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[0:31] R. Alex Murray: Welcome back adventurers to the Ale and Well Met Podcast. It's me, R. Alex Murray, your Universal Swing and Podcast host. We're hanging out with, we've got David Carpenter in the studio with us today, our intrepid producer. Hi, David.

[0:43] David Carpenter: Hi, Alex.

[0:44] R. Alex Murray: How's it going?

[0:45] David Carpenter: It's going well. How are you doing?

[0:46] R. Alex Murray: I am excellent. Thanks for hanging out.

[0:47] David Carpenter: Thanks. I just came from a staff meeting, so I am just already irritated.

[0:51] R. Alex Murray: Listen, you're full of, I saw how many Jolly Ranchers you just ingested. You're full of sugar. You're ready to go.

[0:57] David Carpenter: That's the fun thing. I developed a Jolly Rancher addiction during tech of this show in New York and there was like always a bag of Jolly Ranchers on me and I gained probably 10 pounds. I had not eaten before I started working on this show like years ago. I think I might have eaten like a piece of candy. It had been literal years and all of a sudden we started doing a Dungeons and Dragons show. It was just bags of Swedish Fish in my life all over the place. Yeah, yeah. To the point where I think we did go to like production a little while ago. Can we have some carrots please?

[1:30] R. Alex Murray: Oh my God, please. Just vegetables. My husband, my husband is just like, at one point he tried to slip me like sugar free Jolly Ranchers and I'm like, what is, what is this bullshit? What are you handing me? It's like nothing. This is nothing for me. I can't produce theater on this. This is just a bar of green.

[1:42] David Carpenter: Yeah, man. So we're just going to take a second to chat about like what it takes to make this show where it came from. Usually the first thing we ask our guests and like even cast members when they're new to the show is like, how did you get into nerd stuff? Like where's your touchstone?

[2:04] David Carpenter: I mean like, so I am the oldest one here.

[2:09] R. Alex Murray: You win.

[2:10] David Carpenter: Right? You got me beat. So like I discovered it, you know, before everybody else. I was always a nerd, right? Like my whole life. I think the thing, you know, when you look at the early days, it was, it was my parents buying an Atari in the eighties, right? So having it like having an Atari as a small child and then PC gaming in the early nineties, right? So I was obsessed with Sierra video games, right? Quest for Glory, King's Quest, right?

[2:39] R. Alex Murray: So much King's Quest, dude. Point and click, baby.

[2:41] David Carpenter: Um, point and click, right? But like the original Quest for Glory, the original King's Quest and the original Quest for Glory is when they were like, are, you know, RGB, like the 16 color original, like, like, like I said, I'm the oldest one here, right? Were text entry, text, text-based games, right? I mean like, like Zork, right? If anyone knows Zork, like text-based games, like Ultima when Ultima was, was, was text-based, right? Like that's where I started, right? That's where I finished. So like, it was that. I mean the Quest for Glory games, Quest for Glory 2 was the beginning of all of this because I played it so many times in all three tracks, right? And like, we have a show that is repeatable and three main tracks, like, but it's, but it's, it, you know, it goes kind of got a very like an Atari controller, right?

In your hand, playing this, right? It does one or two things. It's all about pressing something, things in patterns and quickly. And yeah, but like, like Dungeons and Dragons is why those games exist, right? And the format of those games exists that you have these, that you have a, I think at least in Quest for Glory, you have a Paladin and a Mage and a Thief, right? Paladin, Mage, and a Thief. Those are the three classes that you could choose. It's all about goes back to D&D, right? So, so like that, plus I'm a huge sci-fi fantasy nerd reader, right? So like, oh yeah. So I, like my favorite books of the kids, my favorite books as a kid were the Dragonlance books, right? I read, Alex, I read all of them.

There were like 30, 40 books in the series, right? So like, so like starting with those books, which were, again, were based on D&D, right? Right. Cause that's, that was, were those the original probably like serialized from something else that TSR was making them for? Originally published by TSR, right? So, and they were, and you weren't playing D&D. You were just reading. I was reading the books, right? Yeah. And then like, and then I do math. So then, you know, it kept, I've never not had a platform, right? That I like, like from PC to PlayStation, like I've never not had a gaming platform. I was like, geez. Now, you know, I am like a huge board gamer, like I love board games. I love board games.

My husband and I love playing board games. You know, I played a little bit of D&D, but I'm not the D&D expert, right? So like the thing I always tell people is that my interest is, is slightly different. Cause I'm interested in creating content for this audience, right? And in that, in this niche that I, that I, that I found myself and started with Puffs. So I was a producer of, of Puffs, which is, you know, a parody of the Harry Potter universe, right? And it's now the most produced play in the U.S. It's wildly successful. And it did, it ran in New York for three years. It did, it did fine. It was a tough show. It was a tough show to produce in New York. What I discovered in that journey, because I'd read the Potter books, but I wasn't a Potter fanatic, right?

