This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:40] Joe Barros: Welcome back to the show. Today, we have a special episode featuring discussions about Amy Engelhardt and Marc Acito’s *Bastard Jones* and Sara Cooper and Lynne Shankel’s *Perpetual Sunshine & The Ghost Girls*.

[1:20] Joe Barros: Our first musical is *Bastard Jones*, which has a book by Marc Acito, music by Amy Engelhardt, and lyrics by Acito and Engelhardt. *Bastard Jones* is a sexy, smart, rollicking new musical comedy that combines a bouncy pop score with period farce. When charming, low-born Tom makes the mistake of wooing Sophia Shepherd, daughter of the pompous Reverend Shepherd, a chain of secrets, schemings, and multiple bed-hoppings are set in motion. Based on Henry Fielding's 1749 Brit-lit satire, *Tom Jones*, this musical reimagines the young, irresistible, bouncing Tom Jones as an electric guitar in a harpsichord world.

[2:12] Joe Barros: And now, here's our conversation with one of the writers of *Bastard Jones*, Amy Engelhardt.

[2:17] Amy Engelhardt: Hello! Hello!

[2:20] Joe Barros: So let's dive in. Amy, you are a dear friend of mine and a collaborator on this show. You were well known as...

[2:27] Amy Engelhardt: Yes, you choreographed *Bastard Jones*.

[2:29] Joe Barros: I did at The Cell, and we'll definitely talk more about Nancy Manicharian's The Cell and Kirsten Ring, who runs The Joint over there. You are well known as the sole female vocalist and writer for the Grammy-nominated genre-busting vocal band The Bobs. And from 1998 to 2012, you recorded four albums and toured the U.S. and Europe.

[2:48] Amy Engelhardt: Wow!

[2:49] Joe Barros: Your original works include *Triptych*, *Carl Sagan's Contact*, *Tesla, a Comedy of Eras* with the Flying Karamazov Brothers, and *Impact*, which just premiered in a streaming presentation produced by The Cell. You've also released numerous albums that I love to listen to. One of my favorite songs you've ever written is called *Cheese Denied*. And I have no idea why you'd ever write a song about cheese.

[3:08] Amy Engelhardt: I don't wish that on anyone, *Cheese Denied*. Cheese is amazing.

[3:17] Joe Barros: The song is on iTunes. It's called *Cheese Denied*. Your co-conspirator in this show is Marc Acito. Marc is best known as the co-writer of the musicals *Allegiance*, *A Room with a View*, and *Chasing Rainbows*. And in 2016, Marc became the first Broadway writer to create a new musical in China, *The Secret*, which features the songs of Jay Chou, the King of Mondo Pop. I also wanted to note that Marc's novel, *How I Paid for College*, was on many bestseller lists and has been translated into five languages and was also turned into a solo play and spawned a sequel, *Attack of the Kill People*.

[3:51] Joe Barros: As Amy mentioned, I had the great privilege of collaborating with Amy and Marc on the 2017 off-Broadway production produced by The Cell, and for those who don't know, again, I was the choreographer, and I had an extraordinary time living and creating in this world with you and Marc. Another reason I wanted to do the show was to work with Evan Ruggiero, who played the title role and won multiple awards for his performance. What I also found really compelling is that the story is ultimately about young people who were thrown out of their homes for being themselves. Your show explores an inspired and inventive way into the 18th-century world of *Tom Jones*. What was the impetus for your collaboration with Marc Acito, and why *Tom Jones*?

[4:30] Amy Engelhardt: Well, I'm glad you mentioned his book because that was the impetus for our collaboration. People kept recommending his book to me, and when enough people did, I said, okay, and I read it, and I usually don't laugh at funny books, but I saw myself in the book because it's *How I Paid for College*, a novel of sex, friendship, and musical theater. It's set in New Jersey in the 1980s, and this kid, you know, he wants to go to college, and he can't, and he finds a way to pay for it, and it's also a coming-out story, and there's characters in it who say things like I would say. Like there's one character, a best friend, who says, "lead us not into Penn Station," and I was like, I'm sure I've said that. I would say this, too, as an awesome New Jerseyan.

[5:14] Joe Barros: There you go.

