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

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

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

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

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

[0:32] The music of tomorrow.

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

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

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

[0:46] Jen Sandler: As the Artistic Director and Associate Artistic Director of New York Theatre Barn, we make space to speak in community with musical theatre writers and their creative teams.

[0:56] Joe Barros: Lifting up songs from original culture-shifting musicals in development and introducing them to a global audience has become a major part of New York Theatre Barn's evolving story.

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

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

[1:19] Jen Sandler: We recently spoke with the writer of In Emily's Words, Jessy Tomsko, and the writers of Fly More Than You Fall, Eric Holmes, and Nat Zegree.

[1:30] Joe Barros: Our first musical is In Emily's Words, which has book, music, and lyrics by Jessy Tomsko.

[1:37] Joe Barros: Tony Award-nominated producer and New York Theatre Barn's co-board president, Blair Russell, is featured as a guest co-host with myself on this week's episode.

[1:46] Jen Sandler: In Emily's Words, a new musical about the power of the human imagination tells the story of English novelist Emily Brontë as she is writing her magnum opus, Wuthering Heights.

[1:59] Joe Barros: Emily's imagination knew no bounds, and in spite of having seen very little of the world, she was able to craft a sweeping melodrama that has left a legacy nearly 200 years after her death.

[2:12] Jen Sandler: Emily Brontë fought through adversity and illness, achieving agency in a time when women were denied it.

[2:19] Joe Barros: Yet, while she paved the way for female writers, Emily never lived to see the success of her own labors.

[2:26] Jen Sandler: Hers is a story of resilience, strength, and the greatness that can be achieved when the immense power of imagination is unleashed.

[2:34] Joe Barros: And now, here's our conversation with the writer of In Emily's Words, Jessy Tomsko.

[2:40] Jessy Tomsko: Hi.

[2:41] Joe Barros: Hi, Talia.

[2:42] Jen Sandler: Hello, Jesse.

[2:43] Joe Barros: Welcome.

[2:44] Jessy Tomsko: Thank you for joining us.

[2:46] Joe Barros: Oh, happy to be here. Thank you so much.

[2:48] Joe Barros: Jesse, so as a singer-songwriter, you've shared the stage with many notable artists such as Joan Osborne, Edward McCain, Don Williams, and James McCartney.

[2:57] Jen Sandler: And as a vocal coach, your work has been seen on Sesame Street and Apple TV's Helpsters.

[3:02] Joe Barros: Your other musicals include The Farmer, which is currently in development with Mia Walker, and Boleyn, which New York Theatre Barn is proud to have featured in our choreography lab.

[3:13] Jessy Tomsko: And Molin is your musical about Anne Boleyn co-written with your father.

[3:17] Jessy Tomsko: Yes.

[3:18] Joe Barros: So, I mean, I as a producer, especially producing new musicals, I'm really like music forward. I love to hear a great song.

[3:22] Joe Barros: And so I'm often drawn to people who are coming from writing or composing in other areas. Singer-songwriters are one of my favorites.

[3:29] Joe Barros: So I'm really interested in what led you to write for the theatre and why you chose this layered and complicated true story of Anne Lombardi as a musical.

[3:40] Jessy Tomsko: So, yeah, it was super random. I started writing for musical theatre just a couple of years ago when I started writing Boleyn.

[3:48] Jessy Tomsko: And I always tell this story when asked why I started this idea to begin with. And it was because I was simply doing the singer-songwriter thing.

[3:53] Jessy Tomsko: I was up very late one night writing and got this random idea that said, what if Anne Boleyn was a singer-songwriter today and wrote a song about being in the Tower of London awaiting her execution?

[4:09] Jessy Tomsko: And I was like, what? And I almost laughed it off. But I wrote a song that night that then became the impetus for that show.

[4:16] Jessy Tomsko: And after a couple of years of working on that, which is still currently in development, just last year, I had the idea.

[4:25] Jessy Tomsko: I love writing, right? And I've discovered my passion, great passion in life is hearing great singers sing my stuff, far more than anything I have ever done myself.

[4:35] Jessy Tomsko: And so I decided to write another show, which I began last year. So it actually started a year before that.