Cause like, I always tell people, like, I like my magic with a little bit more sex and drugs. So like, so like my, like what my go-to, love Harry Dresden, like no question, love Harry Dresden. But like, I love Les Grossman. I think the Magicians, which is a, which is a take on the Narnia Chronicles, right? But like, it's an adult take on the Narnia Chronicles, right? I read them and I, they got out of school in the first half of the first book. And I was like, no, that was all I wanted. Go back to school. So, but, and also just like total side note, Lev Grossman was at our opening in Sydney, Australia, cause that's where he lives. And that was really neat. So like, so like this idea of being able to produce live stage entertainment for this audience is what I care about and what I do for a living because it's like, I am like a nerd.

It's my breath. Like, like in sci-fi, like I now read like hard sci-fi. So like, um, what was the, the Expanse series, right? Which is like, but like, there's a, like, you can go way deeper than that in terms of like books about horrible mechanics and like shit like that. It's like that, like, I like, that's a ton of stuff that I still go hunker. But like for now, right. What I'm like, what I'm doing right now, like literally right now is that, um, I'm during the pandemic, my PS4 bricked and I was bricked with no safety. Everything was lost. And I was, I was like 65% of the way through Red Dead Redemption too. Right. And it was like, I cried, like I cried real tears. So, so I, oh my God, so many perfect pals.

So I had, of course I put it aside. You were spending all your time stalking. When you're like 120 to 130 hours in a game and you lose it and you're just like, my switch got stolen when I was on the final Aeon battle of final fantasy 10. And I'm still, yep. I can't think about it. So I'm like working my way back through it now. I started a few months ago and I'm just taking my sweet time and my husband will come in and he's like, what are you doing? I'm like, trying to run over rabbit stalking, right. Right. Trying to shoot a rabbit with an arrow. He's like, or like, I'm just playing poker and he's like, this doesn't because he doesn't get that game at all. I like a nice long, slow, it's really funny because the thing that we do is so the exact opposite of that, right.

This show is so fast and like, it's never like, all right, well let's make up a mechanic for playing a slow poker game in the middle of that too. But I love that in a video game where you can just be like, yeah, I'm going to do this for a little while. So where this all started, it was in kind of two places, right. Which I know you're going to ask that question. I'm just going to dive into it. Hey David, where did this all start? Um, I saw sleep no more back in 2010, right. When it, right. When it opens, I think that's where 2015 sometime, I think it was 2015 when it opened. I was reading about it having just opened right before I moved to New York, which was like 2011. Okay. So somewhere, somewhere around that.

And I remember going to sleep no more and being really blown away by it and being like, wow, this is really cool. I, as a patron to, to choose what kind of experience I'm going to have, right. Because I get to follow people around. I get to see them like, I'm like, this is really cool. This is the thing that Punch Drunk does. And, but I walked out saying none of my choices actually affected the world, right. Nothing I did mattered, right. And I remember thinking, gosh, like I wish I made a choice that affected a narrative. And then like, and that was just in my brain. I never kind of, it was one of those things that just never left my brain. Right. So then a few years later, probably in 2016, I came across a play that the audience was handed remotes, like push-button remotes when they walked into the theater and, and it was tied to educational polling software, right. That was just on a laptop, like your laptop, that was just projected out like you would in a classroom, right.

[9:34] David Carpenter: Were they like.

[9:35] R. Alex Murray: Like, like ABCD radio frequency remotes.

[9:38] David Carpenter: Proprietary technology remotes.

[9:40] R. Alex Murray: Like any, you could get out of a radio shack, you know, right. Like, like literally a radio frequency that you could find.

[9:46] David Carpenter: But they have like a bucket of.

[9:48] R. Alex Murray: Yeah, exactly. Right. So, so I saw, and so.

[9:53] David Carpenter: No, in 2016, we all had a smartphone in our pocket.

[9:55] R. Alex Murray: Yeah, right. That's the, that's the point of the story. Right. So, so I remember, and the show was a rom-com and it was about a guy who's always been unlucky in love and he finds this object. I won't say what it is, right. Now, Jeannie pops out of this object and Jeannie's like, I'm going to help you in love because I helped your grandfather, so I'm going to help you. Right. Right. Yeah.

[10:13] David Carpenter: Is it Click? Is it Click the musical?

