This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:01] Joe Barros: The music of tomorrow is being written today.

[0:10] Jen Sandler: The music of tomorrow is almost ready to play.

[0:18] Joe Barros: Experience the musicals of tomorrow today.

[0:21] Jen Sandler: Get a glimpse inside the blueprint of an original musical being developed in real time.

[0:26] Joe Barros: With New York Theatre Barn's podcast, The Musicals of Tomorrow.

[0:32] Jen Sandler: The music of tomorrow.

[0:40] Joe Barros: I'm Joe Barros.

[0:42] Jen Sandler: And I'm Jen Sandler.

[0:44] Joe Barros: And we're the hosts of The Musicals of Tomorrow.

[0:46] Jen Sandler: 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.

[0:56] Joe Barros: 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.

[1:06] Jen Sandler: Each original musical's intention, content, and journey are unique and extraordinary to the storytellers who create them.

[1:14] Joe Barros: We believe that there is no formula for musical theatre except authenticity.

[1:20] Jen Sandler: We recently spoke with the writers of Mimosa, Lauren Taslitz, and Danny Ursetti, and the writers of Ten Brave Seconds, Jeff Talbott, and Will Van Dyke.

[1:29] Joe Barros: Our first musical is Mimosa, which has book and lyrics by Lauren Taslitz and music by Danny Ursetti.

[1:36] Jen Sandler: Mimosa is a plant with a special gift. She can dance.

[1:40] Joe Barros: Mom begs her to stop, concerned that she could be noticed by a human.

[1:45] Jen Sandler: Then along comes lonely teenage human Molly, who catches sight of Mimosa, dancing and is so delighted by her, she digs Mimosa up and takes her home.

[1:55] Joe Barros: Together, they learn to communicate in order to unite and heal their imperiled communities.

[2:01] Jen Sandler: Mimosa is a cautionary tale that asks us to see ourselves as natural parts of the natural world in order to preserve and save our environment.

[2:10] Joe Barros: And now here's our conversation with the writers of Mimosa, Lauren Taslitz and Danny Ursetti.

[2:16] Joe Barros: Well, Danny Ursetti and Lauren Taslitz, it's great to see you both.

[2:20] Joe Barros: Danny, you are a composer and percussionist from Southern California. Your work has been developed with Barrington Stage Company, Prospect Theatre Company, Coastal Carolina University, and NYU Tisch Drama Stage Works.

[2:32] Joe Barros: You also served as music assistant to your mentor and friend William Finn on the Broadway revival of Falsettos, and rumor has it that you're collaborating on a project together.

[2:41] Danny Ursetti: That's very true. We're working on a song cycle right now about the pandemic, and we're hoping to have that ready for the summer to maybe do a little reading.

[2:53] Joe Barros: Awesome. Can't wait for that. Falsettos is my favorite musical, and Bill Finn is my favorite composer of all time.

[2:59] Danny Ursetti: It is? I've never heard this about you.

[3:02] Joe Barros: Lauren, you are a lyricist-librettist who splits time between Chicago and New York. Your work has been developed with Barrington Stage Company, National Asian Artist Project, Porchlight Music Theatre, Prospect Theatre Company, and the Fifth Avenue Theatre.

[3:15] Joe Barros: You were the 2020 Robert and Stephanie Olmsted McDowell Fellow and have also been in residence at the Fifth Avenue Theatre, the Johnny Mercer Grove at Goodspeed, and the Catwalk Institute.

[3:26] Joe Barros: You and Danny were Dramatist Guild Fellow finalists in 2019, among many other finalists and awards as well.

[3:33] Joe Barros: So, Danny and Lauren, what inspired your collaboration, and what was the impetus to tell a story about the sentient power of plants and our connection to the natural world?

[3:45] Lauren Taslitz: Yeah, we met at NYU's Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program in 2015 and really started to work together in our second year in Bill Finn's lyric writing class.

[3:57] Lauren Taslitz: I had admired Lauren's lyrics from afar, and was very excited when Bill started assigning me to work with her.

