This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Music

[0:22] Teresa Attridge: Ever wonder what it takes to make a new musical sing? Our mission is to give you an inclusive look behind the scenes. We're interviewing the creatives who are changing musical theater one 11 o'clock number at a time. This is your Backstage Pass.

[0:43] Teresa Attridge: Hello, everyone. Hello, Barnacles. Welcome to another episode of Backstage Pass. We have a really fantastic episode for you today. We've got Janine McGuire and Arri Lawton Simon here today to talk about their musical The Bubble. Hi, everybody.

[0:54] Janine McGuire: I'm Janine.

[0:59] Arri Lawton Simon: I'm Arri. We're really glad to talk to you today. It was really a pleasure reviewing this show. This show was actually recommended to me by Joe Barros, the artistic director of New York Theater Barn. And I knew a little bit about the show, the plot of the show as I dove in, but I was emotionally unprepared for how deeply moved I would be by your piece. So I'm really excited to talk with you about it today. Getting to play that music too, such emotional depth and such bops all in one place. It's almost like we could really have it all. Do you know what I mean?

[1:30] Janine McGuire: That was our aim for putting together the score was to find and musicalize many moments of joy that really put love on stage, romantic love, platonic love, community love. So a lot of the songs really do have a lot of joy and fun within them. And then of course, because it is the type of story that it is and there is tragedy within this love story, the songs also we, you know, we hope and we're hearing from you go to a place that is very emotional as well.

[1:55] Teresa Attridge: That's very true. I'm really excited to share them with our listeners. You know what else we should share with our listeners, pals, we should probably give our little book report on these two little cuties, give everyone their little bio.

[2:02] Pauls Macs: Absolutely. Just, you know, for some people, this can be an uncomfortable experience, but you're just gonna have to endure it.

[2:11] Janine McGuire: That's fine. We wrote that bio.

[2:16] Arri Lawton Simon: You did write it and you wrote it together. This is one of our first team bios. I'm obsessed. You'll find that we do a lot of things jointly.

[2:23] Janine McGuire: Listen, we're gonna hear more about that. It's such a huge theme of the piece. All right, well, here we go. Janine McGuire and Arri Lawton Simon, aka McGuire and Simon, are an award-winning musical theater writing and producing team based in New York City. They both serve on the steering committee of the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop and are active members and frequent moderators of the BMI Advanced Songwriting and Bookwriting Workshops. Their musicals include The Bubble, which is based on the 2006 film, Express, and Kibbe the Space Dog. Their work has been developed by the Dramatists Guild Foundation Fellowship, Goodspeed Musicals, New York Theater Barn, and Rhinebeck Writers Retreat. They've contributed original songs to the Rainbow Lullaby album on Broadway Records, the Broadway Star Project, and the Lottie Linya Songbook, and have produced sold-out concerts at 54 Below, the Green Room 42, and more. You can find out more at www.mcguireandsimon.com.

[3:12] Teresa Attridge: Janine, Arri, I would love to know, we'd love to know, how you met and how you came to collaborate, and especially, you know, why you chose to work on The Bubble.

[3:24] Arri Lawton Simon: Well, we met at the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop in fall of 2012.

[3:31] Janine McGuire: We love it!

[3:36] Arri Lawton Simon: And yes, it's, we have great skin.

[3:41] Janine McGuire: Oh, truly! You know, the years are there, but we met there in the first year. BMI is structured at least the first two years in a series of assignments. We were paired together for the first assignment of first year, and then after we had worked with about six other people on different assignments, by the end of the year, once you've experienced working with half of the class and experiencing the rest of the half of the class's work, you choose a collaborator to work your second year with on one project that they encourage to be an adaptation of something, but you work towards writing a full-length musical.

[4:04] Janine McGuire: And so Arri and I chose each other and started working on a project second year, which was an adaptation of a different film that we got a very hard and fast no for when we petitioned for the rights at the end of our second year as little babies. You know, it's life and it needed to happen.

[4:14] Teresa Attridge: What did you do? Did you go out for a drink, or how did you mourn that process? I'm curious.