[10:15] R. Alex Murray: And so, no. And so what happens is that this Jeannie, like it didn't actually make any sense, but like the audience was helping the Jeannie and you got to make a decision for this guy on, like on going out on a date. Right. And there was a point system built in. Right. And so like you got to make all these choices over the course of the evening that affected what happened, like what line, what he would wear, where there go, what lines you say, even like what woman he goes on a date with, which is problematic. And I'll come back to that in a second.

[10:44] David Carpenter: And so if you voted a hundred percent, like positively for this guy throughout the entire evening, the ending you got was he slept with a girl. Right. And if you voted a hundred percent negative. This is like a, just a live mobile dating. Right. But this is 2016. Right. Totally negatively. He throws himself off a bridge and then everything in between. Right. And yeah, so funny. So like, so like, so song, there's a choose your own adventure. Like the Yeti eats your ball sack. So, yeah. So I was the first time I'd ever seen anyone successfully integrate that into a show, like a gaming mechanism where the audience and I'd show, I opt in the show immediately. I was like this fucking brilliant. I got to do this.

Right. So there were problems in the script. Right. There were two big problems. One, I said, Hey, this handing people a remote, this is not a scalable thing. You can't do this. It's never going to work. Right. I'm going to go fix this problem. Wild. Right. And I said, here's pages and pages and pages of notes about your script. Right. Which is like, well, it's super misogynist. Like all the women that you've, that you populate, that you make the audience choose are really broken. That's a problem. Like the sleeping with the girl, the reward at the end, that's a really big problem. Like notes and notes and notes. Three months later, Arthur comes back and hands in a script that is wholly unchanged from the original script.

Now, during that time, I had met this technologist named Dave Keene and brought him this problem. And Dave said, well, let's build an app. And I said, we can't build an app. Right. I said, the problem with an app, and you know this, right? Nobody's going to. It's not that it's not that it's not it's it's most of our audience for this show comes in at two minutes till curtain. That's also true. Right. No, that is the that is the problem. Right. So that unless they can scan it on their way from the box office to when they're in the seat at any moment of time, have instant access to their technology. It is it is dead on arrival. Right. And I said that to Dave and Dave said, well, OK, we have to do it mobile web based.

Let me go figure that out. So he goes and figures out gamiotics. Right. So I show back up three months later and I have gamiotic, the rudimentary beginnings of gamiotics. And the other turns in the script and I call the author. I was like, you didn't take any of the notes. And he was like, if you didn't like my script, then you shouldn't have optioned it. My script is perfect. And I was like, you idiot. I know. I was like, peace out, dude. Like your option runs out in June. I'm like, good luck. Good luck. Have a great time. Like, appreciate the collaboration. Like it happens. But I was like, great. Now I'm out. Ten thousand dollars. But fine. I was actually. No, we've done a reading and everything like like.

Yeah. No, I think I'd spent like fifty thousand dollars on that thing by that point. Sure. So so I'm now left with this software and nothing to do with it very quickly for people listening, because we get questions about like, why don't you do this? Why don't you do that? Why don't you do this? I like everyone to think about how very casually David just said fifty thousand dollars and threw his hands up as like the people are like, oh, what? Couldn't you? Couldn't you? Could you? It costs some money. Live theater is it's expensive. Sorry. I didn't mean to break. No, no, it's very true. No, no, it was very nice to have you go like, well, I'm like, I spent this money, but I have this software.

Now what? Like I'm I'm in like I'm in deep now. Now what do I do? So I commissioned a play that I worked on for about two and a half years. I just couldn't get it to work. And the main problem with the play is that it was built where the audience the audience controlled the protagonist and all the decisions of the protagonist made. Yeah, that was problem number one. The real issue was that is that they the people who did this play for me use the technology as a gimmick instead of a tool. And so by the end of that process, I had a foundational problem, a narrative foundational problem being like, well, this isn't quite working. I don't I don't think I have the time to figure this out. But I have a bigger problem, which is this can't be a gimmick.

Like you can't you can't make the software gimmick because then it's like you're killing the experience, which is what happened. I couldn't get that thing off the ground. So OK, so you want me to say something really stupid and arrogant. Then I had to go produce a Broadway show. Right. Yeah, right. And that's true. I got my I got a I got my first offer for a theater and I produced the Slava Snow Show on Broadway in 2019. Yes.

[16:00] David Carpenter: I remember to this day, I remember exactly what happened. It's a crystal clear memory. Sitting in my attic where my office is, staring at the wall being like, now what do I do? And I just remember going downstairs and saying to Jacob, my husband, and saying, pick up a pen, pick up a piece of paper. We have two assets to our name. It's this house and we have this software. Everyone's out of work. We're going to start writing adventures for people to play at home, right? And so we did this thing called... And the second person I called was my... Yeah, I called my friend, Caroline Prue, who's no longer with us. And I said, you need to help me write this. And she helped me. Basically, that was the beginning of Gameotics, right?

