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[0:00] Joe Barros: The music of tomorrow is being written today. The music of tomorrow is almost ready to play.

[0:18] Jen Sandler: Experience the musicals of tomorrow today. 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.

[0:40] Joe Barros: I'm Joe Barros and I'm Jen Sandler and we're the hosts of The Musicals of Tomorrow.

[0:46] 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.

[0:56] Jen Sandler: 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] Joe Barros: Each original musical's intention, content and journey are unique and extraordinary to the storytellers who create them.

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

[1:20] Joe Barros: We recently spoke with the writers of Nothing To See Here, Bryan Blaskie and Laurie Hochman, and the writers of The Lesson, Avi Amon, Ty Defoe and Nolan Doran.

[1:32] Joe Barros: Our first musical is Nothing To See Here, which has book and music by Bryan Blaskie and book and lyrics by Laurie Hochman.

[1:40] Joe Barros: In the summer of 1925, the struggling town of Dayton, Tennessee, hosted a trial that claimed national headlines and divided the country.

[1:49] Joe Barros: The Scopes Monkey Trial, the first major anti-evolution court case.

[1:54] Joe Barros: Nothing To See Here is the story of Frank Robinson, the man who built the trial as a publicity stunt for his town, and Mae Robinson, his wife who longs to save her family from falling apart in a seemingly godless town.

[2:09] Joe Barros: Of course, notorious reporter H.L. Mencken is there to spin their story and to uncover what the truth behind the trial really is.

[2:19] Joe Barros: And now here's our conversation with the writers of Nothing To See Here, Bryan Blaskie and Laurie Hochman.

[2:25] Bryan Blaskie: Hello.

[2:26] Laurie Hochman: Hello.

[2:27] Bryan Blaskie: Let's get started.

[2:28] Joe Barros: Bryan, just in case you forgot, you're a composer and a music director. Your music has been performed on both the East and West Coast.

[2:37] Joe Barros: Your musical Assistance premiered off Broadway in the original L.A. production won third place in NMI's search for new musicals.

[2:44] Joe Barros: Your opera Outside, written with the amazing Seth Christenfeld, premiered at NYC's historic Stonewall Inn as part of World Pride in 2019.

[2:53] Joe Barros: How amazing is that? Laurie, you've been a published writer and member of BMI since you were eight years old, and you grew up in northern New Jersey with Jen.

[3:02] Joe Barros: Your music and lyrics have been heard on Nickelodeon's The Wonder Pets, and you also wrote book, additional lyrics, and story for Perfect Life, which premiered at the Austin Theatre Project.

[3:12] Joe Barros: And I also remember something about you musicalizing the Pledge of Allegiance back in the day.

[3:19] Laurie Hochman: Yep.

[3:20] Joe Barros: Yes. I didn't know about that.

[3:22] Laurie Hochman: Many, many moons ago.

[3:24] Laurie Hochman: It was the first piece I ever wrote.

[3:26] Joe Barros: And that's how you became a published writer at eight, probably, right?

[3:29] Laurie Hochman: Yeah.

[3:30] Laurie Hochman: And it was right around 9-11.

[3:32] Joe Barros: Right.

[3:33] Laurie Hochman: We're from a town where they really, really responded well, and we did a lot of things at that time.

[3:37] Joe Barros: Yeah.

[3:38] Joe Barros: So you've heard of the musicals 13 and 9.

[3:40] Laurie Hochman: Well, there's Laurie Hoffman.

[3:41] Bryan Blaskie: Eight.

[3:42] Laurie Hochman: Eight years old.

[3:43] Bryan Blaskie: And Eight and a Half, of course.

[3:45] Joe Barros: That's a movie.

[3:46] Joe Barros: But anyway, enough monkey business.

[3:48] Joe Barros: So Bryan and Laurie, when did you decide to collaborate together, and what inspired you to tell this untold story together?

