This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Joe Barros: Experience the musicals of tomorrow, today. Get a glimpse inside the blueprint of an original musical being developed in real time, with New York Theatre Barn's podcast, Backstage Pass. I'm Joe Barros, and I'm Jen Sandler, and we're the hosts of Backstage Pass.

[0:23] Joe Barros: As the Artistic Director and Associate Artistic Director of New York Theatre Barn, we make space to speak in community with musical theatre writers and their creative teams. Lifting up songs from original culture-shifting musicals in development and introducing them to a global audience has become a major part of New York Theatre Barn's evolving story. Each original musical's intention, content, and journey are unique and extraordinary to the storytellers who create them. We believe that there is no formula for musical theatre except authenticity. We recently spoke with the writer of Salem, Kira Stone, and the creators of Shapeshifters, a queer comic book musical, Truth Bachman, and Zhailon Levingston.

Our first musical is Salem, which has book music and lyrics by Kira Stone. In Salem, Susanna, Bridget, Miriam, Martha, Rebecca, and Mary are held hostage in a modern-day courtroom for their collective trial by judge and jury. We marvel at the mass hysteria, we deliberate, and we ultimately are part of deciding the fate of these six women. Follow the twists, switchbacks, and real-life discoveries that are made as we speculate. Why did this happen? How did this happen? And heaven forbid, could it happen again now? And now, here's our conversation with the writer of Salem, Kira Stone.

[2:03] Kira Stone: Woo! Hi, guys! Well then, let's dive in. Witch hunts are not just a thing of the past. They are constant in our world, unfortunately, in many countries. Feeling the pressure of McCarthyism and being accused of communism, prolific playwright Arthur Miller fired back with his 1953 play, The Crucible, which, as most of us know, is an allegory that compares McCarthyism to the Salem witch trials. This is the perfect example of how art can be used as warfare, where an artist's point of view and thesis can meet at the intersection between art and policy to create a conversation about the state of the world.

[2:39] Kira Stone: I was so riveted by The Crucible because I was like, this really happened? And it's such a dynamic play that feels incredibly fresh whenever you read it. And it's very wordy and very lengthy. You know, people often think they've read it, but they've seen the film and it's a completely, completely different thing. History seems to be repeating itself yet again. And you, like me, are also very drawn to the source material. So what drew you to this material? And what inspired you to write a musical that would resurrect these ghosts and literally turn history on its head?

[3:10] Kira Stone: Well, that's a great question. I think I was feeling a little stagnant personally in my art and in my work. I was wanting to find the stories of women and of strength that I resonate with. Probably part of it had to do with having a daughter. And I really wanted to find the projects that I was going to get so excited about and that was going to just like fill my heart and have it burst. And so I came up with like a short list and I kept coming back to the Salem Witch Trials and I just ended up pouring into the history. I read like seven thick biographies. I made my husband sit down and watch historical documentaries with me. I listened to podcasts. I went to Salem. I got to walk the grounds and see where these women were executed and see the courthouses.

I got to stand on the land where the main household of the parish household was, which is one of the major judges and ministers during Salem. I took videos while I was there. I had chills. It was crazy. There's like a very palpable feeling in the air of like electricity and of something terrible having happened there. And you just, you can't really shake it. Two weeks after getting home from the trip, I got a kind of frantic phone call from my mom, who is wonderful. And she was like, Kira, Kira. And I was like, what? And she was like, well, I knew we had an ancestor that was accused of being a witch, but I didn't really know anything about her. And so my mom and I looked back and right in our family tree, in our family history, I am a direct descendant of one of the 14 women that was hung in the Salem witch trials.

She's my eighth great-grandma. And she is one of the women I represent in my show. I also play her in the show, which is really fun. And that has become such a huge part of telling this story. It has become my drive, the fire in me, the passion to not only lift up the voices of these women that were so muted during this time, but this is my eighth great-grandma. It's crazy. She's my blood. And I feel like it's almost a responsibility at this point that I feel really thankful and honored and privileged to have.

