really dealt deeply into Four principal characters plus the character of Mars, which is a principal character And he helped us develop the idea of what Mars could actually be at first It was Johan bringing in every imaginable cool thing. We possibly got on the stage All kinds of stuff we had different people come in to see different parts Tim Gold who's pretty well known in the back area. He has a video store out there and very dynamic That guy came in and he sang one song named Johnson singing the other but it When we actually sat down with Dennis we crafted the thing into much more cohesive characters and much more cohesive in Relationships made a lot more sense. He helped us The process of writing the whole thing was very inspired we were really just having fun and Following our hearts While we're writing and so it wasn't it took a long time to develop it all but it flowed And for an example Johan and I were watching after she wrote this the first song which We didn't know it was going to be a rock opera. We were watching we're listening to something some astronauts speaking about their experiences in space and that Literally, I'd started writing down the lyrics and those became the lyrics of the next song and that we wrote It's not the next song in the rock opera in terms of the progression of the songs But it's the next song we wrote and again it happened the way I came up with this idea And it's it's a rock-and-roll group strong rock-and-roll song and it's all based on the lyrics of These astronauts who had these cosmic experiences knowing stepping out onto the moon Being in space looking around feeling like we're all stardust and there are such poetic words I didn't make them up. We created a little bit of connecting tissue. Oh, we could play it right now Yeah When I looked outside my window, I was floating there in space Earth was small and lapis blue I felt so full of grace There are shooting stars and a rose dancing lights The cities in my distant world I Saw there's nothing random every planet's in its place all the trouble in that natural world Is from the human race But there's challenge and confusion as I wonder what to say To share this revelation Maybe friends will come to this So that that was great that we got that from the chocolate church Concert version that we just heard space journey now my question is You described how that you came up with the last song first And then you just played a riff from a song that you know inspired you but you had the storyline already Made out how did you then you know really develop the story with the songs when there was a writing process to the intersecting trajectories these two two people and Now there's a lot more people involved in that but as with Dennis's help We've made it a lot more complex and there's a lot more people that you can identify with But we wanted to take it from There's a human development story the palo goes from being kind of full of himself He's like the top gun and he becomes very humble and very and the first start of that is in space journey When he starts experiencing the grandeur of the universe as your honor was just saying and he's that like oh my god This is such an amazing place, and then he realizes all the troubles back on earth were are caused by the human race so He goes and eventually he gets out when he lands on Mars, and he's all there by himself It's it's a pretty scary and lonely experience ultimately for him, and then communication links go down meanwhile Cassandra back on earth is becoming more and more empowered Yeah, oh, but we wanted to catch this one song Where Cassandra and her best friend are talking about what it was like when he took off because you know They can see the face of the astronaut is He's going up So they do a song about seeing his face and her reaction to it Yeah, this is a song about when he's about to take off or taking off and and the Cassandra is talking. We'll just play a little part of it. Okay Yes So that's sort of like a song that's reflective of what's going on Right in there, but then you have to develop the since the rock opera There's no actual just spoken words you have to develop the plot with music And do you have an example of a song that like sort of advances the plot of the Send-off is a really good it's a pivotal song in the rock opera where The head of the space agency has made the decision that Somebody has to go to join Palo on Mars because all the systems on earth are breaking down. There's nuclear terrorism going on Global warming is causing catastrophic breakdown of all fiction, of course They some fiction. We'll see So he decides to send Cassandra and in that song he Describes what's happening on earth. There's fighting now in every country people dying in the streets missiles bombs There is no more hope for peace We must send someone to Mars to join our captain there in space Basically, it's like this is our maybe our chance to save the human race. It's that critical And when he chooses Cassandra, she's sent off to space So that's sort of the pivotal song in the in the whole thing where it tells a lot of the story in that one song it sounds very You know has to be very energetic to carry all of that now You have us you ever sort of a small cast with this don't you you have to convey like this whole