[4:43] Jessy Tomsko: I thought that I wanted to write a Wuthering Heights musical. And I went so far as to write the first song.

[4:48] Jessy Tomsko: And when I tried to go further, I just wasn't super excited about it. And I thought, I'm going to just put that on the back burner, come back to it when I have a better idea for just a better angle, a better way in.

[5:00] Jessy Tomsko: So fast forward a year to January of last year, pre-pandemic, and I was out walking. I get lots of ideas when I'm out walking or when I'm in the shower.

[5:09] Jen Sandler: Same. Literally same.

[5:12] Jessy Tomsko: I get out of the shower so much with ideas. It's crazy. But anyway, so I'm out walking.

[5:18] Jessy Tomsko: And I just thought, light bulb, Emily Brontë needs to be in the story. And it's going to be her perspective telling the story.

[5:26] Jessy Tomsko: It's going to come to life in her eyes. And she's going to be becoming more and more immersed in the story as we go.

[5:33] Jessy Tomsko: And I'm really fascinated by the creative process. I love human beings and our desire to make art.

[5:40] Jessy Tomsko: And I'm so amazed by where ideas come from. Where does inspiration originate?

[5:47] Jessy Tomsko: So for that reason, this show is not an Emily Brontë life story. This is not even a full telling of Wuthering Heights.

[5:54] Jessy Tomsko: It's just shining a light on what I am imagining as her creative process. And that's honestly more a story than Wuthering Heights.

[6:03] Jessy Tomsko: And I think that's what the most exciting thing is, that people like that story, but they don't know how it got made.

[6:09] Jen Sandler: Exactly. So I mean, I don't really either. No one will ever know for sure what was happening in Emily's head.

[6:14] Jessy Tomsko: But that's the fun of writing.

[6:16] Jen Sandler: Exactly. So to talk more about your development path, we're going to bring on someone who is no stranger to the New York Theatre Barn family. We have Avi Tal-Asselin, your director here.

[6:25] Avi Tal-Asselin: Hi, Avi.

[6:26] Jen Sandler: So as many of you know, Avi is also the director of our choreography lab.

[6:31] Jen Sandler: So Avi, how did you become a part of this project? And how did New York Theatre Barn shepherd your becoming a part of it?

[6:37] Avi Tal-Asselin: Oh, absolutely. New York Theatre Barn played a huge part in me eventually joining this project because I met Jesse through New York Theatre Barn.

[6:46] Avi Tal-Asselin: Woo! So him was brought to Joe's attention, I believe sometime in, I don't know, 2018, 2019, somewhere thereabouts.

[6:56] Avi Tal-Asselin: But he said, you know, I have this lovely woman who's writing this lovely show. I think you should listen to it. I think it would be great to put in Choreography Lab.

[7:04] Avi Tal-Asselin: It seems like it might be interesting to see it dance. And I agreed. And, you know, with Choreography Lab, we program lots of writers and lots of choreographers.

[7:15] Avi Tal-Asselin: It's certainly not just all about us working on things or me working on things. But I loved my experience working with Jesse.

[7:24] Avi Tal-Asselin: She is incredibly smart, incredibly passionate and also incredibly just willing to dive in and do the work.

[7:32] Avi Tal-Asselin: And I think sometimes it's rare to meet people who are really tops in all of those areas. And so that was something that was just immediately apparent to me working with her as a producer.

[7:44] Avi Tal-Asselin: And when I was looking for something to do over the pandemic, I had seen some whispers on social media that she was working on this new project. And so I reached out to her.

[7:56] Joe Barros: So take us back a little. Before Avi and the Combustion Collective came on, what was your development path before that that led you to Avi?

[8:03] Jessy Tomsko: So I started writing this, as I said, pre-pandemic. And then the pandemic hit very soon after that.

[8:08] Jessy Tomsko: And I just decided to go into my writing process as, yes, a means of an escape. But also the fact that I felt like so much, as I know many of us felt this way, so much of our control in our lives was taken away.

[8:21] Jessy Tomsko: My agency in my own life was taken away. And as someone who constantly I have to always be doing something, I have to always feel like I have a purpose.