[5:17] Amy Engelhardt: So I recognized things in the book, too, and I looked on the back cover, and I saw that he went to Westfield High School, which is two towns away from me, and all of a sudden, this is the crazy version, all of a sudden I was like, I know Marc Acito, but I'm not sure it's him, and it turns out we met for one day in high school and forgot about each other, like forever, and the book brought us together. So I met him in Portland when The Bobs were playing in Portland in 2010.

[5:45] Amy Engelhardt: Yes, it took that long to get a production of *Bastard Jones*. That's pretty normal, and we wrote the first act in six weeks. We didn't know each other. He said, "What are you doing this summer?" I said, "I don't know. What am I doing this summer?" But he pitched.

[5:59] Joe Barros: That's what you're doing.

[6:01] Amy Engelhardt: Yeah, I had no gigs. It was, you know, 2010. I was contemplating leaving The Bobs, and I drove up to Portland, and he got me a place to stay, and neither of us at that point had written a full-length musical. We both had started in theater and then gone in different directions. I was doing theater until my, I guess, early 20s, and then I went straight into music, pop, rock, and jazz, but I always kept an ear to the ground. So Marc pitched *Tom Jones* to me, and I had not heard of it, and I said, okay. And he said, because of what you do in The Bobs, which is kind of out there and not afraid to go, as we say, "balls to the wall" and is more about commitment, I think, and audacity than anything else, he said, "I love where your ear goes and where you write." So I watched the movie, the Oscar-winning movie, and the BBC series from the 90s with Samantha Morton and Brian Blessed, I think, and Fiona Shaw.

[7:02] Joe Barros: Ah, I love Fiona Shaw.

[7:04] Amy Engelhardt: I'm a huge Anglophile. And we started working. I have to say that in the beginning, Marc was drawn to this because we saw it as a gay marriage story, as why can't you love someone? Why are you not allowed to love someone because of how you were born? Because gay marriage had not yet been legalized. As the years went by and we were using draft after draft, it was legalized, but we gradually realized that if you substitute any word for any marginalized group in *Bastard Jones*, you get the same story. And so it kind of became a mission for us. And then when we got this production to sell, which we raised all of the money to do. Yes, it can be done, people. We bridesmaided so many times. We were top 10 finalists for the Richard Rodgers, top 10 twice for the O'Neill. I mean, stuff like that. We had other offers, and it just told us we were on the right track. What was so exciting about this production is that it had a cast that looked like the world.

[8:13] Amy Engelhardt: So, yeah, we were kind of, I want to say, sadly, ahead of that discussion curve because I think it should have been had a long time ago. But we knew that we wanted a cast that looked like the world, that looked like America, 20 percent of whom has some sort of disability. And so Evan Ruggiero, who you mentioned, who's amazing, is an amputee. He lost his leg to bone cancer. Yes, but he's a dancer. Ali B. Ghori, who is now an activist for performers with disabilities, was also in it, and she is legally blind. We also had, you know, every race, ethnicity. You have now a Lortel winner, Crystal Lucas-Perry, who is more of an unknown at that point. So many great people. And was contract was going to play John Adams in the all-female *1776*, I think. Yeah, she's still, she's still well. It got to late, but it's still happening. We were so blessed with the most fabulous cast.

[9:08] Joe Barros: This cast also included Cheryl Stern, Adam Shapiro.

[9:15] Amy Engelhardt: That's right. Who later did *Fiddler* with Joel Grey. And Tony Perry. I just want to note, you know, like we said, Evan was such a big bright spot of that show. And he won the Clive Barnes Award for Promising Young Performer that year. He was also nominated for a Chita Rivera Award and a Drama Desk Show. And your show was also nominated for an Off-Broadway Alliance Award for Best New Musical. So that production was a bright spot in so many ways and exciting. And such an exciting start for your show in that way.

[9:44] Amy Engelhardt: And yeah, it was so great to have Evan in the cast. We cast him first. Actually, Marc found him, and we had a private session with him. And I'll never forget. Joe was there at The Cell. I think it was February. The show went up in June. And Joe turned to Evan and said, "Show me everything you can do." And because it's about what people can do, you know. And he was absolutely phenomenal. He's had the chops that I wanted, which is both a legit and a rock voice. Because I wrote right for both. And we just kind of knew. And he had the right sense of greenness to him. Because even though Tom sleeps with anything that moves, it's not predatory. He's a joy whore. And for anyone that doesn't know Evan, his story is just so inspiring.