[5:35] Joe Barros: Wow. And how did you come to collaborate with Sarna?

[5:38] Kira Stone: Well, Sarna's just the best. Sarna and I met several years ago at a 54 Below concert of my work. And she was kind enough to read a draft of a show I had then and suggest a book writer, which was wonderful. I worked with Matthew Green for about a year and a half writing new musicals centered around the concept idea of what we had. And then after that, Sarna read it and was kind and receptive.

[6:06] Sarna Lapine: I'll let you take it from there.

[6:12] Kira Stone: Yes, that was my experience of it too. But a mutual colleague of ours brought me to this 54 Below show and said, you really need to meet this young composer who's just come out of school. And he was very taken with her work. And it was a magnificent concert. And it was evident that there's something very special about Kira and very prolific. Within, I think, about two to three years, when we did get back together again, there was like a list of new projects she had been developing. And she happened to mention this one. And like you, Joe, The Crucible was a very influential book or play, but I read it as a text first in my life and immediately was interested in the subject matter. I kind of begged Kira to send it to me.

She did. What I think the most obvious theme of a story like The Crucible is the power of fear and how it can eat and destroy us and how it's simply a perception that can be presented on the world stage or on a stage in a theater. The power of fear is a big theme of the show and about your show and sort of usurping that fear through power.

[7:27] Kira Stone: Yeah, ultimately, I think of the message of what I want to convey is a fearless type of forgiveness when we have those that we love and those that we don't love make mistakes and a radical form of repentance when it's on us. I really feel strongly about that. I have talked to folks young and old, my wonderful grandparents as well about this, and it comes to a kind of a consensus that the time we're living in right now is one of the biggest times of mass hysteria that they can remember in their lifetimes that I've seen in my lifetime. And so it feels like a poignant topic right now. It's almost cathartic in a weird, weird way. So I think as we set into our first song, tell us more about the plot of the show because we haven't talked about that enough yet.

[8:11] Kira Stone: Yeah. OK, so it's six accused women and their six accusers and our six accused women are kind of trapped in a modern day courtroom with a judge and the jury. The jury is the audience and we are taken on their trial as spectators and as judges so that we can hopefully hear from them at some point about how this happened, why this happened. About halfway through, everything blows up in their faces and we get to ride that rollercoaster the rest of the way. I don't want to like spoil anything or give it away too much. Let's talk about our first song and they get the little sneak peek before the plot, but that's all they're going to get.

[8:58] Kira Stone: So this one is a song. It is about midway through the show. It's sung by the judge, performed by Antonio Cipriano, who's the best. So in this song, our judge is deliberating back and forth. What is he going to do in this situation? He's hearing from the people of the town that there are lots of uprisings and there's a lot of fear going on. And he's hearing from the people of the town, you need to condemn these women. And from the accused woman's side, he has a feeling that there's something that is not being told. He hasn't quite heard any of them speak and share their stories. And so he has his conscience a little bit torn and we kind of can peel back those layers a little bit and start to see a glimpse of empathy there. Here is Antonio Cipriano.

[9:51] ♪ Musical number: "Ready or Not" — performed by Antonio Cipriano ♪

[12:47] Kira Stone: One of the things I said to Jen when she was like, so what do you think?

[12:52] Kira Stone: Salem, when she was sending me a bunch of your shows, I said, I think it's my favorite of her shows. And I said, one of the reasons I like it is because it doesn't sound anything like I thought it was going to sound like. But I love that. Thank you. The pop and hip hop style of music is my favorite to listen to. It's my favorite to make. It's where I've found I can have the most fun and creativity, and it feels the most like myself. So when I kind of figured out how to use logic and do my MIDI keyboards and kind of make it fun, I fell in love with it. It's been the funnest process. And Sarna, one thing I love about you as a director is, you know, you do things like I Know the Park with George, you do things like Borderline, you do things like this, you do every kind of genre of music I feel like in a musical theater, you know, and that's a feat. That's so cool.