[8:34] Jessy Tomsko: I felt purposeless. And so I've been in this little corner pretty much for the bulk of the pandemic, writing this piece and just because I could feel like I could get some of that control, some of that agency in my own life, back in my imagination and in my writing.

[8:51] Jessy Tomsko: And I started to just kind of write like on the DL. And I didn't talk about it to anybody because I thought this is a side project. We're still doing Boleyn. And the more I worked on it, I just fell in love with it and everything I learned about Emily and the Brontës, which I already was quite familiar with the Brontës' work.

[9:09] Jessy Tomsko: I read Wuthering Heights years ago and loved it. I've read it several times since. And I felt like I was able to reclaim some of what was lost in the pandemic.

[9:19] Jessy Tomsko: And I got super excited about this project. And within like six months, I had the full first draft, which was super. I mean, I suddenly had time on my hands to write, which I wasn't constantly running around the city every day like I always was.

[9:34] Jessy Tomsko: And so that was the silver lining of the for me of the pandemic being homebound. And that's where I found the inspiration. Did a little informal read and revising it ever since.

[9:45] Jessy Tomsko: It did make it into the O'Neill semifinals, which was cool. And it was a finalist for the Imagine Workshop at Michigan, which was cool.

[9:55] Jessy Tomsko: Didn't get any of them, but for the first time out, I was super excited to just like get really great feedback. And this is also the first book I've written as well because I'm doing the music and lyrics and the book.

[10:06] Jessy Tomsko: And so that was really cool to feel like, okay, I guess I'm sort of doing something right to get some great feedback.

[10:12] Jessy Tomsko: And that yeah. And then I just, you know, Avi reached out to me and said she was excited about the idea. And I was like, really? Who told you? Who knows about this?

[10:22] Avi Tal-Asselin: Well, she's a lovely woman with a lovely show. Didn't you hear?

[10:25] Jessy Tomsko: It was cool. Yeah, I guess. So anyway, that's it's very new. This is I said to you earlier, this is a pandemic baby.

[10:32] Avi Tal-Asselin: Before we move on to the songs, you're developing this within your company, the Combustion Collective. What is the Combustion Collective?

[10:39] Avi Tal-Asselin: Ah, so Combustion Collective is a company that I started a couple of years ago after producing a few of my own works and realizing that producing them under a nameless shell company was probably not the best route forward.

[10:56] Avi Tal-Asselin: So Combustion Collective is an interdisciplinary theater company that is very focused on the how of making theater, how we collaborate and wanting to shepherd projects through development.

[11:10] Avi Tal-Asselin: But it's also a production company. So we have the aim to produce full productions. My company has produced two productions thus far.

[11:19] Avi Tal-Asselin: We made Ephemera, which was an immersive dance theater piece that was set in a bar with an original score. And then we also made Floor Show, which was a play that I co-wrote with my husband, Dan Berg.

[11:32] Avi Tal-Asselin: And we produced that in 2019. Combustion Collective is happy to be working on a new musical for the first time, even though musical theater is really my bread and butter.

[11:44] Avi Tal-Asselin: Combustion Collective has kind of worked on these genre-bending projects. And so, you know, we're not sure exactly where In Emily's Words is going to wind up going, but there might be possibilities for it having some immersive, you know, vibe or having some actor, musician, music kind of shape to it a little bit down the road that we haven't figured out yet, but it might be something that we may explore.

[12:13] Avi Tal-Asselin: So your first song tonight has been stuck in my head all week. Can you tell everyone what it is?

[12:18] Avi Tal-Asselin: I should also specify that this show does kind of have a show within a show construct, as it is Emily writing the stories. We have her life in her reality and then we have the story.

[12:28] Avi Tal-Asselin: So this first song is called The Bell Brothers. If you don't know, when the Brontës first published, they took on pseudonyms because they were women.

[13:06] Teresa Attridge: Welcome back to Backstage Pass. Today, we’re diving into two exciting new musicals: In Emily's Words by Jessy Tomsko and Fly More Than You Fall by Eric Holmes and Nat Zegree.

[13:36] Blair Russell: I’m thrilled to be here as a guest co-host. Both of these shows explore profound themes through unique storytelling.