He was in the middle of college and got bone cancer and said, "I'm going to still tap." Was tapping beforehand. The minute his doctor told him after his amputation that he could tap again, he went for it. And it's a story that I hope makes a lot of people dance who think they can't dance anymore.

[10:51] Joe Barros: Totally. It's what I did for love. Tell us more about your development path before The Cell. Because I know you had a NAMT residency. You worked with Milken University. Just so many places to get you to this big production.

[11:02] Amy Engelhardt: Yeah. It was kind of strange. First, we did a table read with friends. Just to see if we had anything. Just to hear it. Great friends, including Storm Large. I think you guys know who she is. She's an underground performer. She, of course, played the evil Lady Belliston. Later played by Crystal Lucas-Perry. We had table reads. We made a demo far too early. A studio demo here in L.A. Because I know people who helped us out. And I was very fortunate to, since I'm in the singer community here, I was very fortunate to have amazing friends who helped with it. Or, as Evan said, sick tenors. And we made this demo. We sent it out to everyone we possibly could. And we got some interesting reactions. And we sent the first draft out. And we knew when we got into the O'Neill the first time, when we were finalists, we were like, huh, okay. All right. I guess this is a thing.

[12:01] Amy Engelhardt: We did some development work with Jerry Patch from Manhattan Theatre Club. He gave me the note that totally changed my, one note that changed my perspective on a bunch of orchestration and a bunch of choices. We replaced the opening number, which is originally called *Cock of the Law*. Which, hello? Because that's, come on, that phrase is a gift. When you're talking about a period piece. We refocused it. And we got the development workshop at Milken, which was so helpful. Submit to that, writers. It is so helpful. Even though we saw people who did not have the age range appropriate for the characters, wow, it was an eye-opener. We needed to see a certain sequence done. There's a sequence at the end of the first act that has, it's basically slapstick farce, the three doors. And we needed to see that on its feet to know if it worked pacing-wise. It's a seven-minute thing. It has reprises and comedy, and it's crazy. It has a lot of physical comedy.

[13:01] Joe Barros: You just mentioned that you rewrote the opening number, which was originally called *Cock of the Walk*, and it's now called *The Pursuit of Happiness*. It's actually our first song tonight. So here is *The Pursuit of Happiness*.

[13:10] ♪ Musical number: "The Pursuit of Happiness" — performed by Amy Engelhardt ♪

[14:40] ♪ Musical number: "Happiness" — performed by Amy Engelhardt ♪

[16:15] Amy Engelhardt: Just makes you smile. We treated a really serious subject with comedy, and we approached it from a, you know, a farcical angle.

[16:25] Sara Cooper: Absolutely. And it's not, you know, the way Henry Fielding ever envisioned it. But I think the show needs to be turned like this.

[16:30] Lynne Shankel: And I think it's so important. And it sees that material in a really exciting a new way.

[16:34] Amy Engelhardt: Yeah, we were thrilled with it. And we were so thrilled with the sell production. And it was just a wonderful experience.

[16:41] Sara Cooper: And we got the show we wrote, which is saying a lot.

[16:44] Lynne Shankel: New York Theater Barn has collaborated with The Sound many times. It's an amazing, amazing space in New York here.

[16:50] Amy Engelhardt: One of our homes.

[16:51] Sara Cooper: The next song tonight from Bastard Jones is the title song, which was sung by Cheryl Stern in the original production.

[16:57] Lynne Shankel: And you're going to be singing it. And I love you on the demo. So I'm excited to hear what you are going to do tonight.

[17:04] Amy Engelhardt: If you want to just set it up, that would be great.

[17:07] Sara Cooper: Sure. This song is sung by Bridget Allworthy, who is kind of the spinster-esque sister of Squire Allworthy, who adopted Tom Jones, the bastard who we found in his bed.

[17:17] Amy Engelhardt: And Bridget has a really vile and unctuous son named Bliffle.