[4:20] Arri Lawton Simon: In fact, I think we just said that this is something that we hope to do in the future, and we honestly still do. We just need to create more of a track record for ourselves first and just trust the universe's timing of what it's telling us.

[4:34] Janine McGuire: Honestly, you should send them this episode of the podcast and they'll be like, there's no one we trust more.

[4:40] Arri Lawton Simon: But you know, we had an amazing second year collaboration, even though we weren't able to acquire the rights to that particular film to adapt for the stage beyond the BMI experience. We loved working together. I'll speak for myself. I thought I had never written anything as good as what I am creating with Arri. He pushes me, he challenges me, he gives me all kinds of ideas, and I think we both hold each other to a very high standard of excellence and enjoy the process as well. So much of this is the time you spend in the room together, and it just takes so long to put together a musical that I always say that if you're not enjoying the process and enjoying the writing and the many, many years of work together, maybe you're not in the right field if you don't want to do that.

But I mean, we just had so much fun together that we became one of those teams at BMI that sticks together and says, I want to do things with you. There are lots of other teams who work together for one project and then form a different collaboration for something else, etc. All those structures of relationships and collaborations are all totally valid. We just kind of got together.

[5:31] Arri Lawton Simon: Yeah, you're like, I actually really invested in this BFF necklace that we share. There will be memoirs, but that's for another podcast.

[5:50] Janine McGuire: It's a collaborative marriage. It is one of the most deep and intense and closest relationships I've ever had with anybody in my life. I think in order to create good work, you have to be vulnerable to the work and to the people creating the work. Janine and I have gotten to a place where we really are just so comfortable being our entire selves around each other and putting the work first. And so when it came time to write something, you know, when we couldn't get the rights to that particular property.

[6:15] Arri Lawton Simon: The movie that shall not be named.

[6:22] Janine McGuire: Yes, Redacted. We knew that we wanted to adapt something. We liked working in that mode of adaptation. So we just threw out ideas, different books that we had read, news articles, films, museum exhibits, etc. I mentioned The Bubble to Janine because I just popped into my head. I was like, why do I feel like this would be cool for us? And I had seen it on a date with a friend when it came out and had its release in the United States and it had stuck with me. And so I mentioned it to her and she was excited by the premise and we watched it together. And I don't even think we were, you know, we were just partway into the movie. And she was like, oh, yeah, this is really great. I felt this intuitive sense that there was something in this story that we could really dig into very deeply and explore through music and explore on stage and bring this story to even a larger audience than it already had. It was a very popular movie in Israel and around the world. And there were just so many aspects of it that I think spoke to us on many levels.

[7:16] Janine McGuire: That's also advice I feel like I have, we have given to other writers looking for their project, because, again, you're going to spend so much time with something that I think it should appeal to you on many levels. For us, there was certainly the subject matter was endlessly interesting to us and felt important and felt that we would want to dive into the research and into primary source interviews and travel and all of that with a lot of curiosity and open-mindedness. It just kind of an endless area of endless possibility. And additionally, I mean, inside the big love story at the center and the queer love throughout the story, I think love is at the center of all stories, really. It's just love of what or whom.

And this big, bold, brave, dangerous, beautiful queer love that is at the center of this story is very attractive to both of us. And it's not anything that we had seen on a Broadway stage, really, in that way. We have been working our way up since the 90s of introducing characters and storylines and things. And we've gotten now some more characters and leads. And, you know, we had The Prom with a queer love story and it's coming up. But the big, tragic, heroic, timeless love we had not seen in that way. And so it just really was very exciting.

[8:37] Pauls Macs: Absolutely. Something I'm really impressed by is the way the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop in year two was like, adapt something, knowing that adaptations could get declined. Right. But it's fantastic that you found each other through that process. But I've just always been thinking to myself, that's really ballsy or that's really courageous for them to be like, go ahead and do it. Now we know sort of from the other side on that. So we are both members of the steering committee, which is the leadership of the BMI Workshop and can now understand how these assignments are given and just what value there is in taking something that is already in narrative form and then using that for that second year to write character establishment songs, to structure your story for the stage based on something that is already, you know, in a dramatic form.