[3:53] Bryan Blaskie: So we met at NYU's Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program, and we wrote one assignment during the first year when everyone does kind of a round robin of all the lyricists work with all the composers on one project.

[4:04] Bryan Blaskie: And we worked on one, and it was like the easiest thing we'd written all semester.

[4:08] Laurie Hochman: It was done in, what, two nights?

[4:11] Bryan Blaskie: Probably one.

[4:12] Laurie Hochman: I think you wrote the lyric during the assignment that was given to us and then handed it to me afterward.

[4:17] Bryan Blaskie: And we went into a rehearsal room. It was like, wait, like this? And then we were done.

[4:21] Bryan Blaskie: And so when it came time to choose our thesis partner, we had to put together a whole document of everyone we wanted to work with.

[4:28] Bryan Blaskie: And I wrote a page about why I thought I should work with Bryan, and they felt we should work together also.

[4:34] Laurie Hochman: And so we got to work together for a whole year.

[4:37] Bryan Blaskie: So we've been working together since 2017.

[4:41] Joe Barros: So do you rate who you want to work with? Is it like when you get your residency after medical school?

[4:45] Laurie Hochman: Oh, yeah.

[4:46] Laurie Hochman: It's intense. You know, it's like you're spending a year working on a single project with someone.

[4:52] Bryan Blaskie: You want to really work out the compatibility kinks.

[4:55] Laurie Hochman: Yeah.

[4:56] Bryan Blaskie: So she wrote a page on me. I just listed her name, and it all worked out.

[5:00] Laurie Hochman: Yeah.

[5:01] Bryan Blaskie: And so Nothing To See Here was actually our thesis musical that we've kept working on.

[5:06] Bryan Blaskie: And fortunately or unfortunately, it keeps getting more timely.

[5:09] Joe Barros: By the way, we've had a few other NYU theses in our program. Dan Collins and Julianne McDavis wrote a show called Wood that was actually a show we produced in the New York Musical Theater Festival back in the day in 2008.

[5:24] Joe Barros: And also Danny Larson and Michelle Elliott wrote a show called The Yellow Wood, which went on to have an amazing life about a young boy who has ADD and discovers that he has the choice to take his medication if he wants.

[5:35] Joe Barros: And now they're all still connected. Julianne's an instructor there. Danny teaches music, whatever the hell the thing is called, music tutorial.

[5:43] Joe Barros: I forget now. It's been so long. Everybody can't. Once you get in, you're not allowed to leave.

[5:48] Bryan Blaskie: You're like trapped at NYU.

[5:50] Joe Barros: So why this show? Why was this the show you wanted it to be your thesis?

[5:53] Laurie Hochman: So we started the process by doing a ton of research to figure out what we wanted to write about.

[5:58] Laurie Hochman: We knew we wanted to write about something historical. And Bryan found a website on Famous Trials.

[6:05] Bryan Blaskie: Literally Famous Trials dot com.

[6:07] Laurie Hochman: And so he found the Scopes Monkey trial and started doing research.

[6:11] Laurie Hochman: And what actually interested us at first was the William Jennings, Bryan and Clarence Darrow, the two attorneys who had notorious careers.

[6:20] Laurie Hochman: Each Bryan being a failed presidential candidate and Clarence Darrow just coming off the Leopold and Loeb trial.

[6:26] Bryan Blaskie: And so we initially structured the show as being like a love story for the two of them as what could have been behind the scenes.

[6:34] Laurie Hochman: And then the more research we did, we came across this whole conspiracy of how the trial was actually a publicity stunt put on by this business owner to bring essentially to build a tourism market to save the town's economy.

[6:47] Bryan Blaskie: And it was just so ripe for adapting because the people involved with it were so dramatic in and of themselves.

[6:53] Bryan Blaskie: You've got these two nationally beloved or hated people and who became the attorneys. You've also got the judge of the case who had his own agenda.

[7:04] Laurie Hochman: You've got the reporter who was sent in to write about it and who had a syndicated column.

[7:09] Laurie Hochman: And it was all happening during the time the radio was just invented.