[4:05] Lauren Taslitz: And because of that, after we graduated, Bill kind of commissioned us to write a show for his cabaret at Barrington Stage, which we worked on at his house in Pittsfield over the summer, and that became Regretting Almost Everything, and we've been working together ever since, and regretting very little, I think.

[4:25] Danny Ursetti: I mean, this show, I mean, it's not like we set out to write a show about the relationship between plants and humans or plant sentience. We were in Times Square on a hot summer night before the pandemic, where you couldn't move or breathe, and I suddenly just wished we could walk into a theatre, have the door closed behind us, and be transported into the woods.

[4:52] Danny Ursetti: And I told Danny, and we were like, okay, cool, but what's the show? And we had no idea.

[5:01] Lauren Taslitz: But not long after that, sort of one thing led to another, and I wound up reading about a woman named Monica Gagliano, who was an environmental ecologist, a scientist, and she wrote a book called Thus Spoke the Plant, which she calls her phytobiography.

[5:18] Lauren Taslitz: It was a book that she co-authored with plants, and her book basically alternated between her spiritual encounters with plants and then the experiment she did in a laboratory that showed plant sentience, learning, memory, communication, intelligence, and I mean, like, if it had just been about the spiritual encounters, I would have sort of, you know, had no reason to doubt it.

[5:47] Lauren Taslitz: But I don't know that it would have hit me as hard. But because of all of these lab experiments, I was like, oh, my God, I think plants are like people, like plant persons.

[6:00] Lauren Taslitz: And I told Danny, and, you know, growing up here in this sort of Judeo-Christian capitalist world, right, where it's humans are above everything, and everything else is an object or commodity, it was, I mean, talk about disruptive and transformative theater. It's like our heads exploded.

[6:23] Lauren Taslitz: And I mean, I started taking walks in Central Park and forcing myself to say hi to the trees, you know, when nobody was looking to just try to get used to the idea. But anyway, we still didn't.

[6:38] Danny Ursetti: So then we knew we wanted to write about plant sentience, but we still didn't know what the show was. And then we read the intro to a book called The Secret Life of Plants.

[6:49] Lauren Taslitz: And the last line of the intro, to paraphrase, is, and so it seems that plants are ready, willing, and able to work with humans on this huge task of regrowing the garden. And I'm like, now that's a musical.

[7:04] Danny Ursetti: Okay, but we still didn't actually know what the musical was. And, you know, more time went by.

[7:10] Lauren Taslitz: And then one day, and this was one of the many moments when, like, being a writer makes you feel like a moron, because it took you so long to think of it. But it was like, oh, my God, what if the protagonist is a plant? I mean, we want to write about plant sentience. Of course the protagonist should be a plant, because that's the point.

[7:30] Lauren Taslitz: And suddenly it stopped being about all the intellectual issues we face, because it felt so right. And it felt sort of wonderful and exciting to change our understanding of our place in the world.

[7:45] Danny Ursetti: I was just going to say, it reminded me when I discovered March of the Falsettos, Falsetto Land and Trousers, which became Falsettos, that a musical could be anything, and it could be about you, and it could be about deep things like this.

[7:56] Danny Ursetti: And so I think, you know, and I remind people, a musical can be about anything. And, you know, while this is about the plant world and humans, there's a deep, deep, powerful metaphor in here.

[8:06] Lauren Taslitz: And, you know, indigenous peoples have known for hundreds of years that plants are conscious. You know, studies have been done with mimosa plants, for people who don't know, you know, a mimosa plant, when dropped or touched or affected, wilts and revives on its own. It senses things.

[8:25] Danny Ursetti: So when tests were done with the mimosa plant, the third or so time the plant was dropped, it did not wilt, because it learned and felt things, essentially.

[8:36] Lauren Taslitz: Yeah. And how did you decide this was a family story? Because I think you have lessons that are so important to adults, but I think it's a cautionary tale that also is so simple to children and young adults about how they need to look at the environment.

[8:49] Danny Ursetti: Well, we just kind of felt like we wanted to write a joyful show, and we wanted to write a show that would be fun for us to write.