Huge thing with this world crisis with a small cast. How do you do that? There'll be 12 people on stage and we'll have a 11-piece orchestra in the pit and there's What's really cool about this show and Dennis can maybe talk about this later we Dennis and Chad Lefebvre and Johanna and I Worked together to create a concept as a cinematic concept So it's it's not just the actors on stage and it's not static sets There's cinema going on behind us So when when Paolo is flying through space the audience is going through space too with a cinematic thing going on on this screen a Huge screen is not a little thing. It's like this is the theater. I don't like this little thing Some of these songs developed in very unusual ways. Some of them just came to us They were like boom we woke up in the morning or Johanna won't walked out into the studio and sat down and played and all of a sudden There was a song I think it's a lot more effortless for Johanna some of the songs were that I wrote were from Musical themes that I have been working on in some cases for years and that song send-off that I was just talking about I really years ago as a sort of a teenage love song Ridiculous, you know Like a who kind of rock and roll song and then Then I went when the Ukraine crisis happened when you know, what's the what's his name? The Russian favoring president of Ukraine was being ousted. I changed the song I took that song and turned it into a thing we called central city Let's go down to the central city Let's go down to the central city People lying in the streets and it was all about the forces of democracy coming up Well, that's awfully political But then when we started writing this rock opera that we were so the music was so much fun to play and it had such an energy to it That then we transformed it into a version of send-off And the version that was played at the chocolate church actually then morphed again So now we that song has gone through four complete iterations four different lives and rare most of them are fairly new but this one had a shelf life multiple shelves So at the very end of the first act is send off but just before that is one of our characters is Madeleine and We have a song called night blooming serious and it's about It's a metaphor but the night blooming series is a flower that blooms once a year and it starts at night about midnight and it opens up and Then it goes back down and it dies by morning and so it's a bittersweet It's the most intoxicating flower too. We were sitting on a porch once with several of them And we were just like all on catnip. It was it was a really Amazing smile and and this flower just kind of stuck in my mind And I sat down one night and this song came and then we met our Madeleine Who is Nicole? Palmer and so I'd like her to come up and sing night blooming serious and our Amazing accompanist who's a great long-term friend of Nicole Ray Bailey who is also our music director Who's also our music director? so we're here with with Dennis St. Pierre who is the Director of this musical and I just want to start off by asking you how you got started and what interest you in getting involved with This rock opera. It's kind of funny Peter Johanna and I in the past had worked on a human trafficking Artist confront trafficking event and I had approached them to perform in it and then for two years We hadn't really spoken they had mentioned something to me when we were doing this that oh, we're working on this new rock opera And I'm like, oh, yeah, I'm out of the industry right now. I don't want anything to do with this right now and then all of a sudden two years later we're on the street and Bath and Cassandra Well, I now call it Cassandra. I can't help it, Johanna But every time I Johanna walks up to me. She goes everybody's been telling us we should be talking to you and I'm like Well, we did the rock opera concert we're doing this rock opera and rock opera concert and It just went really incredible, but we want to go a little further with it and people are saying that we should talk to you and I Was game. I was unemployed Not that this is paying me anything Not yet, but it will I I'm confident on that And I was I needed something to fill my soul again I had been in the industry for over 20 years as an actor as well as Professional singer and I've directed and so forth in New York and LA, but I got burnt out But that passion never left me and my soul just needed it again and that's just they happen to come up to me at just the right time and Help me find my way back and I can't express how grateful I am to them for that But they were really open to to having me come and check it out So I had a chance to watch the concert or he did get I didn't see the concert live I got to see it later. I have a five-year-old. So it's kind of hard at the time he was four-year-old It's kind of hard to get out at night So I watched the video of it and Immediately, I knew there was something there It reminded me of like Jethro Tells aqualung, you know or Or a piece like that that's you know or meatloaves bad out of hell not that the music was similar But the concept was there. It was very similar to like a Concept album, which is what a lot of people think is rock opera. So it was already right there And there was a thin narrative not not not