[7:12] Bryan Blaskie: So people were tuning in to listen to this as entertainment all while vaudeville was dying.

[7:17] Laurie Hochman: And the nation was all focused in on one particular thing for the first time.

[7:22] Bryan Blaskie: So everybody was just like, what's going on? I was saying like this is like the O.J. Simpson trial of its time.

[7:27] Laurie Hochman: Everybody was paying attention and listening.

[7:29] Bryan Blaskie: So the more we worked on it, the more we found kind of this vaudeville frame for the whole thing that gets totally, totally smashed apart in the end.

[7:37] Jen Sandler: It's interesting because when you were saying that you went to the website to look up famous trials, I thought for sure that the Evelyn Nesbitt, the crime of the century must have been there.

[7:47] Jen Sandler: And when I think of that, you know, that's a vaudeville. And you also mentioned the Leopold and Loeb story, which is also a musical, too, by Stephen Dolganoff called Throw Me.

[7:55] Bryan Blaskie: So we're not the only ones to have discovered this website.

[7:57] Laurie Hochman: Yes. When we were pitching this idea for thesis, someone was like, who wants to watch a musical about a trial? And I go, I absolutely. I absolutely do.

[8:06] Bryan Blaskie: And what was exciting for me as the composer was the different type of musical worlds that were colliding with vaudeville jazz from the south.

[8:13] Bryan Blaskie: But it's set in Dayton, Tennessee, where they had early bluegrass, pre-bluegrass, but like this Appalachian folk music.

[8:19] Bryan Blaskie: And I was like, there's so much to mine here.

[8:22] Laurie Hochman: And what we are going to see tonight is a song that was inspired by the jazz genre and then a song that's a more diegetic setting.

[8:30] Laurie Hochman: But it was really exciting for me to see how do these musical worlds collide.

[8:33] Bryan Blaskie: And similarly for the text, there was all this controversy over this trial being entertainment, as Bryan was talking about.

[8:39] Laurie Hochman: But there was a documentary made, what, 20, 30 years ago. And what stuck with me watching that was this woman who lived in Dayton at the time as a child was saying, well, the media painted us as fanatical.

[8:51] Laurie Hochman: And that's just not how it was. It wasn't like that here.

[8:54] Bryan Blaskie: Part of building the show became, well, OK, what was it like for the people there?

[8:58] Bryan Blaskie: And we got to paint this really, I think, interesting dichotomy between the show of the trial and the grounded real world behind it.

[9:06] Laurie Hochman: So the first number that you're going to hear is the title track. Nothing to see here. It's performed by Jonathan Christopher, who was in the presentation of it and has since become our muse.

[9:17] Bryan Blaskie: We write pretty much anything for his voice.

[9:20] Laurie Hochman: And it is he's playing Mencken, the reporter who came to town and was digesting the story.

[9:25] Bryan Blaskie: So this is his arrival to Dayton, coming off the train.

[9:29] Laurie Hochman: Here is nothing to see here.

[9:40] Jonathan Christopher: This is H.L. Mencken riding home to the Baltimore Sun. If this train ride is anything to go by, this journey's set to be a convoluted one.

[9:54] Jonathan Christopher: What I can't quite figure out is the major players in this ring. Why are two established big cheese lawyers coming down to Dayton to do a little arguing?

[10:11] Jonathan Christopher: Tennessee, what a sleepy countryside. But every small town's got something to hide.

[10:24] Jonathan Christopher: Go watch the trial, Mencken. I hear it's nice there, Mencken. Bring us home a story, Mencken.

[10:32] Jonathan Christopher: There's nothing to write, there's nothing to say, there's nothing to see here.

[10:44] Jonathan Christopher: I could write about the drugstore selling dusty bottle tonics. Or about the banjo player fixing out of tune harmonics.

[10:58] Jonathan Christopher: I could write about the husbands who forget about their missus. Or about the teenage lovers trading promises for kisses.