[13:41] Sarna Lapine: Thank you. For me, it's always driven by the story and the writers, the creators. And if it stirs a strong response, the musical genre doesn't matter. You know, I think it's just a tool to express an incredibly unique and interesting story. And I love all kinds of music. So it does serve that.

[14:01] Kira Stone: Sarna, Sarna in the Park with George is one of my favorite shows. And I've always really loved the work of Sondheim and James Lapine. But I feel like a few years ago, I've always felt it was a little hard to get into the show because I found it to be cerebral and often about the stuff that was on stage. And what I found really special about your production was it wasn't about stuff, it was about relationships. And it was about the people around all that stuff, because all that stuff wasn't really there. Because of that, I think you're the perfect director for this piece.

[14:33] Sarna Lapine: Thank you, Joe. Thank you. A secret aspect of, not a secret, but something that people might not know is the first time I directed Sondheim in the Park with George was for a very, very small, like barely birthed regional theater in Columbus, Ohio. And there was no stuff. I mean, we are literally we had a tent up over the light board because the roof was leaking. So the opportunity to develop that show with a really intimate community in a space where the stuff wasn't there to begin with was something that taught me a tremendous amount about what existed on the page and how to mine that and manifest that, as you say, Joe, through the characters and their relationship. It is something I look for, like if it's not on the page or in the score, all the glitter in the world ain't gonna fix it. If it's not on the page, it's not on the stage.

[15:27] Kira Stone: I'm gonna use that forever now. I love that. Well, speaking of things that are on the page, what is our second song tonight? This song is called Kingdom Comes and it is our first peek inside the hearts and the minds of the women. We kind of go in a little cerebrally and we see their collective thoughts, what they're all feeling and thinking at the same time. So it's sung by six of our accused women. And who is singing this one? I think I know her.

[15:55] Sarna Lapine: I am performing the song. Here is Clara.

[16:13] ♪ Musical number: "Kingdom Comes" — performed by Clara ♪

[20:40] Kira Stone: Our second new musical is Shapeshifters, a queer comic book musical, which has music and words by Truth Bachman and direction and development by Zhailon Levingston. High school bully and comic book genius Mel discovers a hidden plane of existence called Queer Time simply by drawing scenarios with pen and paper. In Queer Time, Mel joins the ranks of an underground network of queer and trans superheroes called the Shapeshifters. As Mel and the Shapeshifters sprint towards uncertain futures, this tribe of queer heroes must rely on community to persist, resist, and survive their living nightmares. And now here's our conversation with the creators of Shapeshifters, a queer comic book musical, Truth Bachman and Zhailon Levingston.

[21:26] Kira Stone: Hello, hello.

[21:27] Truth Bachman: Hi, friends.

[21:28] Kira Stone: New York Theater Barn and myself first got to work with Truth as an actor on a project, well, I should say I first got to work with Truth as an actor on a project for Musical Theater Factory. And then Truth's show, Chasing Fear, written with Blake McCarty, was featured in both New York Theater Barn's New York series and Choreography Lab. And I wanted to note that Chasing Fear is a musical inspired by Turkish folklore about a boy who leaves home in search of the true meaning of fear and seen through the eyes of a young refugee. That presentation was produced in partnership with The Z and Infante. They also performed in the presentation, which was really, really spectacular. There's a song from the show on your EP, Blue River, called Glass of Water's Joy, and it's an incredible, incredible album.

And that song is something that I listen to often. Jaelyn, you are the resident director of the Broadway musical Tina, which we so love, and you were the director of Chicken and Biscuits, the new play that ran at Queens Theater, written by our friend Douglas Lyons. And you were the director of the solo play Neptune about a young black queer HIV positive boy who was lost on his way to a date. Sounds like a really, really interesting piece. So exploring these complex and multidimensional themes and stories seem to be exactly what both of you do. So it seems inevitable that you would collaborate. So we're interested to know what inspired your collaboration and what inspired you to develop and tell this story together?