[17:21] Sara Cooper: And what has just happened is there's an accident with a carriage that the Squire is involved in.

[17:26] Amy Engelhardt: And Tom Jones, having a heart of gold, rushes in to help.

[17:35] Sara Cooper: What can I do? And takes care of this pregnant town slut, blah, blah, blah.

[17:41] Amy Engelhardt: And he moves her, you know, makes sure she's OK. She was in the way.

[17:44] Sara Cooper: And so he takes care of her while her son just stands there, basically, and looks down at the whole thing and insults people.

[17:53] Amy Engelhardt: And she's very taken and moved by this fact that, you know, the person that everyone reviles is the person that saved the day.

[18:02] Sara Cooper: And her son did nothing. So she's contemplating that in this, the title track.

[18:07] Amy Engelhardt: Take it away.

[18:14] ♪ Musical number: "Bastard Jones" — performed by Amy Engelhardt ♪

[20:16] Lynne Shankel: Then she does. I just love it.

[20:20] Amy Engelhardt: And Cheryl Stern would walk down the aisle in that ghostly light.

[20:23] Sara Cooper: This character, I said, she's dying in a rock musical and she gets just enough strength to build the bridge.

[20:30] Amy Engelhardt: That's theater for you. Got about that bridge and then you croak.

[20:33] Lynne Shankel: Yeah. And actually did the on the demo.

[20:37] Amy Engelhardt: That's Mark dying, doing all the birthing noises.

[20:42] Sara Cooper: When we originally had Bridget giving birth in the original open, he he was giving birth.

[20:48] Amy Engelhardt: I'm like, how do you know this? You're you know, he did it really well.

[20:52] Lynne Shankel: And so I kept method acting, method acting and typecasting.

[20:57] Amy Engelhardt: Well, we have to head out. Thank you so much for being with us.

[21:00] Lynne Shankel: And we'd love to hear these two songs.

[21:03] Amy Engelhardt: Absolutely. And we'll see you soon.

[21:05] Sara Cooper: Our second new musical is Perpetual Sunshine and the Ghost Girls, which has words by Sarah Cooper and music by Lynne Shankel.

[21:14] Lynne Shankel: Perpetual Sunshine and the Ghost Girls is an all-woman positive through composed musical theater piece about the capitalist exploitation of workers' bodies and rights in the face of a national public health crisis.

[21:26] Sara Cooper: Featuring an original mashup score, the show is based on the true story of the women who worked in the factories and were knowingly poisoned by the United States Radium Corporation and who fought back changing the United States labor laws forever.

[21:42] Lynne Shankel: And now here's our conversation with the writers of Perpetual Sunshine and the Ghost Girls, Sarah Cooper and Lynne Shankel.

[21:50] Amy Engelhardt: Hi, guys. Hi.

[21:52] Sara Cooper: Sarah, I first saw your work off Broadway, The Memory Show, an incredible musical, which had a celebrated run at the Duke Theater, produced by Trinkeport Group after it was featured in NAMM and at Barrington Stage Company.

[22:06] Lynne Shankel: You're also the writer of Hot, featured in our New York series with Lynn.

[22:10] Sara Cooper: And you've also written Windows and Breakfast, Fault Lines and Elevator Heart.

[22:14] Lynne Shankel: Your television pilot, Pollyanna, received the Grand Jury Prize from Bolt, Barnstorm Media, and you are a Jonathan Larson Grant Award winner, which is awesome.

[22:24] Sara Cooper: Lynn, and in addition to being an incredible writer, you are also best known as a music supervisor, arranger and orchestrator.

[22:32] Lynne Shankel: As the orchestrator of Broadway's Allegiance, you were the first woman to solely orchestrate a new musical on Broadway, which is an incredible thing.

[22:40] Sara Cooper: Your other iconic works include Cry Baby, the 2006 revival of Company, Alter Boys, the Broadway revival of Your Good Man, Charlie Brown, which was the first show I ever saw on Broadway, and Jodi Pico's Breathe, which I'm also a part of.

[22:56] Lynne Shankel: And your work, Lynn, is the heart and glue of the show.