[9:02] Lauren Taslitz: And, I mean, it was fun for us to write. We wanted something accessible because, really, the goal was to have as many people as possible see it and leave the theater going, did they actually mean that? Like they don't really want us to think the plants are talking, but the thing is we do.

[9:22] Danny Ursetti: And, like, if I tell Elle, my five-year-old granddaughter, like, what would you say to the tree? Like if I say introduce yourself, she'll introduce herself to the tree. But I wanted the adults to wonder if maybe they should introduce themselves to the tree.

[9:37] Lauren Taslitz: I know I sound insane. I am so not insane.

[9:39] Joe Barros: Let's talk about you haven't even been writing the show for that long, which is the craziest part to me. You started it during the pandemic, and you've already won some awards for it during the pandemic.

[9:48] Danny Ursetti: Yeah, because it's, I mean, I have written, this is probably my eighth book musical, and the others have been important to me and I think worthwhile. But this is the most exciting.

[10:02] Danny Ursetti: Yeah, I mean, we started it, and I think having the time to kind of live in this world and build it, like I got to work on things, like the orchestration that I normally wouldn't have time to work on, kind of, it was just really a unique way to write a show that we wouldn't have had. I don't think we would have written it the same way.

[10:31] Danny Ursetti: And yeah, we were lucky. NAMT announced this award, this 15-minute contest, which honestly really pushed us to keep writing it, because we had started writing the first song, and then the world shut down.

[10:47] Danny Ursetti: So I was, we were just streaming shows, or I was just swiping on my phone. And then Lauren was like, well, maybe we can finish 15 minutes of it. And then when we started that, we kept going.

[10:58] Danny Ursetti: And then when we found out we won the NAMT 15-minute musical contest, that was, it was like a sign, like let's just keep going and see what happens.

[11:08] Joe Barros: And you also connected with Michigan State University's design classes, who also helped you envision what the show could be. And Joe also has had the great gift of showing the show to his students, who are all under 18, correct, Joe, and have interpreted the show and put their spin on it.

[11:24] Joe Barros: Yes, all my students from The Right Way have had a great time working with my favorite song from the show with them called Gotta Move, which you're going to see in full tonight.

[11:31] Joe Barros: So let's hear more about Gotta Move.

[11:34] Danny Ursetti: So this song kind of introduces our main character, Mimosa, who is a rambunctious plant with a special gift, played by Shereen Pimentel.

[11:44] Danny Ursetti: You'll also meet Mimosa's overprotective mother, played by Christine Toy Johnson, who newly elected treasurer of the Dramatists Guild, hooray. And you'll also hear a chorus of Mimosa's family, sung by Belen Moyano and Forrest Van Dyke.

[12:02] Joe Barros: So here is Gotta Move.

[12:12] ♪ Musical number: "Gotta Move" — performed by Shereen Pimentel, Christine Toy Johnson, Belen Moyano, and Forrest Van Dyke ♪

[12:27] Gotta move, gotta play Gotta melt and plunge and bend and swoop and sway Gotta move, gotta collide Gotta fold and fall and stress can open wide Staying still is boring, playing dead is dull Where is the surprise to light my eyes with wow and wonder We'll revive, we'll revive Need to whoosh and whirl and reel to feel alive Gotta get, I can't hide Gotta pulse that bubbles up from deep inside Wanna tease, wanna flirt Life's a snooze when you are rooted in the dirt Taking charge is awesome, breaking rules is great Getting high by trying and defying expectations Reach and try, reach and try It's a bliss with special skills that others lack Mimosa, stop! Why? It's a gift! Gift, it's a flaw, it's a curse Cut it out or things will go from bad to worse Save your strength, save your life

[14:44] ♪ Musical number: "Revive" — performed by Diana Huey and Shereen Pimentel ♪

[15:47] Will Van Dyke: You know, recently.

[15:49] Jeff Talbott: So what is the second song we're going to see tonight?