[22:48] Zhailon Levingston: Yeah, that's a good question. I guess I can start and then I'll tag you in Truth. But just to say, I was just taken by Truth as a person first and just wanted to have coffee with this person, who I had just kind of been secretly following a little bit. And so really, it started with us just getting to know each other and meeting each other. And honestly, a lot of my best collaborations start that way of just me like fanning out over someone and wanting them to know that I exist in the world as well. And so we kind of developed a friendship first. And then as I was exposed to material from Shapeshifters, I kind of was like, I think this is a full musical. It started as a playlist and as a cabaret and concert experience.

And I remember seeing the concert of it at Joe's Pub. I said, I just I have to be a part of this. And luckily, Truth asked me to stage a medley of songs from the show for the public theater's Queer Now extravaganza that was maybe two years ago at the Delacorte. And so that was the kind of beginnings of our working relationship together.

[24:01] Truth Bachman: And Zhailon, what I think is so exciting about this show, I've had so many people say to me, wait, it's the bully that this all happens to. It's not the person being bullied. You know, usually we see the person who is suffering get this kind of redemption. What made you want to give the bully the redemption?

[24:15] Truth Bachman: Well, you know, I think sometimes it's very easy to play into this idea that all queer people are victims. It's very easy to play into the idea that we have no agency in who we are, who we become. And Mel is a character who is at the bottom of the food chain in their community and channels that anger and channels that rage at first by taking it on other people, which leaves and perpetuates the cycle of this is a troubled child. This is somebody who, you know, doesn't know who they are or what they want. It's not, I think, about as much like empathizing with bullies as it is like people do and behave in ways for all sorts of different reasons, which oftentimes we're not even privy to. And we enter Mel's world from that lens.

[25:01] Zhailon Levingston: That's really, really so true, though. There's such a layer of empathy there that just speaks a lot to who you are as a person and as a writer. And, you know, we're always kind of taught that the bullies are suffering more than we realize. And I think we don't think about it enough.

[25:44] Truth Bachman: One of the things that Zhailon said to me when he was like, this could be a full musical is like, y'all are just like up there singing and you're like superheroes and like your voices are your superpowers. And every single person on stage was in some way a different queer expression of who they are. So from there, we kind of thought, okay, well, what if each of these things that makes us beautiful and able to survive in a really tough world, what actually was our superpower? And it kind of started from that. And I think what's so exciting about that is, you know, we kind of all right now are hiding behind this crazy, crazy world. And we all are getting by with something. We're all getting by with a superpower. Oh, yeah, we are.

[26:21] Zhailon Levingston: And talk to us more about the development of the show. You talked a little about that, but you've had a lot of development recently.

[26:26] Truth Bachman: Yeah, so it started as a commission for Stonewall 50, that I was supposed to make something for the duplex. I just kind of thought, okay, well, what time is it now? And where am I? And as you know, if you live in New York City, the duplex is right next to Stonewall, which is the birth of the queer liberation movement. And I sat in Christopher Park nearly every day, just writing everything that was going through my mind, like the nexus of like, what got me to here? What got me to this point in my life? Whose shoulders do I stand on? And also, how did I make it through the trials of adolescence to be in this place, where I can now sort of reflect on it and write about it and share it with other people in songs.

We started with that. And then we had the Joe's Pub residency. And we did a performance after that at the Delacorte Theater, part of the Publix Pride celebration. And it was just incredible. We had, you know, 45 people on stage, many of whom were kids, all singing this, like, Shake Shifters anthem. And from there, we had two sessions of development with Musical Theater Factory, one for Act One and one for Act Two. We had a lovely week with Rhinebeck Writers Retreat. And here we are today.

[27:32] Zhailon Levingston: Fantastic. Well, we love the Rhinebeck Writers Retreat and Kathy Evans. Well, thanks for telling us about your development. We'd love to hear about your first song tonight.