fully developed at all yet Only really two characters and we really didn't get to know them a lot But there was a lot already there There was the the lyrics of the songs had a great deal of passion Incredibly good storytelling within the in the lyrics and the whole concept of a rock opera based upon The journey to Mars really just hit me, you know with everything that's going on and Send-off was one of those songs that really put me over the edge and so did space journey and Then when she sang you should have seen her face was another one So there are these there are very strong elements there already written into it And I could easily see how this could be developed into a full rock opera where we developed the characters we create a real narrative we bring more characters into it so that we have more relationships and Lot not to make it a rock musical theater piece Which a lot of people also wonder is that with this as well musical theater still has script still has lines What makes this truly a rock opera when we develop it for the stage is that it's all some There are no Spoken words at all. It's all sung but it's developed with the same kind of ideas as an actual opera has So the same kind of narrative is put in there Ray could even attest to more of this So it just has to have more storytelling. We have to know who these people were We have to get a sense of who their past was their relationships with each other as well as with other people and And I was excited that they were willing to Listen to me a little bit and then write eight new songs. How was it for you to who had worked, you know You're working so close together and you're inviting somebody else into the process How was the how did that change the dynamics of your creative process? It was really What we needed to create some cohesiveness we are songwriters But we are not actors and we are not that we certainly had never done of any musical theater or We thought we had a rock opera, but it it was really a concert of rock songs that told a little bit of a story So what we seriously needed was Somebody in the business who was a professional who's done three million, you know tours of Les Mis as John Valjean and Who could bring that sensibility and that expertise To what we already had so for us it was a dream come true really It made it made our dream realized and it was Extremely welcomed and a total gift We have Three Taipei personalities right here and a whole bunch more in our circle. So it has taken a little negotiating, but We all have a shared vision and we have enormous respect for each other's talents and abilities and experience and Dennis never tried to take it away from us and say you know is his he was always very Giving and generous in his appraisal of what we had done and we feel the same way about what he brings to it and Dennis has such a vast Experience and connections in the industry We had no idea how to do auditions for example, and he helped us set up auditions in New York and Nicole was very instrumental in that too and we had over 200 people apply And we we chose what 50 or 70 of them and actually met with them in New York City and The people that we chose Every single one of them are so good that when they sang our songs It literally brought tears to our eyes. It was so moving and so incredible and Everybody Nicole who is actually living in Maine now. She's one of the only people from Maine is actually in the Very important Mars. Yes, but every single person in the cast has that charismatic Emotional power in the way they present themselves So it seems like every addition of a person here added to this and sort of the synergy that you're talking about The creativity coming through you not actually and Dennis has been the ringleader in all of this Oh, I'm putting all these incredible people together. He brought Chad Lefebvre in to help us Manifest the cinematic aspect of this show So Yeah, so you were talking earlier about The songs in the show that needed to fill some spaces Well, a lot of the problem a lot of the issues that we were facing is we didn't get enough Knowledge about the characters themselves in their past or their own self narrative And their relationships So we've been creating a lot of new little snippets and actually taking some other things back From other songs and pulling them and for example the first song that Johanna wrote for the show is now actually two new songs We've broken in apart and there are two new songs out of that They still hold true to their original Ideas and and but they're conceptually now different realized differently And one of the songs that we found for Cassandra was when she's up in space by herself Because now we we took her from we didn't really know why Cassandra was chosen to go to Mars as well We knew she was Paolo's wife, but that was it in the original version now. She's actually an astronaut as well So we know right off the bat. She's an astronaut just like Paolo is and that she's probably going to be on another mission Following because there are many missions that are gonna happen. Paolo just happens to be the first one to be going So now we've developed all that into the show so now when she's up in space all Hell is breaking loose on earth and The song you just heard Nicole sing nightbloom and serious