[15:55] Will Van Dyke: The second song is called "Can't Do It Alone." It's kind of the message of the show in a way. I mean, the thing I'd say, I'll set it up and then I'll say one thing quickly. The setup is so Mimosa's mom doesn't want her to dance because she might be seen by a human and you cannot trust humans. And sure enough, Mimosa dances. She's seen by Molly, this 14-year-old human who digs her up, takes her home. And five minutes later, Molly, who cannot dance at all, is given the task of making up a dance and teaching it to the whole town. Mimosa volunteers, offers to teach Molly a dance. And Mimosa and Molly spend the next three days locked in Molly's room, planning to teach a human this dance. And that's how their friendship grows and they bond. And the whole time, they're listening to what is really a pop song on the radio called "Can't Do It Alone." And that is what we are about to hear. Danny, do you want to add anything?

[16:52] Danny Ursetti: No, just that, I mean, I guess this song, Joe, kind of you asked us to do this song and we were pretty kind of hesitant to do it because we weren't happy with it, but through rewriting and kind of building this version of it, adding sections, cutting sections, we're really happy with how this turned out. And we think Diana Huey is playing Molly and Shereen Pimentel again is Mimosa and they completely kill it. And hopefully you all are dancing at home. We're really excited about this song as well. So here is "Can't Do It Alone" with Diana and Shereen.

[17:28] ♪ Musical number: "Can't Do It Alone" — performed by Diana Huey and Shereen Pimentel ♪

[21:04] Will Van Dyke: Yay! So thank you both so much tonight for introducing Mimosa to the world. We are so grateful that you could be here, and we think that there's a really powerful message here and something that we've never seen in a musical. So thank you for your beautiful show and your fantastic collaboration. And we hope to have a real-life old Mimosa with you soon.

[21:26] Danny Ursetti: We have to.

[21:28] Will Van Dyke: Thank you both so much.

[21:29] Jeff Talbott: Thank you, guys. We'll see you soon. Our second new musical is "10 Brave Seconds," which has music and lyrics by Will Van Dyke and book and lyrics by Jeff Talbott. "10 Brave Seconds" is a new musical about the day that 16-year-old Mike comes out of the closet and the cosmic change that affects his community. Mike is about to find out that it's on the other side of the telling that all the good stuff sits waiting. This original story is about those tiny brave seconds that make up the gargantuan moments that tell you and the world who you are. And now here's our conversation with the writers of "10 Brave Seconds," Jeff Talbott and Will Van Dyke.

[22:08] Joey: I'm Joey.

[22:10] Jeff Talbott: Hello.

[22:12] Will Van Dyke: I'm so glad you both could join us and that you have such beautiful walls of fame behind you.

[22:17] Joey: Yeah, I'll bet, yeah.

[22:19] Jeff Talbott: I can't compete with Ben's naughty mind, but, yeah.

[22:23] Will Van Dyke: That's right. Jeff, you are best known as the writer of "The Submission," which was the inaugural recipient of the Lawrence Hatcher Award and was produced off-Broadway by MCC Theater in 2011. It went on to receive the Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Award for New American Play and was a 2011 O'Neill semifinalist. Your work has been developed with Tact, Utah's pioneer theater company, and Montclair State University. Will, you are a New York-based songwriter and one of the industry's most in-demand music supervisors and a frequent collaborator of the great Andrew Lipa.

[23:01] Will Van Dyke: Yeah.

[23:02] Joey: Yeah, I can speak for you at events if you'd like.

[23:07] Will Van Dyke: You're even a 2021 Grammy Award nominee for your work on the cast recording of the hit revival of "Little Shop of Horrors."

[23:14] Jeff Talbott: Product placement.

[23:15] Will Van Dyke: That's right. Your recent orchestration credits include "Fly," which premiered right before shutdown at La Jolla, "Pretty Woman," "Kinky Boots," "Rent," "The Addams Family," "Grease," and "Wicked," just to name a few. Your band has played all over the country and have notably backed up the likes of Matt Doyle and Anna Lee Ashford, among others. And together, you've written music and lyrics for "Imagine Harry," "Winter Song," "Seven Broken Hearts," and "The Circle in the Wheel." And as a team, you've been finalists for the 2019 Fred Ebb Award.

[23:48] Jeff Talbott: Wow.