[13:56] Jessy Tomsko: In Emily's Words is about the incredible imagination of Emily Brontë as she writes Wuthering Heights. It’s a story of resilience and the power of creativity, especially in a time when women faced significant challenges.

[14:16] Avital Asuleen: We wanted to capture Emily's journey and the struggles she faced, both personally and as a woman in the literary world.

[14:36] Eric Holmes: Fly More Than You Fall tells the story of Malia, a young girl coping with her mother’s illness through her writing. It’s a heartfelt exploration of grief and growing up.

[14:56] Nat Zegree: The narrative intertwines Malia’s real-life challenges with her imaginative tale of a bird with broken wings, creating a rich tapestry of emotion and growth.

[15:16] Teresa Attridge: Both shows highlight the importance of storytelling in navigating life's complexities.

[15:36] Blair Russell: Absolutely, and they both showcase the incredible talent of their creators and performers.

[15:56] Jessy Tomsko: I think it’s essential to bring these stories to life, especially ones that resonate with so many people today.

[16:16] Eric Holmes: And through Malia’s journey, we hope to inspire others to find their voice in difficult times.

[16:36] Nat Zegree: The music in Fly More Than You Fall also plays a crucial role in conveying the emotional depth of the story.

[16:56] Avital Asuleen: It’s all about creating an immersive experience for the audience, allowing them to connect with the characters on a deeper level.

[17:16] Teresa Attridge: I’m excited to hear more about the creative processes behind both musicals.

[17:36] Blair Russell: Let’s dive into how each of you approached the development of your shows.

[17:56] Jessy Tomsko: For In Emily's Words, I drew inspiration from Emily Brontë’s life and her literary works, aiming to reflect her spirit through music and narrative.

[18:16] Eric Holmes: In Fly More Than You Fall, we wanted to create a relatable character in Malia, someone who embodies the struggles of growing up and facing loss.

[18:36] Nat Zegree: The collaboration between Eric and me has been vital in shaping the musical’s tone and emotional impact.

[18:56] Teresa Attridge: It sounds like both projects are deeply personal and resonate with universal themes.

[19:16] Blair Russell: Yes, and that connection is what makes theatre so powerful.

[19:36] Jessy Tomsko: I believe that when audiences see themselves in the characters, it creates a lasting impact.

[19:56] Eric Holmes: Exactly, and we hope to spark conversations about the themes we explore in our shows.

[20:16] Nat Zegree: It’s all about fostering empathy and understanding through storytelling.

[20:36] Teresa Attridge: I can’t wait to see how audiences respond to both of these incredible musicals.

[20:56] Blair Russell: Let’s take a moment to discuss the music in each show, as it plays such a crucial role.

[21:16] Jessy Tomsko: The score for In Emily's Words is designed to reflect the emotional landscape of Emily’s journey.

[21:36] Eric Holmes: And in Fly More Than You Fall, we’ve crafted songs that capture Malia’s inner thoughts and feelings.

[21:56] Nat Zegree: The music serves as a bridge between the audience and the characters, enhancing the storytelling experience.

[22:16] Teresa Attridge: It sounds like both musicals have a strong musical identity that complements their narratives.

[22:36] Blair Russell: Absolutely, and I think that’s what will resonate with audiences.

[22:56] Jessy Tomsko: I’m excited for people to experience the world we’ve created in In Emily's Words.

[23:16] Eric Holmes: And we can’t wait for audiences to join Malia on her journey in Fly More Than You Fall.

[23:36] Nat Zegree: It’s going to be an emotional ride, and we hope it leaves a lasting impression.

[23:56] Teresa Attridge: Thank you all for sharing your insights today. I’m looking forward to seeing both shows come to life.

[24:16] Blair Russell: Thank you for having us! It’s been a pleasure discussing these important works.

[24:36] Jessy Tomsko: Thank you! We appreciate the opportunity to share our stories.

[24:56] Eric Holmes: Thanks for having us! We’re excited for what’s to come.

[25:17] Teresa Attridge: And now, here's our conversation with the writers of Fly More Than You Fall, Eric Holmes and Nat Zegree. Hi everyone.

[25:25] Eric Holmes: Hello, hello, hello. Welcome, welcome.

