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

[0:09] Jen Sandler: The music of tomorrow is almost ready to play.

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

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

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

[0:32] Jen Sandler: 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.

[1:20] Jen Sandler: We recently spoke with the writers of Little Miss Perfect, Joriah Kwame, and Lauren M. Gunderson, and House Rules by Daniel Mertzluft and Kate Leonard.

[1:31] Joe Barros: Our first new musical is Little Miss Perfect, which has music and lyrics by Joriah Kwame and book by America's most produced playwright, Lauren M. Gunderson.

[1:42] Jen Sandler: Coming of age is even harder when you're also coming out. Noelle's world turns upside down when she develops feelings for Malaya, the foreign exchange student being hosted by her conservative family.

[1:54] Joe Barros: As class president, she also must confront her privilege and compliance when her high school refuses to take steps in being more inclusive.

[2:01] Jen Sandler: Noelle struggles to decide whether she will be true to herself and an ally to her peers, or if she will settle with simply being Little Miss Perfect.

[2:11] Joe Barros: And now, here's our conversation about Little Miss Perfect with Joriah Kwame and Lauren M. Gunderson.

[2:19] Jen Sandler: Hey friends! Thanks for joining us!

[2:22] Joe Barros: So Lauren, I know you hear this a lot, but it's exciting. You are America's most produced playwright, and your plays include I and You, a fantastic two-hander, Miss Benedict, Christmas at Pemberley, Bower, Silent Sky, Exit Pursued by a Bear, and Toll and Trouble, among a few.

[2:38] Jen Sandler: You're also the book writer of the musicals The Amazing Adventures of Dr. Wonderful and Her Dog, Justice, the new musical about Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Jeannette, about Jeannette Rankin, the first congresswoman, which was a part of our virtual New York series almost a year ago, as we just mentioned.

[2:56] Joe Barros: Joriah, you are a writer whose passion for musical theater composition was sparked when you wrote and self-produced your first project at age 13. You performed your original R&B, neo-soul music throughout your youth and adolescence, opening for artists such as Anthony Hamilton, the Dramatics, Life Jennings, SMV, and Keith Sweat.

[3:18] Jen Sandler: You've since written over six musicals, ranging widely in style and subject matter from song cycles, stories of strong women, a dark retelling of Pinocchio, to an MLK biopic. Your song Little Miss Perfect was a winner of the 2019 Write Out Loud contest and has since become a viral sensation.

[3:39] Joe Barros: So legend has it that your award-winning hit song Little Miss Perfect did indeed come first and was ultimately the impetus for the musical. The fans responded to the song, and it's like the universe told you that there was more than just a song, but possibly an entire show. So tell us more about the success of the song Little Miss Perfect and how that led to the show Little Miss Perfect.

[4:05] Joriah Kwame: Yeah, so I won, like you said, Write Out Loud in 2019 and got to work with Taylor Louderman on the song, and I don't think either of us anticipated the reaction. In my mind, it was definitely a more lighthearted, important story to tell, but I never imagined, like as soon as the song came out, I started to get hundreds of Instagram messages from kids all over the world saying, like, this song is the reason I came out to my parents, and I never thought that they'd be okay with it, but they are. This song saved my life. I needed to hear it when I was having dark thoughts about myself and my identity, and it was a reminder that I'm not alone, and I don't think I was ready for that in the best way.

Like, it really just made me realize the power that we as artists have to use our work to challenge in action and also to change people's mind, not just about subject matter, but about themselves. And the opportunity that I have having all these young people's attention was, like, very overwhelming for me, and so it became clear to me that I think it was time to use my work to create a coming-of-age story that highlights underrepresented communities and struggles while also tapping into that musical magic that made people fall in love with Little Miss Perfect. And so I thought about all this, and I got ideas, and I was like, huh, I don't want to write this book. I want someone with more skills in that area to do this.

Who should I pick? And I was like, well, what about asking the most produced playwright in the country who I had worked with last year as an actor? And so I went out on the limb, and I reached out to Lauren, and she said yes, and I was like, yeah! And it's happening now, and I'm just so over the moon and excited to get going on this.

[5:43] Jen Sandler: So before we move forward to talk about your collaboration, we have a video of Little Miss Perfect and the way it has transformed. So here you go. Today, we're going to be talking about Little Miss Perfect, a.k.a. the Taylor Louderman TikTok 13 Reasons Why song.

[5:58] ♪ Musical number: "Little Miss Perfect" — performed by Joriah Kwame ♪

[8:29] Lauren M. Gunderson: Jariah, we started talking about your collaboration with the show. Tell us more about how you came onto the show and why this show.