[23:49] Joey: So, Jeff and Will, how did you come to collaborate and what inspired you to create this coming-of-age while coming-out musical story of hope?

[23:57] Will Van Dyke: Jeff and I, about five years after that concert and five years after "The Submission" opened, Jeff and I were both looking for collaborators, new people to collaborate with. And Jeff actually sent me an email one day. He was like, I don't know if you are looking to write with new people or anything like that, but I'd love to pick your brain and talk to you. And we went out for chicken and waffles at the Delta Grill, which is sadly gone. And the rest is sort of history. We started talking about a musical, like an idea for a musical that day just over brunch and started writing it, I think, that week. And it was kind of crazy and wild. And that got us to today.

[24:49] Joey: Cool. Well, maybe we could talk a little bit about how you guys came to write this story together.

[24:56] Jeff Talbott: We wanted to write a musical about coming out, but more about the, it's sort of like breaking down that structure a little bit where the musical is about, not just about the event of coming out itself, but sort of the idea of coming out and how it's like that. It's a small, like regular moment. And we tried to frame it in the idea of like one day to sort of like constrain ourselves a little bit to like time and tell a story that way. But it was really important to us that the musical, the event of the musical was not just this concept of like a kid coming out, because we've all seen that story. And more about an entire, like how that affects the people around him and how everybody like gay or straight or whatever comes out almost every single day of their life because we all have things that we're holding on to.

And then we sort of like release them as we grow. And that is what really interested us about this story. And so it's really a show about, you know, a family who's dealing with this one particular event, but they're each, you know, in their own way coming out of something.

[26:12] Will Van Dyke: And it was interesting. I gave this to an Artistic Associate to read and he was like, what does it sound like to you? And I said, you know, it's its own thing, but it's almost like "Dear Evan Hansen" meets "The Prom" in the best way possible.

[26:22] Jeff Talbott: Sure.

[26:23] Will Van Dyke: That's kind of, yeah, I've been saying that a lot lately to Joe too.

[26:26] Joey: So why did you want to be a part of this project though? You know, why, you know, you and Will have written a lot of different shows together, but what sparked your excitement about this show?

[26:33] Jeff Talbott: I think both of us have always had a desire to enter the narrative landscape of talking about coming out, but there are so many, there are so many versions of that story. And for me, we first started fishing out about it, fishing around about adapting, but the stories that we found were either too heavy and too afterschool special or too tricky and too high context. And we really wanted to sell something straightforward about recognizable human beings at a crossing point in their lives where they have to say something scary. So it isn't just about coming out as a gay human being into the world, but everybody in the show has a secret, something they're afraid to share. And by the end of the show, everybody has to face that 10 brave second moment of actually saying something to tell somebody who you are.

[27:30] Joey: Since the show hasn't really had much development, where do you see the show moving next? Or what do you, what do you need?

[27:35] Jeff Talbott: You know, we'd love to hear it. As we all know, the hearing of a musical isn't just get your friends together and then one afternoon do a thing. It takes support. And like everybody, we're looking for the kind of support that could give us 29 hours to actually explore and end that time with all of us finding out something together, because the next step with every piece of writing is asking other human beings to enter the room with you so you can find out what you have.

[28:13] Will Van Dyke: Yeah. Jeff and I are also both big rewriters. Like we like to like put things on people and make it theirs. And so we want to be able to do that with actors and a director and all of those things.

[28:29] Joey: And is it a show you see a lot of movement with? Is it a show, you know, is it more of a, you know, what kind of show is it? Is it a show with big dance numbers? Is this a show in your mind with more movement?

[28:36] Jeff Talbott: You know, I think musicals can be so many things right now. I think it depends on a director's vision, really. I mean, it's heavy narrative. Our, all of our shows have a big book element and we're waiting for that partnership to let somebody lend a visual life to the things so that we can rise to meet that. There's also, because there's a lot of the show takes place in high school. There's also like, you know, that ensemble element that's really interesting to bring into it. And the way we've constructed the show and written it is it's a lot of narrative with those people. So, you know, there there's obviously opportunity for movement, but I, it, it, it's up to somebody to come in and figure that out, you know?