That's where it really started. And so we spent 18 months writing all... I hired a whole team of writers, right? Because I got, you know, government money. I hired a whole team of writers. And I raised some money from investors. And I just started putting together all these different types of adventures. And we did murder mysteries. And we did one of my favorite shows we ever did. We had two of my favorite shows we ever did. We did this teen camp horror show called Camp Stab Away. It was hysterical. And then we did a Christmas show called A Christmas Karen that was amazing that my friend Kevin Hammons wrote that was absolutely just brilliant. And we just started writing these things in the audience.

And we'd perform them on Zoom. We'd make digital backgrounds. Like, we'd go to all these... I mean, it was crazy. And people would... Wherever they were in the country, they'd join us on Zoom and they'd play... Use Gameotics at home to affect the nature of the narrative. And that's how we learned how to write these things, right? Out of that, one of the things we did was a D&D show, right? And that was the beginning of Twentyside Tavern. The original version of it was called Seize the Dragon because we were doing this thing called Seize the Show. And with Seize the Dragon, it was... Of everything that we did... Because by that point, I was looking... We were just like, okay, the pandemic is going to start easing.

I need to start moving back to live stage. What am I going to pick? Why this? And it was... Okay, so what I learned during the pandemic was what Gameotics is is a tool for the gamification of live entertainment. That is what that company does now. That is what I am after with my technology companies, bringing this idea of this type of video game style narrative structure, right? This idea of never the same show twice, right? This idea of branching narrative structure that some people call choose your own adventure. I do not because that is trademarked. An adventure that you choose by yourself. And I thought, okay, this... I want to take this. I want to take this side of the stage. It goes back to the sleep no more thing I said earlier.

What D&D did was, well, it is already a game. And it is already a story-based game. So how do we figure out how we give... How do we turn an audience of the fifth player? And that was... It is also a game where you have to make decisions all the time. And we are rolling a dice, right? It seems built in, I guess. Yeah. Well, and then your audience... Your mysteries do not intrinsically have a dice rolling chaos effect. Well, and your audience is there to see a game. Yeah. Right? So, like, it just like... It checked all the right boxes, if that makes sense, in a way that was like, if I am going to take a risk now, and we are going to return to live stage, I think this is the thing that I want to go with, right?

That was also right about the time where the whole freaking world that started playing this game, right? And then also, like, live plays. Got hot. Got hot as hell. Yeah. Got really hot. Yeah. So the timing was correct, right? Look. Look. A hot iron. Let us strike it. Yeah, exactly. But it lent itself to the tool, and it was easier to explain... The tool meaning Gamiotics. It was easier to explain and saying, this is what we are doing. Because I spent a lot of time trying to explain what Gamiotics was. When we got to this, it was like, no, no, no, we are doing this D&D game live on stage. And Gamiotics was just not even part of the conversation, right? And that is how I sold it. We started developing it at Gamiotics, right?

Were you using Gamiotics all the way? Yeah. All the way back in Philly. In Philly, yeah. Because, yeah, I know. I used Gamiotics when we were at the asylum. Yeah, yeah. This has been developed since with Gamiotics from day one. Day one. Yeah, yeah. So we developed it, and so it just kind of kept going from there, right? And then I think you know this story, which is like, I'm on the phone. My friend, Mark Fleischer, who runs the Pittsburgh CLO, he called me because they were producing Puffs in May of 22, and he wanted some advice on marketing. And he said, offhand, what are you working on? And I said, well, I'm doing this D&D show, this interactive D&D show. And he said, how fast can you bring it in, and how much?

And I said, if you split the bill with me, I could get it to you by March, right? I don't think I knew that's why we did it so fast. That's why we did it so fast, because I had a production opportunity. It was light speed. Y'all, seriously, and then we're talking as an actor coming in, who I had been involved on some work, some creative workshops, but it had been done, what, for like two weeks at the asylum and once at the Philly Fringe? Four. We did Philly Fringe. Yeah. Four individual performances at the asylum. Just the four. Just the four. And then, did we do a week in New York before we went to Pittsburgh? No. At the asylum? No, we just went and did it. Oh, man, what were you thinking? It was wild.