[27:38] Truth Bachman: Yeah, so the first song is called How They Burn. And this song was really inspired by a lot of the first queer liberation movement actually began in Weimar, Germany, just before the Holocaust. And in sort of the overtake of Adolf Hitler, there is like the burning of books, there's scientific studies about gay people, about trans people that are all just thrown away in the Nazi regime. And so this song was inspired by that, but then has come back around in the play version, and is sung by my character Psyche, who is a seer and is seeing a vision of the future and giving this like warning. Well, without any further ado, here is you.

[28:32] ♪ Musical number: "How They Burn" — performed by Truth Bachman ♪

[31:00] Truth Bachman: That is such a bop.

[31:03] Zhailon Levingston: Thanks.

[31:07] Truth Bachman: You know, we have to sing about the dangers of the fascist patriarchy, you know, and make it fun.

[31:12] Zhailon Levingston: There's a little signature truth Bachman in there. Like, I feel glimmers of glass of water's joy, even though I feel, you know, it's a totally different piece. I hear you. I feel you. I feel your soul in there.

[31:24] Zhailon Levingston: I was going to say, what have the both of you learned about the show?

[31:27] Truth Bachman: Oh, wow. Well, the show is a shapeshifter of its own. And I think what's been most thrilling to learn about the piece is what has become undeniable about the piece in terms of the music that follows every incarnation, the themes that follow every incarnation, our even individual creative intentions that we're bringing into the project. Each time we do a different version of it, we kind of hold up this metaphorical magnet to the script, and there's certain things that pop up each time. And that has actually given us the confidence to radically reimagine the forms in which the story can take and be as open as possible to telling the story in however many ways that we can. So developing it as a TV show currently, we still want it to be something that happens on stage.

We believe it can be an audio experience. We believe there's versions of it that are for middle school children or kids to work on. So I think that has been a joy of discovery, of figuring out, oh yeah, so long as this element, that element, and that element remains true, we've created a world that really can shapeshift for such a time as this.

[32:40] Zhailon Levingston: Well, I know our next performance is again kind of in the world you're talking about. Really what we're focusing now on is how we can take this and translate it into this episodic form for digital consumption. So that's sort of like the next thing that our efforts are really focused on.

[32:51] Truth Bachman: Awesome. Tell us a little bit about the next song. We're going to hear Atlas.

[32:56] Truth Bachman: Yep. So Atlas is kind of Mel's, Mel is our lead character. And Atlas is a shapeshifter who is Mel's kind of spirit guide. And she lives in the lineage of the great shapeshifter Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera and all these sort of black trans activists who really have paved the way for everywhere that, you know, we are right now and have given up the model to fight the fight that we currently find ourselves in at this moment in time. And who is singing this song tonight?

[33:28] Truth Bachman: This song is sung by the amazing Basit Chetou and just so happy that they were able to come and sing for us tonight. So here they are.

[33:44] ♪ Musical number: "Atlas" — performed by Basit Chetou ♪

[37:42] Zhailon Levingston: Yay!

[37:43] Truth Bachman: What a person.

[37:44] Zhailon Levingston: Wow.

[37:45] Truth Bachman: Like, what a beautiful person with a beautiful message and a song.

[37:48] Zhailon Levingston: I just, wow.

[37:50] Truth Bachman: Thank you.

[37:51] Zhailon Levingston: Really special.

[37:52] Zhailon Levingston: Well, thank you both, Jalen and Truth. We can't wait to see how Shapeshifters continues to shapeshift.

[37:57] Truth Bachman: Thank you.

[37:59] Zhailon Levingston: If you enjoyed The Musicals of Tomorrow, please rate, subscribe, and share.

[38:04] Truth Bachman: The podcast is co-produced and edited by Paul Smock and Hector Flores, Jr.

[38:09] Truth Bachman: Our theme song, The Music of Tomorrow, was written by Lynn Schenkel and Sarah Cooper for their all-female identifying musical, Perpetual Sunshine and The Ghost Girls.

[38:22] Truth Bachman: Join us next time for more of The Musicals of Tomorrow.

[38:28] Truth Bachman: See you then.

[38:29] Zhailon Levingston: Bye.

[38:30] Truth Bachman: Bye.