[22:58] Sara Cooper: As a composer, your work includes Hot with Sarah, as I mentioned, Postcard American Town with the extraordinary Crystal Skillman, which was featured in our New York series, new songs for the revival of Bear, Maya and Red Velvet.

[23:09] Lynne Shankel: In 2017, you released a critically acclaimed album called Bare Naked on Yellow Sound Label, and I love two songs from it.

[23:18] Sara Cooper: Jen Colella sings a song called I Will Make Thunder, and Casey Levy sings a song called Anything Can Happen.

[23:25] Lynne Shankel: So I just wanted to say everybody should listen to that.

[23:28] Sara Cooper: Anyway, let's dive into this show here.

[23:30] Lynne Shankel: The story of many factory workers who became disabled or died from radium poisoning has been buried in our history for far too long.

[23:37] Sara Cooper: Female identifying factory workers who contracted radiation poisoning from painting watch dials with self-luminous paint after being told that the paint was harmless is something that we're talking about here.

[23:48] Lynne Shankel: The recent film Radium Girls follows a group of ill factory co-workers who set out to expose a corporate cover up.

[23:56] Sara Cooper: There's also been a musical adaptation that explores this premise, including Julie Stein's 1953 Broadway musical Hazel Flag.

[24:04] Lynne Shankel: So Sarah and Lynn, how did you come to collaborate and what makes your musicals approach to this premise unique?

[24:10] Sara Cooper: Our origin story is Lynn is the orchestrator on The Memory Show music by Zach Redler, who's lovely. And I was just I just fell madly in love with Lynn's music.

[24:15] Lynne Shankel: And I always wanted to work with her.

[24:20] Sara Cooper: And I was kind of like when I started, we started thinking about things we could collaborate on.

[24:23] Lynne Shankel: I remember exactly how we came to Hot, but we just like kind of emailed back and forth.

[24:27] Sara Cooper: And then we were like, this is the thing.

[24:30] Lynne Shankel: You sent me a draft of Hot and you were like, oh, I don't know what this is, but I know it's not a play.

[24:37] Sara Cooper: And it may be a musical and see what you think.

[24:40] Lynne Shankel: So, yeah, that's where it all began.

[24:43] Sara Cooper: That's right. I thought it was going to be a play. And then I was like, Lynn, come see.

[24:49] Lynne Shankel: And then it was gosh, I mean, we worked on Hot, writing that for like a year.

[24:54] Sara Cooper: And then you threw me an email one day about having this idea for this crazy show about the women who worked at the U.S. Radium factory in the 1920s.

[25:06] Lynne Shankel: I had never heard the story. I just saw a clickbait thing for it on Facebook.

[25:10] Sara Cooper: And I was like, what is this? And I clicked through the rabbit hole, which you should never do because you'll get a virus.

[25:13] Lynne Shankel: But I didn't that day. And I said on the show.

[25:15] Sara Cooper: And I don't know. I was like, I thought about it for a while.

[25:17] Lynne Shankel: And then Lynn and I sort of talked about it. And I kind of like didn't we didn't we were busy with Hot.

[25:21] Sara Cooper: And then we went to like the Johnny Mercer Foundation, Writer's Grove.

[25:24] Lynne Shankel: And we were working on Hot and we're kind of like talking about it.

[25:26] Sara Cooper: And I sort of vomited out some stuff for it.

[25:29] Lynne Shankel: But and then like I don't know. And then we talked about it and we just started writing it.

[25:33] Sara Cooper: But I have a weird story about it. Can I tell my story?

[25:37] Lynne Shankel: So I vomited out this weird thing that is not very much like what we ended up with.

[25:42] Sara Cooper: But three weeks, just like this crazy, crazy draft of something.

[25:46] Lynne Shankel: And the day after I finished it, I was at a family gathering and my uncle Fred was like, what are you working on?

[25:52] Sara Cooper: And I was like, oh. And I told him sort of what was bad.

[25:54] Lynne Shankel: And he's like, oh, that's so strange. Your great aunt worked in one of those factories.

[25:57] Sara Cooper: And I was like writing it like I was possessed. It was like, Lynn, I'll tell you, it was like this crazy.

[26:01] Lynne Shankel: It was very weird. She was not one of the women who was doing the watches, but she survived this situation.