It was also one of the things we were like- No, wait, I'm not sure, but no, I think we did a week. I think we tested a week. I don't know, I'd have to go back and look. No, that was before Edinburgh. We did two tests. No, we did two week-long tests. We did two tests. We did one at the asylum, then we did one at the DR2 before Edinburgh. Edinburgh, but I've never done this show in New York until we were doing this one. Oh, so we did a week at the asylum- Yeah. We did a week at the asylum before going to Pittsburgh to test out some story ideas. And the asylum, we actually put it together for the first time. Yeah, I think it was, yes, the asylum, put it together for the first time, and then we rehearsed for Pittsburgh and went to Pittsburgh.

We had a long tech in Pittsburgh, but we didn't do it. It was like we were in the rehearsal room and using chairs, and then we walked into the PCLO and had this big, giant room, which seemed, at the time, I was like, huge, massive, three screens. And I think about it now, we also had the cauldron that we had to go run off stage and pick up and walk in, and then I had to put it down and I had to reach down and turn on the fog machine inside of it. Oh, I've forgotten about that. Yeah, yeah. Oh my God, that was insane. Yeah. And then- People would buy us beers and hand them to us. Yeah, I remember that. That was one of my favorite things. Well, I also just remember that first preview, no one knew what to do on stage.

Do you remember that? No one knew what to do. We had the first preview, the first two people that I talked to were these adorable little old women who walked in and they were like, we don't have smartphones. And I was like, okay, do you know anything about Dungeons and Dragons? And they were like, no, we're just seasoned ticket holders to this place and we're excited. And they had a blast. They had a blast, yeah. They had so much fun yelling for their sexy rogue to do sexy things. They were loving it. It was nuts. And so, in that, we learned a lot on that production. We went and then we took- We had dice cams there, which I don't think we'd had before either. Dice cams were new for that production, yeah.

Yeah, and that was my favorite production story is that I was watching in the audience one day, someone rolled the dice and an action card fell over on it and they shrugged at the room, flipped it over and it was a 20. And the guy sitting next to me stood up and threw his chair across the theater. And I just went, we're going to work forever. Like, this is wild. This is it. This is just- Like, so we got Edinburgh Fringe off of Pittsburgh, right? Like, I had been working on it. I've been actually working on trying to get a show to Edinburgh Fringe for years. And like, when I had the Pittsburgh production, they said, great, let's commit, let's do it. And then as we were prepping for Edinburgh, then we got Chicago.

So, that was the hardest. That was, there's been a lot of hard. This show has been, I mean, like, I love this show. There's nothing but how hard this show has been at every step of the way. Because like, we had to go to Edinburgh and then come back and do Chicago, like, with a month's, maybe two months turnaround. And put a whole, yeah, it was nuts. Chicago was tough until it wasn't. Sure. Yeah. I remember right at the beginning of my run in Chicago, houses were still low. And then all of a sudden every nerd in the Midwest found us. It was awesome. Yeah. And then we had to take a hiatus for a year. Sure. Like, that was like, that was a tough year because, so we got out of, what happened was- I think that's a big question, right?

How did you end up with Hasbro? How did we end up getting the ampersand? So, I know the people over at Path Entertainment who, so they run Monopoly Life Size and they're bringing it, they're doing it here in the States now. And they have a relationship with Hasbro, right? And they had come to see the show in Edinburgh and they came and saw the show in Chicago. And they asked, they said, do you, what do you think? Now, one of the, we were, so the thing about the show is that I had a year-long tour booked out of Chicago, right? I was ready. Right. And I was getting ready to go to three months in Toronto and then hit the road in splits and one-nighters, right, with the show. And that set could have handled that.

Yes. I remember you saying, we built this to go into a truck. So, the problem that I have on Puffs, because this actually goes back to Puffs, was Puffs was unofficial, right? And I spent three years exchanging nasty letters between lawyers. I bet. Right? The owner of that IP, famously chill. Ms. Rowling did not care for our existence, but we were perfectly legal within the States. There was a lot of ugly conversation back and forth, but, you know, we stood our ground and they recognized our, I mean, as much as they ever could, our legal right to exist within the US, but we're very clear that if I ever took the show to the UK, she would sue the pants off me. Sure. Right? I have that in writing, right?

Or, you know, or whatever language of being like- Legally. Right? The legalese- I can see it being actually like, I will sue, I will take your pants. Your pants will be mine. Yeah, your pants will be mine. Every last pair of chinos. You know, that was a really big disappointment to me. Now, you know, Puffs, I believe, is perfectly legal to do in the UK, but I don't have a million pounds to put at risk. Sure. Right? Because if you lose a legal battle like that in the UK, you pay the other side's fees. That's the risk. So, but, so, so anyway, so it's gate locked, but in here, Canada and Australia, which all have similar or same parity laws, right? Yeah. And the other thing that happened on Puffs, the reason why Puffs closed in New York is because Cursed Child opened, right?