[29:26] Jeff Talbott: We're definitely looking for collaborators and opportunities to take this off the page and potentially go to, or even go to, a retreat or a theater in, say, Connecticut that has great actor housing. And it can be so many things right now. It doesn't know what it wants to be yet, and that's the most exciting part.

[29:42] Will Van Dyke: Yeah. Yeah. We just finished a draft. We're ready to go.

[29:47] Jeff Talbott: You heard it. Cool. Well, let's show the world two amazing numbers from this. The first song is called Off the Playground. Tell us a little bit about what happens before that song is sung in the show.

[29:54] Will Van Dyke: Both of these songs take place back-to-back near the end of the show, and they come at the climax of two different relationships. And Off the Playground comes, the show is largely populated by 16-year-old humans, and this song features two of them who have been at odds for a long time in the show, and they meet on a playground and are discussing what it might mean to actually become a grown-up in the world.

[30:25] Jeff Talbott: I think he put it... Will, do you have anything to add?

[30:28] Will Van Dyke: I was just going to say, and Troy Iwata and Angela Trevino sing it really beautifully.

[30:32] Jeff Talbott: That's right. So here is Off the Playground.

[30:45] ♪ Musical number: "Off the Playground" — performed by Troy Iwata and Angela Trevino ♪

[34:16] Jeff Talbott: Aww. I'll be singing that for the rest of this week.

[34:19] Will Van Dyke: All right, so you said the next song comes right after that song, so tell us a little bit about that.

[34:25] Jeff Talbott: The very next song is the coming out song in the musical, and it's for our young hero who finally tells his dad who he is, but we wanted it to not be the song you expect. So we found, through research, we found a piece of information about a very famous author that allowed us to build into the show a longer story that culminated in not only our main character coming out, but learning something about somebody from history that both Will and I didn't know before we started writing the show.

[34:54] Will Van Dyke: I was going to say it's a very different moment, but it sort of reminds me a little bit of the moment where Alfie Byrne connects with, oh my goodness, Oscar Wilde in A Man of Gold.

[35:06] Jeff Talbott: Oh, yeah.

[35:07] Will Van Dyke: Yep, yep, yep, yep, that's right. Will, you were going to say something?

[35:12] Will Van Dyke: I was just agreeing with Jeff and everyone.

[35:17] Jeff Talbott: And who is singing the song?

[35:18] Will Van Dyke: This is Mackay Hernandez, and he's awesome.

[35:21] Jeff Talbott: He's so awesome. I got a little homework an hour or so ago about a famous author.

[35:37] Will Van Dyke: He's one you probably know. He wrote a lot of weird stuff, but his most famous tale took place out on the water about a captain and a whale. The writer is the story much more than what he wrote. His marriage was a castle. His books became his moat. Let old Captain Ahab be his lonely avatar. His life's a proper lesson on hiding who you are.

[36:14] Mackay Hernandez: It made me tired. It made me mad. It made me look straight in the mirror and be fed up looking sad. I'm done chasing someone who isn't there. And if you don't like who you're seeing, dad, I don't have time to care. I'm not gonna lie again. I'm not gonna cry. I'm tired of wondering when I might start to fly. My life's gonna be my quest to carve my own trail. I'm not gonna be some sad lost captain. I'd rather be the whale.

[37:02] Mackay Hernandez: I'm sitting in the backseat when I should grab the wheel. It's my car, time to drive it and say out loud what's real. You've made it clear it's not who you hoped I'd grow to be. But I'm all through with hiding and living silently. Does this feel strange? Well, that's too bad. You think I'm selfish. I'm not sorry because it's not a passing fad. I'm through with pursuing some phantom goal. To be what everybody needs and fill some worn out empty role. I'm gonna be wide awake, not sleep in a cave. I'm gonna be who I am and who I am is brave. I'll be my own fairy tale, just watch me prevail. I'll be like a fantasy worth chasing. I'm gonna be the whale.

[38:12] Mackay Hernandez: I'm leaving my fear behind and racing ahead. No longer a follower, a lead and not be led. The salty air sweet and clean, I'll pause and inhale. I'm done taking Melville's road to hide and weep and wail. I'm living a big screen life in epic size and scale. The title character is me now. I just became the whale.