[9:11] Janine McGuire: Yeah. Writing a story that works in the first place is already really hard. Trying to musicalize it is even harder. So trying to do both at the same time while you're like just getting your legs and learning what you're doing is not necessarily the best idea. Slash even to just, you know, from the more right-brained passion side of things, there's no guarantee that any show you write, whether you have the rights for it or not, will ever happen or be produced or be successful. And you are going to write the best work that you can write if you write something that you love. And so taking that, you know, worrying about getting the rights out of it and just saying just adapt something that you love because it really inspires excellent work. And I think that absolutely worked for us because we do love it.

[10:03] Arri Lawton Simon: And who says that there can't be an unauthorized song cycle concert at 54 Below down the line?

[10:10] Janine McGuire: Indeed. We weren't the first and we won't be the last team to have embarked on a project such as that for our second year. I mean, famously, our heroes and mentors Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty wrote a bedazzled adaptation that still to this day has not been seen in full on stage. But we've gotten to enjoy some of those songs here and there in concert. And I'm sure they would say, as we would, that all of those early collaborative experiences help you find your aesthetic together and your collaborative rhythm and the way that you will work through craft together. So, you know, it's so nothing's ever wasted. And the ways that you work.

[10:43] Pauls Macs: Yeah. Because we all know that this industry is just like

[10:49] Janine McGuire: We love to cynically say, I mean, I don't generally, but you see people say like, oh, rejection season's here, you know, kind of thing. And it's like, we've all just kind of cycled through getting all of the yearly no's that say there were 652 applications and this in no way reflects... What I always say about rejection personally, and like, I think this helps as an artist, even though it sounds really stupid, is that it's like, it's like when a dog wants to eat chocolate, like the dog doesn't realize it's not a great choice. The universe will often be like, hey, this is something you really want, but it might not be right or the right time or the right thing. But when you're the dog who wants the chocolate bar, you don't know that. As opposed to thinking of things as rejections, it's almost thinking of like, what are the protections that are being put around you so that the path towards the right thing is clear?

[11:36] Arri Lawton Simon: 100% Yeah, you're absolutely speaking our language. We feel you might not get the chocolate bar as a dog, but there's a spoonful of peanut butter with your name on it. You know what I mean? Well, I feel like this show in particular has been created in tandem with whatever the universe is giving us and has just clicked along like the big breaks it's had in development or with casting or with research, whatever have happened just in these really synergistic ways that have come about by us showing up and just continuing to keep our hands on the hard body as we like to say, you know, not giving up. We're not far away gone, not here.

[12:08] Janine McGuire: Absolutely. Well, why don't I go ahead and read a synopsis of the show? You know, if they haven't read it in the episode description yet, the barnacles can hear exactly what show we're discussing. Adapted from the groundbreaking film by Eitan Fox and Gal Achovsky, The Bubble follows Noam, an Israeli soldier and musician, and Ashraf, a closeted Palestinian who meet at a border checkpoint and fall in love during the Second Intifada. Supported by their chosen family, the pair construct a utopian bubble in Tel Aviv and risk their lives to be together when the bubble bursts. This explosive new musical pulses with energy, urgency, and unyielding hope for peace, capturing the struggle and resilience of love in a divided world. This piece really resonated with me in terms of the conflict that's happening in our world right now, the fight for love to exist in a divided world.

[12:55] Arri Lawton Simon: Well, I would absolutely love to give the listeners a flavor of what we've been talking about so far. So let's start with the first song, which is I Used to Hear Music, which I think is the first song in the show, is that correct?

[13:03] Janine McGuire: Yes. Yeah, it's like song one, because you've got that first intro moment and then you've got the full song. Yeah. Currently, yes.

[13:09] Arri Lawton Simon: Yes. And what you will hear is, you know, a few seconds of the world before even our main character Noam begins to sing, it's really setting the stage and setting the scene. And he comes out and before any other speech or dialogue, sings this song. And so we do what we love to do, which is really learn about a character through how they musically express themselves. And this is what he comes to us with at the very beginning of the show. You know, I usually have the writer set up the song and I officially asked them to do it, but you just did it naturally. And a really listen, that's how you can tell that they don't just go to VMI, they like run it. Like, you know what I mean? This is educators right now.