[25:31] Teresa Attridge: So, welcome both of you. Eric, you're best known for your television career where you've written shows such as CBS' The Good Fight, CBS' Evil, and every theater person's favorite show, NBC's Smash. Your play Black Friday was nominated for the Otis Guernsey New Voices Playwriting Award, and your farce Nearly Departed won you the David S. Hall Scholarship. And Nat, you've written music and original material for CBS' The Good Fight, a little connection there. And your original album, Fly More Than You Fall, not to be confused, is available on iTunes, and I think we should all go pick it up right after this. You've also performed. You've played Jerry Lee Lewis for over 400 performances in Million Dollar Quartet, Mozart, and a live music production of Amadeus.

And I heard this little Easter egg, and you'll have to point this out later, that your voice can be heard on the cast album for Dear Evan Hansen. So, together, you've written three original musicals, including The King's Critique, not to be confused with The Queen's Gambit, which we were talking about earlier. And so, I'm really excited to learn more about how you came to collaborate and why you chose this original, gripping, familial, coming-of-age story of love and loss to write about.

[26:47] Nat Zegree: Well, boy, I mean, that's such a great, flattering beginning. Just what a fantastic—I can't remember the last time I've just sat down and had people remind me of successes.

[26:58] Eric Holmes: We get to learn a little bit about the both of you and your collaboration and how you teamed up and wrote Fly More Than You Fall.

[27:04] Nat Zegree: Yeah. This is the third show we wrote together. We met many, many moons ago, maybe 10 years ago. And I was writing a different musical. Matt was still in college, and he was in it. And we just kind of became best friends. And then three years later, we were, you know, goofing off, talking about stuff. And he had written a few songs for a play I was writing. And then we were like, what if we tried a musical? And then next thing you know, we started writing two musicals at the same time. I think that first week we started writing, we wrote nine songs in a week. And we're just like, oh, we should do this. This is fun. And that's all it really was, was just two idiots sitting around a piano trying to make each other laugh. And then we just kind of didn't stop.

[27:53] Teresa Attridge: So you've written other shows in the past, and eventually you decided to write this original show, which I always think is a huge task, especially these days where, you know, it's easy to kind of like, pick up something, but it could be really challenging. Where did the story of Fly More Than You Fall come from?

[28:11] Nat Zegree: The song had actually existed for a couple years before the show came into existence. The song was just a song that I had written when I was still at school, like right before I went out to New York. I just, I woke up one day and kind of, it's, you know, the song in itself is kind of what I consider to be my personal mantra in life, you know, a standard that I try to hold myself to every day. And so the song just came out of me naturally like that as just a normal single. And then it wasn't until, and then of course, I made the album based off of that song, because it means so much to me, the song does just personally. And then it was a couple years later when Eric kind of thought, you know what, there might be something that we can flesh out from the idea of this song, which is that you can fly more than you fall.

[29:04] Eric Holmes: I can't believe it. It's funny, because when Nat moved to New York, and moved in with us briefly until he found a place, and he sat at the piano and played me four songs he had written by himself. And they were all fantastic. But Fly More Than You Fall was just, I mean, it was out of this world. It was, it was crazy. So for any time he had a party, he had to sit down and play it, because everyone wanted to hear it. Everyone just loved it. And so from the get-go, that was such a huge part of just our lives, that song. And we were writing these two other musicals that were so fun and original and just weird and whatever. And we had always wanted to write a show that dealt with losing parents, because we had both lost parents at a very young age.

It's one of the things that has just bonded us as humans for so long. My mom passed away when I was 17. And then Nat lost his dad when he was 21. And so we just, we both went through that. And we always wanted to explore that. But you know, it's like, how do you do it? How do you do it? Without making it just, you know, without making the audience want to slip their wrists by the end of the evening. And then we came up with this idea of what if a little girl was going through the process while she was trying to become a writer? And what if she used her writing to help her through it? And we could live in this half fantasy world, which is something I think both of us did to cope when we lost our parents as we kept trying to escape into theater, into stories into anything that took us away from it.