[11:11] Jonathan Christopher: There's nothing to see here, I don't know what there is for me here. This town is apple pie and fresh mud in the air.

[11:19] Jonathan Christopher: This town is people playing keep away with their home lives in the square. This town gets less and less appealing with everyone I meet.

[11:30] Jonathan Christopher: This town has radio equipment rolling down the street.

[11:38] Jonathan Christopher: Maybe this trial's gonna be a bigger story than I thought. This town may have been so slightly terribly misrepresented by a star reporter who may have recently relented.

[11:54] Jonathan Christopher: I will say the prosecutor's shaking hands with the defender. And that based upon the sides they're on, one is a pretender.

[12:11] Jonathan Christopher: One of them is using the other for his goal. One of them is fighting for control.

[12:24] Jonathan Christopher: Oh. So. There's nothing to see here. There's nothing to see here. Nothing to see here. Nothing to see here.

[12:48] Bryan Blaskie: Makes me want to dance.

[12:50] Laurie Hochman: Well, there is a tap dancing man in a monkey suit. So there you go.

[12:53] Bryan Blaskie: Because like we were trying to talk about earlier, there's this vaudeville world that that is the trial. That's their form of entertainment. We're like, what can we do to throw some weirdness into it?

[13:05] Bryan Blaskie: And so there's a man in a monkey suit that leads us around the vaudeville act and the opening of act two.

[13:10] Laurie Hochman: He does a little tap. Sure does.

[13:12] Joe Barros: So tell us more about your development with the show, you know, past NYU.

[13:16] Bryan Blaskie: So we kept writing as we were starting other shows and we did a table read and then there was a pandemic.

[13:22] Laurie Hochman: But we've continued working on it and especially revising things to be more relatable to now.

[13:28] Bryan Blaskie: Yeah. And this is a show that kind of, pun intended, has evolved. It revisits a lot of the issues that we still experience in terms of, you know, very stark divides with very passionate people on either side circling around the same issues of religion versus secularism.

[13:36] Laurie Hochman: The state versus the people, all sorts of conservative versus liberal. We were like, this show is just more apropos than ever.

[13:58] Ty Defoe: It's a rural town, very similar to Dayton, Tennessee, where this takes place. And they just built a huge performing arts space, gifted by an alum. Well, not just by him, but it's the Michael D. Eisner Center at Denison University. And my dream is to have this show put up there. It's the perfect place where these types of music clash. And it's such a great theater program. I'm like, come on, y'all do it. Make it happen. I'm ready. Let's do it. Have Michael Eisner fund it. If only. He's very involved with the school. I mean, it's his building. We can say nothing to see here at the Eisner Center. It's a great building, y'all. We'd love to check out this next song, Stand Tall. Do we need to know anything more about it?

[14:41] Bryan Blaskie: We should just tell you who's singing it. William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow. William Jennings Bryan was the prosecutor. Clarence Darrow was defending John Scopes. And Bryan was a fundamentalist. And Darrow was a hedonist. And so they didn't see eye to eye on anything, which is why, as I mentioned before, we originally conceived this as like a love story for the two of them. And that all got relegated to one song. This is Late At Night On The Porch. It was reported that they were all, everyone from both sides of the trial were like hanging out and drinking moonshine on the porch at someone's house. And so we're like, well, we have to see these scenes. And so this is after one of those such evenings. And it's maybe the headiest part of the whole show, but I think it's worth bearing. And who is singing the song?

[15:27] Bryan Blaskie: It's William Jennings Bryan is played by Forrest Van Dyke. And Clarence Darrow is played by Jonathan Christopher. We aforementioned. It's so versatile. He's playing two characters tonight.

[15:37] Ty Defoe: There you go. Here is Stand Tall.

[15:39] ♪ Musical number: "Stand Tall" — performed by Forrest Van Dyke and Jonathan Christopher ♪

[20:34] Ty Defoe: I'd like to shiver from that end. I love leaving a lyric, bruises and all.