[13:48] Janine McGuire: I'm talking about who is singing on the song. This recording is done by our good friend Omer Shayesh, who is a brilliant Israeli singer and actor. He tours all over the world with different groups and you'll hear he's pretty special. Here is I Used to Hear Music performed by Omer Shayesh.

[14:55] ♪ Musical number: "I Used to Hear Music" — performed by Omer Shayesh ♪

[17:35] Janine McGuire: You feel the tension and the opening musical motif and then it just expands and the way it just like shifts into minor keys and just drives and drives and drives. I do agree that the best way to get to know a character in a musical is through music and I do understand this character through this song.

[17:52] Arri Lawton Simon: Thank you. It was hard to get to. So one of the things that we often do with any project that I encourage people to do is to explore your character's voices, right, and just kind of start at the top when you're working on a new project by writing, you know, the I want or I am songs character establishing. So who are your main characters? What are they trying to get in this show? And we did start there with this show, but it was before we knew so many things that we learned by going and doing research on the ground in the region twice and the study of music and other stories. I think we wrote something that was exploratory and thematic and interesting and wasn't correct. And it lived for a while in the show.

And then we got the opportunity to do a reading several years ago and decided, yeah, this is this is Rennett's course. We need to let it go and wrote something entirely new for that moment. And we also which we also which we also let go of. And I love I love the story, by the way. I love this story. I'll tell you why I ended up here. And so, you know, the first attempt was kind of focused on him just wanting to leave the chaos of the checkpoint and go back home. And then the second one was more about his frustration with the situation and being there, but not necessarily wanting to be part of it in that way. And then this place we landed, we thought, like, this is this is all fine and good. But how is it him specifically?

Noam, this is from the film, had wanted to be a rock star growing up and learn to play guitar and sing and love music. And so we're like, well, what does that feel like? Actually, there was a quote that Zelinsky said that we heard on the news where he I'm going to misquote, but he likened war to the absence of music. And so that just really stuck with us. And that's what became Noam's in and how we felt like, OK, now we know who this person is.

[20:03] Janine McGuire: That's also a little bit of a window into our process, our belief that writing is rewriting and that sometimes you don't know if you have the right song for the right moment, the right scene for the right moment to move your story in the way that you hope to until you try it, you know, until we put it on stage in a reading format or or even a table read with our friends, etc. I think the thing that was hard about this specific rewriting moment that Aerie described is that we really did like and believe there is value in and, you know, and good good writing inside each of those two songs that we discarded. In fact, actually, the first one I know Aerie remembers, the first one that we wrote for the you know, for the show is this exploratory song we brought into the BMI workshop and we turn around and we see Stephen Flaherty in the moderator's chair that day.

So he was among the first people to have heard our first stab at this moment and, you know, was encouraging and all of that. But it's just a part of the creative process of specifically writing musicals where you have to not get precious about any one piece of the puzzle because you're trying to serve the whole. So, again, even though we started with something we kind of liked, by the time we understood what our bigger story was, we realized that we needed something that captured the emotional heart of the character, not just in that exact, you know, microsecond of the musical, but for the entire arc that we would be going on. And again, we just we learned this from doing it many times and we love to do that.

We love to early and often bring people into the process and listen to their feedback. It speaks to our process and our philosophy overall as well, which is this little motto that we coined years ago, but where we say nothing stupid, nothing sacred, because the story is the most important thing. So it's like we will try anything. We will throw all the spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. We will say the dumbest idea we have because sometimes, actually often, it's not actually dumb. It's somehow weirdly brilliant. The other person just has to make sense of it. But we can't fall in love with something so much that we just, you know, the show dies.

[21:40] Janine McGuire: I hope you know that I'm getting nothing sacred, nothing stupid tattooed as like a collarbone tattoo so I can see it emblazoned across my chest daily because that is definitely going on the inspo board. The inspo board being my physical body.

[21:55] Arri Lawton Simon: A couple of things I wanted to say actually was when you were talking about introducing this character and the world in this moment, the lyric that I had here was, but now all I hear is silence or worse the sound of war. I don't hear the music anymore.