[26:06] Sara Cooper: But very weird. We love stories like that.

[26:09] Lynne Shankel: You know, we also have, you know, Keira Stone, who you're collaborating with, Sarah.

[26:12] Sara Cooper: Joe knew I was going to say this, and she's writing a musical called Salem and found out that one of her descendants was a part of that trial.

[26:19] Lynne Shankel: And she's playing that part now. So we love when these kind of coincidental things happen that kind of make your fabric with the story even that much stronger.

[26:26] Sara Cooper: So was this always going to be a show that was a full-length musical?

[26:30] Lynne Shankel: Because your journey with this kind of properly started during the pandemic when you won the NAMM 15-minute musical challenge.

[26:36] Sara Cooper: Yeah, I mean, it was always going to be a longer piece.

[26:40] Lynne Shankel: I mean, we envisioned it to be kind of a companion piece to Hot in that it's also a one act.

[26:47] Sara Cooper: It's also performed by a completely female identifying cast.

[26:53] Lynne Shankel: And we just, we hadn't, I mean, I had not written one note before, you know, the pandemic hit.

[27:00] Sara Cooper: And then, you know, we're all at home and I'm, you know, sitting in this very room thinking, what am I going to do now?

[27:07] Lynne Shankel: And, you know, and we were like, let's just work on this.

[27:10] Sara Cooper: And we had just started working on it when, you know, NAMM announced this competition.

[27:15] Lynne Shankel: And it was kind of the greatest thing because it was a goal.

[27:20] Sara Cooper: And I just felt like for me, I just need goals, you know, or I'll just like sit on things, you know, forever.

[27:28] Lynne Shankel: But having that goal was so huge.

[27:31] Sara Cooper: And, you know, in just in getting it, in just getting it out of the gate and getting it, you know, and getting it done.

[27:37] Lynne Shankel: Yeah, we took the first 15 minutes of the show and applied for the NAMM competition.

[27:43] Sara Cooper: And we were one of the first place winners, which was so exciting.

[27:47] Lynne Shankel: And yeah, it was it was amazing.

[27:49] Sara Cooper: And that led us to being able to work with the fabulous students at Baldwin Wallace College, led by Vicki Bussert and Matthew Webb.

[27:57] Lynne Shankel: And they're they took that they took that 15 minutes.

[28:01] Sara Cooper: They do a thing, which is so cool, called the 5 by 15 festival.

[28:06] Lynne Shankel: They did it for their winter.

[28:08] Sara Cooper: You know, what would have been their winter musical?

[28:10] Lynne Shankel: They performed all five of the first place winners.

[28:14] Sara Cooper: In collaboration with the Beck Center.

[28:16] Lynne Shankel: Exactly. And they videoed, you know, made a 15 minute musical out of each one of these pieces and filmed them and just did them to the nines.

[28:26] Sara Cooper: And it was just it was incredible.

[28:28] Lynne Shankel: So cool. And their students are like unbelievably like out of this world.

[28:33] Sara Cooper: I could not even believe we were so lucky.

[28:36] Lynne Shankel: And I think what's so cool about this competition, you know, we also have the brilliant Nico Jouber.

[28:41] Sara Cooper: Nico Jouber was a finalist and won.

[28:43] Lynne Shankel: We had a musical Mimosa was also a part of it.

[28:47] Sara Cooper: And all of these writers have said that this competition was it came during such a dark time and it gave you so much confidence that you were in the right direction with the story you were trying to tell.

[28:56] Lynne Shankel: Totally. Yeah. Just so, so fantastic.

[29:00] Sara Cooper: So let's hear more about the first song you're going to present with us.

[29:02] Lynne Shankel: That is featuring the Baldwin Wallace students that we're so excited about.

[29:06] Sara Cooper: Yes. It's the opening number.

[29:09] Lynne Shankel: We don't want to say too much.

[29:10] Sara Cooper: Lights up. Yeah. But this is like they have Vicki and Vicki Busser and Matt Webb and their students actually made this.

[29:15] Lynne Shankel: And this was the first chunk of what we saw in their collaboration with Beck Center.

[29:20] Amy Engelhardt: We're so excited to be here and talk about our shows, Bastard Jones and Perpetual Sunshine & The Ghost Girls.