[20:40] Bryan Blaskie: Thank you. Thank you. Awesome. Well, thank you both so much, Lori and Brian. We hope to see more from the show and if people want to know more about the show and both of you, they can go to Brian's website.

[20:49] Laurie Hochman: Yep. More demos online, more info, some pictures of me. You can get tickets for the production in Ohio soon, I hope.

[20:57] Bryan Blaskie: Yeah, up in Akron. Here we go. Cool. Well, thank you both so much. We'll see you soon.

[21:01] Laurie Hochman: Thank you very much. This was great. Thanks for having us.

[21:04] Pauls Macs: Our second new musical is The Lesson, which has music and lyrics by Avi Amon and Nolan Doran and a book by Ty Defoe. The Lesson is a fantastical reimagining of a chance encounter between a revolutionary Beethoven and a more established Mozart, whose worlds and hearts collide in Vienna in 1786. The show is set in an alternate universe that melds the future and past into an entirely new queer fun and political space, a hybrid of theater, film, concert and dance party. The Lesson is a meditation on the purpose of artistic expression, the influence of family on who we are and the control of information and ideas by the government. And now here's our conversation with the writers of The Lesson, Avi Amon, Ty Defoe and Nolan Doran.

[21:54] Avi Amon: Hey there.

[21:56] Ty Defoe: Hello, hello.

[21:56] Nolan Doran: Hey. Let's get started. Avi, you are a Turkish-American composer, sound artist and educator, and you're the co-writer of The Copper Children, which presented at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Stu at Soho Rep, The Fisherman with HBO, the Black History Museum at HERE Art Center, and Salonika at Berkeley Rep. You are also a Jonathan Larson Grant and New Music USA Grant winner. Ty, you are from the Oneida and Ojibwe nations and are an interdisciplinary artist, actor, writer, and Grammy Award winner. You've received the Global Indigenous Heritage Festival Award, a Robert Reichenberg Artist in Residence, the Jonathan Larson Grant, and are a TransLab Fellow and Cordillera International Film Festival finalist.

Your work includes Red Pine, The Way They Live, Ajijak on Turtle Island, Hear Me Say My Name, Trial and Tears, River of Stone, and Wind Changes Direction. And I'm not even listing all of them. And some of those are written with you and the incredible Tatiya Sinatoke. You are also co-founder of Indigenous Direction, a core member of All My Relations Collective. And as an actor, you're most recognized from Netflix's Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and your Broadway debut in Young Jean Lee's Straight White Men. Nolan, you are a collaborative theater artist as well, a director, a writer, a producer who creates new works across theater and film, including My Eclectic Life at HERE!, Woody, A New Fairy Tale at Main Street Musicals, The Spectrum, and The King.

You were a co-producer and assistant director for the fan-favorite Broadway musical Head Over Heels. And you were the executive producer of Broadway for Bidens in Our America Concert, starring over 150 Broadway artists. I'm exhausted.

[23:41] Ty Defoe: Wow. Show's over, actually.

[23:45] Pauls Macs: So the three of you are certainly very inspiring, as is your collaboration on The Lesson. So Avi, Ty, and Nolan, when did you decide to collaborate together? And what inspired you to want to tell this inspired reimagining together?

[23:58] Avi Amon: I think we all met at NYU Graduate Musical Theater writing, cycle 22. But we met there, we didn't really, we didn't work together initially. We sort of did the first year assignments. They sort of, it's like Project Runway. They're like, here's a project, make it happen, make it work. And, you know, Avi and I did a project together. I think we did Man with Friend based off of a piece from The Met. It was like this really cool, artsy word, spoken word piece. And then Ty and I wrote a piece called Honor and Family with our friend, Colin. And we did it downtown at the, I think it was West Village Musical Theater Factory. And anyway, we worked together, but separately. We all loved each other individually and just never got to work together.

And so eventually many years later, I was sort of like knocking on both of their doors and like, like, I was like, we have to work together. We have to, we have to do something. And it started with me and Avi. We sort of started working on music.