[22:08] Janine McGuire: And one of the things that really struck me about that is we are getting both the macro and the micro because we have this character's own journey with not playing music anymore from personal loss and what that feels like, but also what it's like to live in a world in which you feel like there is no music or celebration or anything that takes you out of where you are.

[22:27] Arri Lawton Simon: Because in a war zone, I mean, silence is one of those things that it's like, sure, it's temporarily peaceful, but it is innately also very scary because it is lying in wait of something. So we have a character who, whether he knows it or not, is on the precipice of exiting silence, but whether it's music or war, does not know. And that's very much how people live every day.

[22:49] Janine McGuire: So I think that personally just reading through it, I thought that was like very clever and very smart, but not at all like in a heavy handed sort of a way. I really appreciated that.

[22:58] Arri Lawton Simon: I would say we are often attracted to lyrical hooks that mean more than one thing. And that, I guess, is an example of one. And it was beautiful to hear you describe your reaction to it in that way. That is what we were hoping to, I think, get across with that.

[23:11] Janine McGuire: Nailed it.

[23:12] Arri Lawton Simon: I love the fact that you're talking about rewriting your opening number three times. And I'm not going to tell the story again, but I have told the story of Stephen Sondheim writing three opening numbers to A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum a few times, probably just once, just once on this podcast. But people are like, pals, it's enough.

[23:26] Janine McGuire: No, pals, you have to do it three times so that it mirrors the rule of three.

[23:32] Arri Lawton Simon: But also, they say in poetry, at least, that like a poem is never finished, only abandoned. And so I feel like music is very similar in that sense. And not abandonism, you never see it again. But it's like, sometimes you just have to leave something alone, trust that it's going to hold its own shape by itself.

[23:48] Janine McGuire: And you may use it again, you may not use it again. But the idea of like killing your darlings is, you know, for like a draft, sure, but like nothing is ever fully gone. You've got like your draft of drafts of drafts in the back in case you ever have to pull out that one bomb lyric again, or like that one hook or lick. And so it's always interesting.

[24:08] Arri Lawton Simon: In our case, we could be running advertisement for Google Docs. Like, we don't get rid of anything. It just goes to the bottom of the pages.

[24:17] Janine McGuire: Google, this is your chance to sponsor McGuire and Simon. This is your chance.

[24:21] Arri Lawton Simon: Something you said earlier was something that was told to me during grad school, which I really needed to hear was that phrase, there's no such thing as wasted work. And that's really so true. And I'm thinking about the headlines and all the artists who have just had their funding canceled from the National Endowment for the Arts.

[24:36] Janine McGuire: I'm not trying to put a silver lining on that situation at all. But to zoom out, working in theater, especially right now, can be disappointing and heartbreaking. But to have that philosophy as you keep trying to move forward, I think is important.

[24:50] Arri Lawton Simon: Yeah. And to paraphrase Stella Adler, right, life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.

[24:57] Janine McGuire: Beautiful quote. You're correct that these are incredibly challenging times right now for artists in all media, making anything, trying to get it out into the world.

[25:05] Arri Lawton Simon: It speaks a little bit to our philosophy as producers and not only as writers, which we consider ourselves both of those things, that right now it just feels for better or worse, artists have the opportunity and the challenge right now of potentially needing to find resources themselves to create their work in the world.

[25:24] Janine McGuire: It's something that we learned with this piece is that we could wait for gatekeepers to open different doors for us. And of course, we certainly have had a lot of opportunities that we've been incredibly grateful for through prestigious institutions taking a chance on us and our piece, and also needing to look for ways to step outside of the well-trodden paths and say, like, listen, we can't count on grant money for this.

[25:49] Arri Lawton Simon: We can't count on someone opening a door for us, like we're going to have to build something ourselves. And that's also been a component of how we have looked at this piece behind the scenes the entire time that we've been working on it.

[25:59] Janine McGuire: We just heard a really fantastic song told from Noam's perspective. I think now we should get a song from Ashraf's perspective. I would love it if you would please set up I Could Get Used to This.

[26:10] Arri Lawton Simon: So after the two lovers have spent their first night together on the roof of Noam's apartment, Ashraf wakes and takes in the view. And this is what he says.

[26:18] Janine McGuire: I love that setup. That was great. And who is performing this song?