Is is all about the fact that we have one little bit of life to live And to live it to the fullest in that little moment, right? But at the same time, we're also given chances and opportunities to do something greater than ourselves right and This song is about that moment of fully realizing That there's something greater than herself and it's I am humanity and I I'm hoping that Johanna will sing it with Nicole and Ray will play it with Peter Continues So can you talk a little bit about the cast I mean we've heard about this New York cast who do you have playing the leads? Well, our female lead her name is Fantine check her out. She's actually fantastic I would say that she's in my opinion possibly the next Beyonce She's a star in Europe and in the Dominican Republic. She's actually both Russian and Dominican Dominican, right and grew up in Australia and she grew up in Australia But she's amazing you could actually seriously check her out on her own website Fantine Faint any music calm calm. Yeah, and She'll be playing the role of Cassandra and then for our role of Paolo We have a gentleman by the name of Pepe And he's originally from Spain and what's really funny about this is Yeah Johanna originally thought of this role as being a Spanish person, right and We were in the audition process and Nicole and and Johanna and I were really upset because we weren't getting a lot of male Submissions that we were really feeling like that was a Paolo You know, we got a lot of them that were really kind of humorous a lot of very humorous things And we we finally went well, we got to get more male submissions. So maybe we maybe it's too Hispanic of a name We got to change it and we actually changed the name to Cruz But it actually fits Paolo Cruz works as this whole name So we thought that would help us get more people but the way we actually found him is pretty funny It's from one of the cast members that we cast in the show She we basically said if you guys know anybody that knows a guy who can really sing and act and he's Pretty good-looking that could look like an astronaut Have him give us a ring and the next day one of the girls in the cast said I Know somebody who's interested. He's a friend of mine And and we ended up doing a Skype audition with him and He was amazing. He's amazing. Yeah, he was a rocker. We wanted a Latin rocker and we got one and so he's our Paolo our Our Madeline you met our Madeline is Cassandra's best friend in the show and we fully developed that character more and now Madeline has a few more songs to And in the original concept there was only one thing that she really sang in But now she has a couple of other pieces that she sings in she sings another duet and in a trio one of the songs is now a trio and So that's Nicole Palmer is our Madeline and then our Hector is Corey Gibson. This man is a presence on stage. I cannot I cannot even begin to tell you But he came in and he sang for us acapella Born what's the name? No, no, he sings the shepherd song for us didn't he be He's saying that acapella for us and we were all just like This guy's amazing and then later he sang anthem for us and that was the that was the closer that just closed the door And we knew he was our Hector and Hector's character originally in the original concept He just sang one song and it was send-off and And now he's yeah, yeah, and he's and now he's all over the place. Yeah, and we've written three songs that he's involved in now Am I gonna try to do no monuments I can try I Final days let us go in grace Except what's coming Can your love Sing their praises And yet they go on song your heroes And yet you go on song What you Is a planet that it's all about but it's also a person in this rock opera How did that come to be that you decided to create a person for the planet was your harness idea originally? I've started thinking about Mars and the energy of Mars and the color of it And I just thought flamenco dancer it just seemed like that we needed a flamenco dancer to embody that energy of Mars So what if Mars have been made dormant until we Landed on it with our Mars landers and that will so she starts out the show first getting the first people to come and Then she approaches and she'll end up going after Cassandra as well and try to get life back because she knows life comes from Two people so we'll get to see that right now Silence is deep but then radios down There is no news from home last thing I heard there was war breaking out So there's seems to be strong Spanish connection here with Palo and the flamenco. Where's where's some of the rock that's in this But I this one works I mean a lot of these songs I wrote on a 12 string guitar and I performed them on a 12 string guitar solo But when you put the whole rock and roll band behind it I said to give it all you got Oh, she gives some more just to have all eyes on me as my rocket shoots away You can't side right again. I feel tonight Keeps getting smaller. Yeah, I'm feeling nine miles high tonight My flying like a kite Living out my destiny We get into it, but there's actually a lot of that in the show as well, and it's really fun. I mean What's interesting to me? I asked some of that to it as well You know, you've got some songs that really are gonna make people go up one dance Yeah, one of the cool