Yeah, sure. Right? Because our- Now there's an actual thing to go through. Our audience all went, nope, going to the official and disappeared that summer. That thing's a stunt show, though. Like, it's just a- It's the official show. So when- That's true. I mean, yeah, absolutely. Path asked me, do you want us to go to Hasbro? And I thought, and we had debated about it internally and there were pros and cons, but I was like, you know, I think it will benefit us if we go the official route. Sure. And so we said, yeah. Took 11 months to negotiate that deal. Yeah. Right? So while we were negotiating that deal, we couldn't do anything because we had to wait. No, I got a whole lot of just- Yeah. Just keep busy.

Emails. Just keep busy this year. And so then opened this show, and it's, I would say that, like, it's a, the show that we opened here in New York is a bit of a re-skin of Chicago, right? Yeah. There's a cauldron again. I've got a lot of questions from people, and really what people want to know is, like, why did you make the decisions? How did you write the stories? And, like, we were talking a lot before we started recording that, like, the thing's alive, right? We never stopped working on it. No, we never stopped working on it. Do you want to talk about the actuators that we thought were going to come out of the ground at one point? It was a ill-conceived idea. Sure. It was pitched to us by a very smart gentleman, and it was never properly integrated, but that we were supposed to have five pillars rise up from the set, that instead of throwing things into the ritual, into the sarcophagus, right, we would place it on the pillar.

Yeah, it was going to be a fifth element, actually. Yeah, exactly, place a pillar. And it didn't work. No. At all. And I literally remember saying to our production manager, like, we still got that cauldron somewhere? He's like, yeah, it's, like, we chipped a- It's the same ass one? I'm like, go pull it, because we're going to re-tech this thing to death. And we literally put it back in the show in two days. We're like, may the script changers get it in. You know, there's some challenges when we open the show in New York, right, in that we didn't actually solve all of the problems that needed to be solved with the show. Right. And so we were talking about how it's like, yeah, as you said, it's like, you know this for a fact, we never stopped working on it.

Like, we took a breath at the top of the summer, and then we kind of dived back in. And Michael Fell and I spent the month of August with the cast re-rehearsing a whole ton of changes to the script. The main thing that came out of opening, for me, was the adventure wasn't clear. Right. Why were we there, right? Yep. And that was kind of coupled with this, that the show was originally really

[30:28] David Carpenter: So one of the big changes, and I'll give you an example of the big changes, is that we, so there were kind of two things going on. There's too much of the DM show, and I'm not getting enough of the story. And so we went back and we rewrote to bring more prominence to, like, why are we here? Well, the world's ending because the wizard fucked up. Yeah, the Lord dumped. The Lord dumped, right? All the DMs were handed a rare thing in this show, a large piece of text to memorize. So we brought the story forward, right, in a way that hadn't been there before. But then in the second act, we took the DM and said, get out from behind the bar, right? That was another thing that was happening kind of constantly, was the DM was just stuck behind the bar.

And so we changed it and we pulled Connor now. We said, get downstage. And they're like, well, now we don't have a DM. We're like, okay, well, the TK is going to have to, and like, and we made all these changes. The TK has become so much more because of that. And so that allowed us to just have the adventure, right, really move center of it, right? Well, to all of your points, all of a sudden now the audience is really dictating stuff. Because of all those things, because everything's so fluid, the AB decisions matter more. The over-unders matter more. Every decision that the audience makes is like more powerful. And now they're really playing a game. Yeah. And the story is really... And so now with the feedback that we got, if people started seeing it, I think we put the changes in September, we're like, oh no, now I see the story.

People would go to the show, like, I had a great time. I have no idea what it was about, was the constant thing, right? And so then after September, you know, this huge shift to being like, what was it about? And people were able to tell you what the plot was, right? It's still a little thin for me now, but next campaign. Well, we're not done working on it, are we? So then Phil and I go to Australia. So one of the challenges of the fall is like, in order to make like cue changes, I have to fly all the designers in. I got to hold a couple of days for tech. We got to do this. It's just expensive. And we had Australia, we had Sydney Opera House come up and I said, let's take this opportunity at tech and go in and change the cues that we need to change.

And so we did that. And if you look at the reviews from Australia, the reviews in Australia are better than we have in New York, because everything is clearer and more streamlined, right? Like everything is clear. We took out things from the show that are unnecessary. I made a bunch of changes in the ritual that I love down there that eventually, like we removed a bunch of just extraneous crap from it and streamlined it and made a better show because we had a chance to retech. We actually are going to put that in that version of the show because we know exactly what we're doing and we can do it in a day, right? Because we know what we're doing now, right? It all exists. Everything's built. We just pull the software.