[29:48] Sara Cooper: Yes, it's a great opportunity to share our work and the themes that resonate within both musicals.

[30:00] Lynne Shankel: Absolutely! Each of our shows tackles different aspects of society and personal stories, which is what makes musical theatre so powerful.

[30:20] Amy Engelhardt: Bastard Jones is a fun, sexy romp based on the classic Tom Jones. It’s a musical comedy that really plays with the idea of class and romance.

[30:40] Sara Cooper: And Perpetual Sunshine & The Ghost Girls dives deep into the historical injustices faced by women workers, particularly during a public health crisis.

[31:00] Lynne Shankel: The music reflects that journey, blending styles from the 1920s to today, which adds a unique layer to the storytelling.

[31:20] Amy Engelhardt: It’s fascinating how both shows, while different in tone and subject matter, highlight the resilience of characters in challenging circumstances.

[31:40] Sara Cooper: Exactly! And I think that’s what draws audiences in—seeing these characters navigate their worlds and fight for what they believe in.

[32:00] Lynne Shankel: Plus, the collaboration between writers and composers is so vital in bringing these stories to life.

[32:20] Amy Engelhardt: Yes, and the creative process can be so rewarding, especially when you see how the music enhances the narrative.

[32:40] Sara Cooper: And it’s also about the community we build around these projects. The cast and crew become a family.

[33:00] Lynne Shankel: That sense of collaboration extends beyond just the production team; it’s about engaging with the audience too.

[33:20] Amy Engelhardt: Right! We want to create a dialogue with our audience, making them feel part of the experience.

[33:40] Sara Cooper: And both of our shows have elements that encourage that interaction, whether through humor or poignant moments.

[34:00] Lynne Shankel: It’s all about connection—between the performers, the creators, and the audience.

[34:20] Amy Engelhardt: And I think that’s what makes theatre so special. It’s a shared experience that can spark conversations long after the curtain falls.

[34:40] Sara Cooper: Absolutely! And we hope that our shows inspire people to think critically about the issues we present.

[35:00] Lynne Shankel: Yes, and to see the humanity in the stories we tell.

[35:20] Amy Engelhardt: It’s about celebrating those stories and the people behind them.

[35:40] Sara Cooper: And we’re so grateful for the opportunity to share them with everyone.

[36:00] Lynne Shankel: Thank you for having us on the show to discuss our work!

[36:20] Amy Engelhardt: We can’t wait for audiences to experience both Bastard Jones and Perpetual Sunshine & The Ghost Girls.

[36:40] Sara Cooper: It’s going to be an exciting journey, and we hope everyone joins us for it.

[37:00] Lynne Shankel: Yes, let’s keep the conversation going about the importance of these stories in our society.

[37:20] Amy Engelhardt: Thank you again for this platform to share our passion for musical theatre.

[37:40] Sara Cooper: We appreciate it!

[38:00] Lynne Shankel: And we look forward to seeing how audiences respond to our work.

[38:20] Amy Engelhardt: Let’s continue to uplift and support each other in this incredible community.

[38:40] Sara Cooper: Absolutely!

[39:00] Lynne Shankel: Here’s to more stories that challenge and inspire!

[39:20] Amy Engelhardt: Cheers to that!

[39:40] Sara Cooper: Thank you for listening, everyone!

[40:00] Lynne Shankel: We hope to see you at the theatre!

[40:20] Amy Engelhardt: Bye for now!

[40:40] Sara Cooper: Bye!

[41:00] Lynne Shankel: Take care!

[41:20] Amy Engelhardt: Until next time!

[41:40] Sara Cooper: Keep creating!

[41:50] Lynne Shankel: And keep supporting the arts!

[42:10] Amy Engelhardt: Yes, we need it now more than ever.

[42:30] Sara Cooper: Thank you again!

[42:50] Lynne Shankel: Bye!

[43:00] Amy Engelhardt: Bye!

[43:10] Sara Cooper: Bye!

[43:20] Lynne Shankel: Bye!

[43:30] Amy Engelhardt: Bye!

[43:40] Sara Cooper: Bye!

[43:50] Lynne Shankel: Bye!