[39:01] Mackay Hernandez: I'm the whale.

[39:08] Jeff Talbott: That line at the end, the title character is me now, just really, really got me when I first read it and it still does now.

[39:15] Will Van Dyke: Oh, thanks. So I feel like, you know, your show, we're in an age where coming out is so much more accepted, but getting there is what the hardest thing is. So how do you hope your show will inspire adolescents and young theater kids that need this message and need it so they can be their truest self?

[39:32] Jeff Talbott: I think my dream would be that we're writing a show that a family could come to and at the end of the show, either a kid could turn to his parents or parents could turn to their kid and say, I have something to tell you, you know, that it opens a conversation and creates a platform for a family or a human being to have a conversation with another human being about something they're afraid to talk about.

[39:58] Will Van Dyke: Yeah, I agree with that. I think I really am, like, hooked into this, like, 10 Brave Seconds idea that we came up with, which ended up being the title of the musical. And just the idea that it really, like, the most monumental things that we'll ever do in our life really happen in, like, these, like, really brief seconds. And if you can, like, learn to embrace them and, like, be comfortable with them, you just, you become your true self. And to be able to deliver that message to anyone would be awesome.

[40:36] Jeff Talbott: Yep.

[40:38] Will Van Dyke: I was gonna say, and, you know, coming out isn't always just the extreme trauma that we always hear about. You know, I was really lucky as a kid who grew up in an amazing family in the San Francisco Bay Area during the AIDS crisis. And, you know, I did feel safe and supported to come out. But for me, it wasn't so much that I was afraid to tell my parents. It was that I was afraid to admit it to myself, because stepping over that threshold in those moments of time meant that I had, I got to become a new person, but I had to face the reality of who I was, too.

[41:13] Jeff Talbott: We also very strategically wanted to include some adults in the show. And there's an older gay man in the show who isn't so much a mentor, but a representative of a generation of people who had a different experience to offer a different lens for our lead person to understand that the thing he's facing has been faced in different circumstances for others. And the responsibility that's being passed on should be passed on by him to others. You know, life is a chain, and we're all building links into that chain.

[41:45] Will Van Dyke: Absolutely. And, you know, you could be somewhere like San Francisco, you could be somewhere like Minnesota, and you need the right people to find you to make the right choices, even if you're somewhere super accepting or somewhere not. So it's so important to hear these kind of things. And I love that this title kind of found you. When did you realize the show was going to be called 10 Brave Seconds? Because it sounds like it was a part of the fabric of what your show was before it was your full identity as the title.

[42:11] Jeff Talbott: I don't, I might say this wrong, and Jeff, you might correct me, but I don't know that we knew it was the title right away. But then once we wrote the song, we were like, oh, that's the title of this musical.

[42:24] Will Van Dyke: Right. Because I, maybe?

[42:27] Jeff Talbott: Well, and also, once we realized that time, like 10 seconds was our hinge, it also gave us the larger lens to write a show that takes place in one day. Time is the character in the show. Time is a thing that everybody's working against in good and less good ways. And we wanted to embrace that in a narrative structure, too.

[42:50] Will Van Dyke: So it isn't just your typical musical where the beginning, middle and end happen with flashbacks and all sorts of things that are non-linear. This is ultra-linear in that it takes place from sunup to sundown. And it only takes a day for things to change like that, for it to make a change in your life.

[43:06] Jeff Talbott: That's what's most important. The last one of the last lyrics of the show is sometimes the life can happen in a day, which is exactly what we were going for.

[43:16] Will Van Dyke: So there's a great message and it's cost effective for theater because there's only one costume per person, per se.

[43:23] Jeff Talbott: There you go.

[43:25] Will Van Dyke: Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you both so much for sharing the beginning of 10 Brave Seconds journey. We can't wait to see what happens next and to support you along the way.

[43:36] Jeff Talbott: Oh, thank you so much.

[43:38] Will Van Dyke: Yeah, it's been such a thrill to be here.