We pull the code from Australia. We pull the images and then we spend eight hours in the theater. I think it's going to be like March 3rd or something. I think we're going to do it. I think it's on your calendar. And we put the Australian version in New York. And so then that is like what the final version of this campaign will be, right? And then it's like, okay, for the next campaign, what do we want to do? That's a big question we get all the time. I think you have answered that in the last 20 minutes of talking. It's like, you can't just write another one. So one of the things about the show is that we have this... And again, the show is unique like full stop worldwide, right? There's nothing else like the show anywhere else in the world.

The... When you're doing a play or a musical, it's linear. We go from Q1 to Q2 to Q3 to Q4, right? That is how the show works. Like full stop, everything is done linear. This is a non-linear show, right? So sometimes we jump out of the world, but we do re-rolls, right? We've broken backstage people doing this show. Oh yeah, absolutely. They just can't handle having to bob and weave. One of the things we have in the show is we have this guy, we have this guy named Chet, who wrote software that allows the lighting and the sound and the video projections to be where they need to be depending on the choice that the audience makes. Chet is much beloved in the community. He's on Discord all the time.

Shout out, buddy. Yeah, yeah. Shout out to Chet. And so we have this software that talks to all of our entertainment control systems that allows the stage manager to be able to naturally go where the show is going, right? It's really, really cool. Anytime we change a cue, we have to update the software. Any little change, it's so hard to do without calling everybody together and say, hey, we got to go in and release. So it's like you can't just make a tech change on the show. You actually have to go back in for a day and sit down. It's called Vertex. Vertex has got to be changed. It's got to be matched up. We have to make sure that everything's talking well with each other. So we did that in Australia.

So it's easy for us to do it now in New York, easy, but easier for us to do in New York. But to be able to put a new campaign in or to make changes, it's a heavy lift, right? Yeah, yeah. So the reason why I'm doing the Oz version now here is that that's the version that's going to go on the road because I want to get it done. And so then we have a short tech, which I can't say where, but we are premiering the tour at the Kennedy Center in D.C. in July. But we'll do a short tech because it just hasn't been announced at the theater yet. And it's like I don't want to spend any time trying to do anything new. This is the version that I am happiest with so far. And then we're going to tour the country with that version.

And then once I get that launched, then I'm going to sit down and say, okay. Maybe another one. Yes. And several people have approached me about wanting to do it. Sure. And so I'm just like, cool. Give me a minute. Let me take a nap. Give me a minute. Let me get this tour launched. You know, the video, the video projections in the show, right. Yeah. Cost six figures, low six figures. Sure. Yeah. Absolutely. Right. Best designers in California, graphic designers in California. They're all like the quality is extremely high. So it's like I run a new campaign. We start with, well, that's $100,000 check. Right. Sure. Yeah. Absolutely. Got to write a whole new code. Got to rehearse a whole new thing.

Like, so it's not like new campaigns are easily north of a quarter million dollars from a creative standpoint, before we get to like having to go in and recheck it, like rehearse and recheck. Right. Yeah. So I have to make space for that. And we have just not had that opportunity in New York at all, and we'll have the opportunity at some point on the road to be able to start developing more stuff. Hell yeah. Yeah. So that's the plan. It's just like, I think the thing, I think the thing that is frustrating to me is live entertainment when it gets moving, only moves extraordinarily slow. Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, I know this, I mean, we all knew this and it's, it's very funny and I, it's nice to say it out loud because this is the thing we get.

I mean, like, listen, friends, we're coming with more. We've also got some other stuff in the works in this podcast as part of it is like service to people who want more from all of us. There are things happening, but like, yeah, another whole ass campaign with, and also like people see these pictures of all the other characters and they want the characters and there's like emojis in the discord that they're like, who are the, and they want more like we're, we're, we're coming. I, and I haven't even talked to our illustrator about it, but I did talk to Michael Fell. And I will say it here, which is like, I have asked for an expansion of our character set going into the tour because it's time.

And, and, but also anytime you add a character requires programming changes and more visuals and more, everything, we're going to need more costumes. We're going to need more stuff. We're going to need more. Yeah. And also we're going to need more costumes for me. I am not the same size as Maddie. So like, yep. I mean, the other, we're running out of a space with guest stars to keep people's base layers. We got, we got tubs full of like blue sweatshirts. Well, that's, I mean, that's another thing, like talk about a time suck, right? Which is the star casting celebrity casting that we've done this year. And I'm not even near done yet. Has been, it's a huge drain on resources for me because it's an enormous amount of time to, to get these people in the show.