And yet, at the same time, the great thing about art is art helps you process that stuff. So you feel like you're escaping, but you're actually doing something very healthy. And you're working your way through it. But more important to both of us, I always felt was that we needed to let other people know that it's okay, when your parents pass, you're not alone. Because both of us, I think we both just felt so isolated and so alone. When my mom died, no one I knew had lost a parent, like no one. And so it was like, Oh, I'm this freak. I'm this, you know, black sheep in the group. But it was, it was such an amazing thing to then write this story to process to combine both of our experiences of what it is to lose someone at a young age, but to also make an audience laugh.

And then watch an audience respond to this. And the group catharsis was like a tidal wave every time we did a version of the show. And we kind of thought, Oh, yeah, we got to keep going. We got to keep writing. Like something good is happening. It's kind of that beautiful realization where what started because when we were writing the show, we kind of realized a little bit through the process that in many ways, we were writing it for ourselves first and foremost, you know, as Eric kind of said, it was an incredibly healing process for us to actually have to dive in and confront a lot of these things. It's still happening. These, you know, the process is still going on. It never quite leaves.

But that's what part of the show is about. And once we realized how powerful it was to us, that's when we had the realization that it could potentially and hopefully be just as powerful and meaningful to the millions and millions and millions of people, particularly young people who deal with something like this in many different shapes and forms. And so that's it. It just means it means so much to us.

[32:24] Eric Holmes: Yeah, I think we forget how important art is to therapy, artists to healing, you know, our, you know, and we I think we learned this during the pandemic that our art gets us through tough times. Our art is important. Artists, you know, are essential workers.

[32:37] Nat Zegree: Right. I think a lot of people find religion when they go through crisis like that. And my religion was always theater. It was always sitting in a theater waiting for the curtain to go up and have that communal religious experience. I think I think we can all say that.

[32:51] Eric Holmes: Yeah. Amen.

[32:54] Teresa Attridge: So tell us more about your development path, because we the end of your current path got you to us. But there was a lot that happened before that.

[33:02] Nat Zegree: We prayed to the theater gods every night. And no, I don't we we started writing this and it just got a lot of attention right away. We were lucky. We did a workshop at Syracuse University and then we did a production in Utah Valley University at the Nordic Center, which was like a fully staged production, which was incredibly helpful to learn, like to learn what you want and what worked and your God, what didn't work and all of that wonderful stuff. But we had a lot of good talent out there that was very helpful to the process.

[33:42] Eric Holmes: And now we won awards. We did. We won nine Broadway World awards. I think we won all but one of the nominations or categories.

[33:47] Nat Zegree: You had to let somebody else have one.

[33:52] Eric Holmes: Well, actually, it's because some of the actors were competing against each other.

[33:55] Nat Zegree: Oh, that's true. I think.

[33:58] Eric Holmes: And some of the awards you won were Best New Musical, Best New Work, you know, lots of lots of great things to carry with you.

[34:04] Nat Zegree: Yeah, it was wonderful. And the audiences there really responded to it, which was I mean, that's really all you want. Like it was lovely to get the awards. But it really like for both of us, we talk about this all the time. It's about the minute the show ends and these people find you in the lobby with tears in their eyes. And they talk about their loved one or something they went through or how they'd never seen it. Like that's exactly what they went through. And no one has ever told that story, or what it felt like. And so that's why you do it. I mean, because it's the best compliment you can get.

[34:39] Eric Holmes: Yeah, you can't get better than that. It's spectacular to be able to also remind yourself like, Oh, I'm not alone. I'm not crazy.

[34:44] Nat Zegree: Beautiful about it, too, is that it didn't even it didn't even feel like, you know, compliments at that point, when you're when you're there after the show. It's really just about the genuine connection that you realize you have with so many people there who have just taken in the show and, and then to share in that connection, verbally, you know, whatever it is, even if it's just silently with a hug, it's, it's gonna get emotional. It's really, really powerful.

[35:13] Teresa Attridge: And now you're working with Mark David Levine and Gemini Theatrical Investors and Alex Stone. And that's how the show got to us. So what is the first song we are going to see tonight?