[26:21] Arri Lawton Simon: This was performed in concert by our good friend Joél Pérez.

[26:24] Janine McGuire: Here is I Could Get Used to This performed by Joél Pérez.

[26:40] ♪ Musical number: "I Could Get Used to This" — performed by Joél Pérez ♪

[29:22] Janine McGuire: My God, I could get used to this music. Let me tell you that love.

[29:26] Arri Lawton Simon: Let's start there. I was thinking, oh, Ashraf, he's so in love.

[29:31] Janine McGuire: Has the sun always been this bright? Has the sky always been this blue?

[29:35] Arri Lawton Simon: It's only the world is just gorgeous and you perceive it in a way that's completely different.

[29:39] Janine McGuire: The other thing I really appreciate about the song is there's also this very mournful quality to this music.

[29:45] Arri Lawton Simon: I'll see that motif repeated throughout the show and a really, really gorgeous way.

[29:49] Janine McGuire: We talked about earlier about how the best way to get to know a character in a musical is through music.

[29:54] Arri Lawton Simon: I actually don't see this in the given circumstances of the play per se. But to me, I was just perceiving this character and I was thinking, oh, things haven't worked out well in the past.

[30:02] Janine McGuire: He doesn't know if they'll work out in the future based on his queer identity.

[30:06] Arri Lawton Simon: That juxtaposition between I've never felt happier in this moment and yet this worry that it's going to be fleeting or this disbelief that he could be this happy in reality came across very clearly to me through this music.

[30:18] Janine McGuire: That's beautifully put and definitely what we were intending to capture in this moment.

[30:23] Arri Lawton Simon: And music can do so much that tells you information that's not on the page, on the lyric.

[30:29] Janine McGuire: And I'll also say that's one of my favorite orchestrations that Ari has done.

[30:33] Arri Lawton Simon: He orchestrates our work. And that clarinet that you hear in the recording is actually performed by Ari in concert.

[30:39] Janine McGuire: Oh my gosh.

[30:41] Arri Lawton Simon: And piano, clarinet.

[30:43] Janine McGuire: Come on, multi-hyphenate.

[30:46] Arri Lawton Simon: I don't want to brag, but I was first chair of clarinet in symphonic band at Black Hills High School.

[30:51] Janine McGuire: So, you know, clarinet player to clarinet player.

[30:55] Arri Lawton Simon: Okay. All right.

[30:57] Janine McGuire: Did you play at Buffet?

[30:59] Arri Lawton Simon: I was also in the jazz band. I also played clarinet and sax.

[31:02] Janine McGuire: No, we have to keep it. People need to know about the clarinet work.

[31:06] Arri Lawton Simon: The clarinet work runs deep, pals.

[31:10] Janine McGuire: Then I think that clarinet line really does tell you a lot about his emotional state and that longing.

[31:15] Arri Lawton Simon: And you said that wistfulness.

[31:17] Janine McGuire: And that's what music can do.

[31:19] Arri Lawton Simon: And that's why we combine music and text and story all together.

[31:23] Janine McGuire: So we can create that all in one.

[31:25] Arri Lawton Simon: I was about to say thematically too, when we have like these introduction songs where it's these characters, where we hear them alone for the first time.

[31:29] Janine McGuire: It's like even their music, like woodwinds versus strings.

[31:34] Arri Lawton Simon: It's beautiful together, but they're classified as separate.

[31:37] Janine McGuire: You know what I mean? Like we hear in the ways that they're exploring their world and we're getting to know them.

[31:43] Arri Lawton Simon: We're hearing the ways in which like intersectionality and music and orchestration, like things are stronger when they're paired together.

[31:50] Janine McGuire: It's interesting hearing different musical motifs for different characters.

[31:54] Arri Lawton Simon: And then later hearing how things sort of like come into one.

[31:59] Teresa Attridge: Thanks for joining us on New York Theatre Barn's Backstage Pass, hosted by Teresa Attridge and Pauls Macs. Join us next time as we continue our conversation with Janine McGuire and Arri Lawton Simon about their new musical, The Bubble.

[32:12] Janine McGuire: Get your backstage pass.

[32:15] Arri Lawton Simon: Get your backstage pass.