things about what I really enjoy about this this the trajectory of these songs is Palo's music was all started with my rock-and-roll Sensibility just really cranking out there as he's taking off and he's getting out to space and he's Mars landing us And he's all the celebratory stuff, but then He starts getting more and more like lonely and Morose and like wondering about this there, you know, even that last song hope is gone What is the point of carrying on when when hope is dwindling away? so he's getting into this really Sad place, but then Cassandra comes in with landing day and She's like asked to my tribe as well as to my tribe. She gets from going these sort of soliloquies and ballad type songs at the beginning to this just total rock-kick The end she's just so empowered when she comes in knowing today is one of those things that we just played in the beginning Yeah, the very beginning of the show. Yeah, that's true. You played landing day at the beginning. Yeah, so you heard that so now Somehow NASA's involved. How did that happen and what's really going on with this explore Mars when we placed it an audition? advertisement in the in the online stuff, you know that this guy from Company called explore Mars. It's a nonprofit that convenes Conferences and does research on all the stuff that's going on to get humans to Mars so every year he puts a conference together bringing in NASA and Lockheed Martin and Boeing and Orbital ATK and arrow jet and all these amazing huge huge companies that actually collaborate and work together on Getting people to Mars getting space exploration he found this audition notice contacted me and Introduced himself and I'm thinking right, you know, this cannot possibly be real and he says but the conference is next week And we'd like you to come down and we'd like you to perform some of your music And I'd like to introduce you to all these people. So I was down there hanging out with us people from NASA and Lockheed Martin and Today just Yes, come turn around one of the they had me come and play for for this It was a reception hosted by Ardbeg single malt whiskey and I played that song I just played I played nine miles high the microphone went out. I had no sound. They told I had to do it entirely Acoustically they told me they could hear me on the next floor down But they were very well lubricated, too And you also have an art installation involved with this project, right? Yeah, we're doing a science art fair In concert with the show Basically, we're going to be allowing at least 15 to 20 high school students So high school students if you'd like to be involved in this you can you're not going to be charged It's basically like a science space camp for a week where you're going to create an installation art piece Basically a Mars base camp You're going to do research on what it takes for humans to live on Mars and create basically that So that everybody can walk through before the show The installation work will happen the week prior to so all the research and Steam work, so it's a steam project science technology engineering arts and math and So there are teachers that'll navigate and help these kids create a large art installation of a Mars base camp with hydroponics Telling you some of the things that you need to do when you're on Mars You know some graphics and stuff some virtual reality possibly depends what the kids want to make and then Everybody can visit that before they come into the theater for the show Wow, so when people buy a ticket to this thing they're gonna get a lot more than just a And we're negotiating with some of these big companies right now There's one I won't mention it right now But there's one that wants to send a virtual reality dot the display Where you I did this when I was in DC and it absolutely blew my mind You put on your goggles and they put on your phones and you're in a totally different environment I did turn the turn it on and you're in a factory that's making Space Engines the rocket engines and you're in there and you're looking around and people are moving around doing stuff And they're building it and then they fire one off and it's like oh my god So that kind of display that's going to be at the show too. We're planning on it Right now as we're speaking the tickets on sale Oh, yeah, right at opera house org You can go right in there and buy them and there's only four performances So if people are watching this they probably want to get tickets as soon as possible August 24th 25th and 26th We have evening shows and then on Sunday August 27th. We have a matinee at 230 That's a Sunday and then the others a Thursday Friday Saturday night And Waterville opera houses an absolutely incredible facility. It's beautiful. It's it's a state of the art It is a state of art theater. It's a 800 seats theater with this absolutely gorgeous balcony and a full huge stage comfortable seats It's important and the Mars bar We just coined that term today coming up. It's the Mars bar of the lobby Serving beer and wine excellent excellent. So I think we're going out now with space journey I was floating there in space The earth was small and lapis blue. I felt so full of grace They were shooting stars beneath me And Aurora's dancing lights The cities in my distant home Go through the darkness