[25:22] Ty Defoe: Yeah. And we like came across this vague entry in some journal that there was a possible lesson that Mozart gave to Beethoven in 1787. And we were like, hmm, interesting, because it's like not confirmed. Who knows? So Nolan and I just kind of started writing songs, no plans to make it into a show, just were like, we had always loved working together, as he was just saying, and just kind of in the way that they make pop songs or like country records is just like, let's just write some tunes and see what happens. And soon enough, we had this like kind of collection of songs. And then we're like, oh, there's actually a story here, which is why we needed to bring Ty for it.

[25:33] Avi Amon: We both share this sort of love of pop music, too, which is why I was so drawn to Avi's musical style on my own, because I sort of came from like this R&B pop background in my other life, and Avi had this sort of classical pop R&B background, like very cool, and multi-ethnic background of all kinds of sounds. And that's why I think it just was, it was so fun to work together, because we could just fuse and make something new. And then we sort of came to Ty was we were like, we need somebody to actually help us tell the story, because we can't, there's no way we can do this by ourselves. We needed somebody as talented as Ty to come on board and help show us the way.

[26:07] Ty Defoe: That's right. And why this like fantastical reimagining? You didn't just tell in a traditional way, you know, you told it differently. Why this way?

[26:14] Avi Amon: Well, we've been attracted to them, like I grew up playing their music, listening to their music, you know, the only music I listened to in my house until I was like, in high school was classical music and Turkish music. So like, I had no other background. So I was very immersed in the world. But, you know, we were kind of talking about this after learning about this lesson that they had, or possibly had, and we like definitely did not want it to just be like a museum piece, which is the way we like to talk about it. Like, this is an interesting thing that happened in history. It's like, how can we take them and what they stood for back then and kind of map it on to some things in our society today, and then with a lesson in a possible future alternate universe on a different, like planet. And yeah, that really allowed us to leave the baggage of history behind.

[27:05] Ty Defoe: Yeah, you were kind of the last piece of this puzzle. You know, why did you want to join this project? Why was the story exciting for you?

[27:11] Nolan Doran: Yeah, that's a great question. I was just about to chime in too. And I said, well, not only are Avi and Nolan, like some of the most styling individuals that I know, but, you know, just wanted to note that we all share a diverse and global and queer type of background that are bound together for quest for innovation. So innovation is the key of creating infinite possibilities. We're talking a lot about thinking outside of the box, thinking outside of binaries that, you know, oftentimes theater and sometimes even musical theater presents itself to us. So, you know, I come from an indigenous folk music stories of sovereignty, and I love colliding and clashing worlds together, like knitting and metal or science and spirit. Like how do those two things go together? Let's try and figure it out. And Nolan,

[27:57] Bryan Blaskie: So watch, don't tune out, stuff.

[28:27] Bryan Blaskie: The motherfucker seems like an awesome song, so tell us about Motherfucker. I can't say it enough.

[28:37] Bryan Blaskie: I know me too, so Motherfucker is the opening of the show, and you enter this world of Beethoven and Mozart, and B.J., Bishop Joseph, and I guess you quickly learn that there's a socio-economic divide in the show between the high court and the low court, and Beethoven is fighting with his father, Mozart is fighting with Bishop Joseph, his boss, and because of his new commission, The Magic Flute, and so we learn about queer love, a triangle that exists, people wanting to get things, if you will, and Motherfucker is a song that also sings about irreverent attitudes towards a type of hierarchy who dictate what art should be. So Nolan, Avi, you want to talk a little bit about the sound? This is a song that we, Nolan and I, just kind of started writing honestly as a joke, but then we're like, oh, maybe this is good, and we just kind of fleshed it out a little bit from that.