[35:23] Nat Zegree: We are going to be presenting the first song is called Up There. It is near the beginning of the show where Malia, our main character, is for the first time reading an excerpt from the story that she has started to write at the writing camp that she has been sent to over the summer. And the character, the main character of her story is a little bird named Willow, who has fallen out of her nest and does not know how to get back to the sky because she thinks her wings are broken. And so as we start to see the beginning of Willow's quest through the words and eyes of Malia, we meet both of these characters singing the song Up There.

[36:02] Eric Holmes: So just you know, before the song starts, Malia starts reading the story to her group about a bird at the base of a mountain. And she, she has this hint of a voice in the back of her head, that if she can get to the top of the mountain, she can get to the sky and the sky is where she belongs. But there's that brief moment before you start any journey where you question what you're about to do. And that's this moment that Malia shares with the group.

[36:27] Teresa Attridge: And who is performing the song tonight?

[36:29] Nat Zegree: We've got Merritt Marsh as Malia, and Stephanie J. Park as Willow. Two incredible, incredible people.

[36:37] Teresa Attridge: So here is Up There.

[36:43] ♪ Musical number: "Up There" — performed by Merritt Marsh and Stephanie J. Park ♪

[37:48] ♪ Musical number: "Fly More Than You Fall" — performed by Merit Marsh and Nico Oliveri ♪

[45:57] Jessy Tomsko: What a mantra! How important to hear those words, though, truly. Especially after what we've all been through.

[46:04] Eric Holmes: Yes. It's definitely a song to cling to after the worldwide trauma we've all just survived.

[46:11] Nat Zegree: Absolutely. So before we go, I feel like stories about mothers and daughters are very prominent in musical theater and they're not going anywhere. Why do you think they remain so powerful and why did you feel it was a part of the makeup of this story? It's more than a mother and daughter story, but it is a big part of the story, too.

[46:29] Jessy Tomsko: Yes. Mothers and daughters, they're just universal. Parents and children are universal. I think at the end of the day, parents are unconditional love. And sometimes it's the only unconditional love we ever experience in our life. And so to lose that at a young age, if you can't musicalize that, if you can't musicalize unconditional love, I don't know what you can musicalize. So that just felt very right for turning it into a show about what it feels like to lose that and also from the parent point of view, what it feels like to know you're going to have to leave them to fend for themselves. And will they be up to the challenge? In our show, there's the relationship between mom and daughter and then, of course, losing mom and something like that.

And then what remains from that is the relationship between father and daughter, which can be equally as complicated sometimes. And, of course, every family is different. But there was something about the relationship of this particular mother and daughter that we found to be so endearing that we wanted to tell. Not to mention, we would much rather see some really strong roles for young women claiming their agency at a young age, younger age, than typically heroic male stories that you have found for decades and decades and decades. And that, to us, is something that is important to tell and share.

[48:01] Eric Holmes: Amen. Because also grieving alone is one thing, but grieving as a group is complicated. Families trying to grieve together lends itself to lots of good drama and story songs and crying from the audience. So everyone wins. And laughter.

[48:19] Nat Zegree: What I think my favorite part of this show is, if I may, is that there are so many moments, heartbreak and joy are so close. Side by side. Side by side as emotions. And when you can kind of find the branching path that goes in the middle of those, you'll find that sometimes through your heartbreak, the joy and the laughter through the tears can be incredibly healing and helpful in that process. And I think we have to remember, I think I just was reading this last night, actually, parents are, when you're a child, your biggest advocate. They will always fight for you. And it's important. And that's why they're always in musicals.

[49:03] Jessy Tomsko: Yeah, absolutely. In true Disney-esque fashion, no parent comes out alive at one point or another. Because it's a critical moment that is universal. We all have our mentor at a certain point in our life, and we all lose our mentor at a certain point in our life. And that's the pinnacle moment. How are you going to survive without your mentor? And those are the fun moments to watch. If they're going to fly or if they're going to fall.

[49:34] Eric Holmes: Yep. Well, we are so excited for what is next with your show. We will see you guys soon, and we are so excited about your show. Have a good night.

[49:41] Jessy Tomsko: Thank you so much.

[49:43] Eric Holmes: Thank you, everyone. Thank you for joining us.

[50:12] Nat Zegree: The Musicals of Tomorrow.