So that's a, that's a, a, another big part of my job right now is I, is that's something that I, that I do personally. I don't negotiate the contracts, Heather Shields does, but managing this whole process of getting these, of getting these, but now we've become a destination for everybody in the D and D world, except for the critical people. It's very cool. We're too busy this year. Whatever we got to bring it. Well, I mean, this has been great. Thank you for coming and talking. Like, I think it clears up a lot of, like, I have a bunch of questions. Thank you. I like Vesper, nobody, Percy, a qualitative vacuum and Fifi for sending questions in. I think a lot of them got answered, but, um, I think I, there's, this is a good one, but we're going to ask a couple of questions here at the end.

Uh, speaking of right on that one, do you have any dream guests for the show? Would there be somebody just for you? Like blue sky, wild, like it would be just insane to like have in your, I mean, like I'm dying to get Matt Mercer in the show. I'm begging Matt. I mean, I mean for you. Oh, for me. Oh no. I already did. Right. Oh yeah. So stupid. Right. This is stupid, but it was our first one. It was Felicia. Right. I like Mike, my two cats who have now passed on, we're named Buffy and Spike. Yep. Our, our cat that is still alive is named faith. And our dog is named Willow. Like, like, like that having a connection, a direct connection to that television show, which is foundational in my life.

Right. Like I, and I love her. Right. Like she was hard for me to meet her. And then two days later it was very cool and chill. Yeah. And so like that, so that was a dream. I mean, obviously Neil is a, is a dream and just the nicest human being. Everyone's great. Like, no, I know I'm having a, I'm having a blast with all of them. I'm trying to think if there's like anyone like crazy. No, not really. Right. Cause we're actually doing it. Right. I mean, that's what's really cool. It's like, no, no, no, that, that one that already got them. What's just one thing that you're especially proud of with like that exists in the show right now? Okay. So one of my friends came and saw the show at some point during the run of this last year and brought their child teenager who is going through trying to figure out what their gender identity is and, and, and everything.

And this, and this is like, I've had this experience on the show kind of in several ways with kids, right? I mean, we're talking teenagers, we're talking like 12 to 14 years old and they come to the show and they see a world where gender is not a subject, right? A, a, an identity. I mean, and that's kind of the point of D and D I can create a character and be anything, but we take it from a live entertainment level to a whole different place in terms of like how we don't, we, and I think, you know, this, we've talked about it. We, what we do is called the Schitt's Creek rule, right? In that, in that we create, we don't, we create, we create the world that we want to live in, right? And in this world, there is no conversation about gender identity because no one cares, right?

Cause it's just right. And in Schitt's Creek, there is no conversation about homophobia or gay because they don't live in a homophobic world. And so what we do is we present the world as we, as we want it to be seen as a, you know, as opposed to like having to like belabor all these questions and for kids, right? For teenagers to see that world is life-changing for them, right? Because they've never been presented before. The other part of it is the technology, right? Whereas like you have kids and teenagers who are getting railed about these devices that they have, railed on about these devices they have, and then they see a show where it's like, yeah, use it. And it's no big deal, right? And they're like, and like, and, and so for me as a queer kid growing up in Atlanta during the nineties, and I would go to theater and I would, and I love theater and I would feel so seen, I'm now watching kids who are teenagers who are coming to our show and feeling seen for the first time, right?

And like, it's like, it's emotional for me, but it's like, it is, it is, um, I was, I saw a friend of mine a couple of weeks ago and we were talking about, you know, the election and talking about stuff and he's like, you know, and everyone's kind of like, well, I don't know, what should I, you know, what do we do? What do we do? And I said, well, I'm, I'm doing it. I've said that a million times. Yeah, I'm doing it. Right. So I feel so lucky right now to be able to tell these stories every night. And so this is my, this is my part in it, but it's also, you know, somewhere in all of this, there's some kid who's going to have a brilliant idea for technology and live entertainment in 30 years, right?

That is going to then be the holodeck, right? So like, that's it. Like, that's why, so it's like, like it's, it's achieved all of, all of the things that, that it should and needs to. Now I want the country to see it. Right now I want it. So my big thing right now, you've heard me, it's like, what I'm really gunning for is the road. Yeah. Like it got, it's time to take the show on the road. It's time to show the rest of the country and not just be so gate locked in New York city, but show the rest of the country what, what we've been so, so successful at here. Yeah. Right. So touring is the next thing. Hell yeah. Well, thanks so much for sitting down with us. Thanks for sharing your time. Y'all, David is a busy, busy human being a meeting into this, into, I think another meeting. So, um, and I, I got to get ready to go do a show tonight. Thanks so much. Uh, we end the show every time this way. So, uh, thank you. And until next time, ale and well met.