We sampled, Nolan, what's the name of the symphony that we sampled for this one? It's a Beethoven symphony, or is it a Mozart symphony? We basically synthesized a lot of their music to sort of come up with a sound that was R&B and pop, but sort of felt like their music, but also had some of the DNA of it, but also felt new and fresh, and it really was a response to, like I said, like to just, I was just pissed off at, personally, I was like, I was mad at like a lot of no's and a lot of people telling you what you need to do in the art world, and I think it was wonderful to just write about it and just be like, and especially like putting it through the lens of Mozart and Beethoven, like how would they react if they were given these constraints. Without any further ado, here is Motherfucker.

[32:42] ♪ Musical number: "Motherfucker" — performed by Bryan Blaskie, Laurie Hochman, Ty Defoe & Nolan Doran ♪

[34:56] Bryan Blaskie: I just wanna, I wanna give a quick shout out. We worked with an amazing orchestrator named Bruce Coughlin on that track. Everybody knows who Bruce Coughlin is, but he really knocked it out of the park for that tune. People who don't know, he is the Tony Award-winning orchestrator of The Light in the Piazza, among other amazing things.

[35:49] Bryan Blaskie: And truly, like, in helping us sort of create this sound that you hear, he was just, he was such a champion for us and couldn't be more grateful to him.

[35:59] Bryan Blaskie: All right. Well, we'd love to know more about the second song, which is called Shit Because of You. I'm just kidding. It's called Because of You.

[36:07] Nolan Doran: I love it. I love it, yo. Oh my goodness. You all, this next song, yeah, it's called Because of You. And we wanna give a shout out to this next performer too, Heath Saunders, who some of you may know from the Big Bad Broadway, right? Heath, come on.

[36:21] Ty Defoe: Yes. He's also a friend of your theater partner. Very talented writer as well.

[36:25] Nolan Doran: Yes. Saunders family. Talented writer, just so talented all around. So during the show, Heath, who is performing this next piece called Because of You, Beethoven wanted nothing more to meet his idol. And so when they finally clash about radical ideas about sort of like what art freedom are, or freedom of expression rather, Mozart is sort of old school and he's a craftsman and he's sort of working for the church and working for BJ. So some of his politics are in question. But it's clear during, right before this piece that Beethoven and Mozart have sexy time. Of course, they fall in love. That allows them to learn about one another's politics after they sleep with each other. And then learning about this great wall that divides actually Vienna, old and Vienna new.

But Beethoven's friends are the have Nazi artists and Mozart's, right, are people of the high court. And so I think this next song talks a little bit about what when your heart goes pitter patter with your moral code versus something trying to, I guess, climb politically climb the ladder. And so Mozart is sort of tested with all of his feelings. They get in a large fight and Mozart is there on the wall that's being constructed looking out over Vienna who Mozart is very, very heartbroken in this moment. This one is a play on Mozart's Sonata in C. We actually do know this one, and everybody knows the beginning of this song, but really attracts the chord changes here. And we just kind of like take it back to this like 80s throwback vibe. So here is Because of You.

[38:11] ♪ Musical number: "Because of You" — performed by Heath Saunders ♪

[40:56] Bryan Blaskie: Well, thank you all so much for being with us tonight and for giving us the lesson of the lesson. We look forward to hearing from and seeing more from it.

[41:10] Ty Defoe: So yeah, you motherfuckers, don't leave us alone.

[41:12] Nolan Doran: All right, motherfuckers, we'll see you soon.

[41:14] Bryan Blaskie: Thanks so much.

[41:15] All: Take care. Good night.

[41:18] Bryan Blaskie: If you enjoyed The Musicals of Tomorrow, please rate, subscribe, and share.

[41:22] Bryan Blaskie: The podcast is co-produced and edited by Paul Smock and Hector Flores Jr.

[41:27] Bryan Blaskie: Our theme song, The Music of Tomorrow, was written by Lynn Shankle and Sarah Cooper for their all-female identifying musical, Perpetual Sunshine and The Ghost Girls.

[41:37] Bryan Blaskie: Join us next time for more of The Musicals of Tomorrow.