[8:36] Lauren M. Gunderson: It's all Jariah. Jariah is so professional, ambitious, talented, and kind. It just made great sense. I met Jariah as an actor when he did a fabulous job at a very sneakily hard play. We did a totally reimagined Peter Pan at Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. before the pandemic. That's how I met Jariah. Pretty instantly, I was like, whoever this person is, is great. It was actually at the cast party. We were all very excited and staying out a little too late. Just pumped up for the opening, which went beautifully. It was a lot of work. We all know that opening night when you really earned the standing ovation that you got. I remember Jariah just saying, okay, let's talk strategy.

I want to write musicals. I want to write songs. I'm a writer. Tell me all this stuff that you know. It just became very clear that his star was one that was rising, and I wanted to do anything I could to help. When he reached out later, I was like, I know this is crazy, but would you ever consider? I was like, anything. Anything you need. Then, of course, the song is gorgeous. It's a beautiful kind of a microcosm of a whole play in that song. There's so much already there. The kind of proof is in the pudding of that song that this can be and will be, as we are creating, a story that is queer positive and has centers, women and girls, and has this message of defiant young people trying to, as Jariah just said, be the change they want to see. It's going to be loving. It's going to be surprising, and so we're really building it right now to kind of fit all of those things and just make it the best we can make it.

[10:27] Joe Barros: Wow. Tell us more about where the show has been besides Write Out Loud.

[10:31] Joriah Kwame: This is like the very beginning. The song was a standalone, and since then, I have just watched the growth of the song. Watching people make the different renditions of the song, people have said it in animatic context for different fan arts for different shows because it's like a general story that they felt connected to their favorite story or something. So I was seeing all these people connect the idea to something that's personal to them, and so then the question became, well, if I want to make this a bigger story, how would I connect it to me? And so I decided not only that it would be good to talk about the love story between this girl, these two girls who one of them is not out yet.

[11:15] Joriah Kwamé: This is an entire discovery, but it also became clear that I wanted to make it a coming-of-age story for her as far as where she stands politically. I thought it was interesting that, like now, a lot of kids, a lot of these Gen Z kids, they have to know where they stand politically. When I was growing up, that wasn't necessarily something that was on our minds. It's like, you just get to be a kid and you get to have all the friends that you have, and you love your friends, and that's the end of it. But now, kids really do have to have an understanding of the world on a bigger level. And so, I wanted to create a subplot that connects Noelle, our main character, to these issues happening around her in relation to her best friends who are African American, and her as a class president having to figure out what is the power she has in this scenario, and what privilege does she have to add to it. So, yeah, we're really developing this story from scratch. And, yeah.

[12:08] Joriah Kwamé: And it's true what you just said. It's theorized that the election went the way it did because of the Gen Z vote. Yeah. And I believe it. Oh, yeah. They are change makers. They are insane in the best way, and I love that. And I wanted this to be really a love letter to them, and the way that they are coming of age right now.

[12:27] Lauren M. Gunderson: Yeah, and I think that sense of how a high school really is a microcosm of what the whole country is going through. I mean, certainly Marjorie Stoneman Douglas and the kids that rose up out of that tragedy saying, we went through this, but we all are going through this as well. And I think the show wants to be both a very personal story of somebody figuring themselves out, and the more local story of a community, and then how that community is part of the world. And I think it's also one of the first conversations Joriah and I had was about how to make it an intergenerational story about that as well. So what are the parents doing during all of this? What are they going through? What are they learning?

When do those generations finally talk to each other and realize, oh, you're going through this version that I'm going through, and that we can do this, or this is never going to work. And all of that has such great theater meat to it because it's just nothing but conflict and great characters.

[13:24] Joriah Kwamé: Totally. And you have a concept album coming out later this year, correct?

[13:28] Lauren M. Gunderson: Yes, yes. I will have the release date pretty soon, but yeah, we will be releasing 10 or 11 of the songs. The first song is the heart of the show in my mind musically. It's really exciting because I'm kind of breaking apart different musical motifs and melodies from that original composition, and we've exploded it into different characters and different styles to relate to these different characters. So that will be coming out within the next couple of days.

[13:47] Joriah Kwamé: Let's talk about your first song. Your songs are so melodic, and they have such range. So the first song is going to be sung by you, and it's called You Only Know His Name. Tell us a little bit about that.

[14:03] Lauren M. Gunderson: Yeah. So I wrote up a little blurb so I don't ramble too much. There is a security guard at the school named Officer Douglas who is infamously racist and targets black and brown students any chance he gets. And there is an altercation between him and one of Noelle's best friends, who is also the school's star basketball player, Elijah, who is African-American. And it gets to a physical level because of the security guard, and he ends up pinning Elijah against a locker, which breaks his arm in the process. And so this incident causes a huge uproar and even a protest amongst the student body. And the local news even decides to cover this story. It's just, it's insane. Nothing has ever happened like this in this small town or that has been acknowledged.

So the news people show up at Elijah's house and start questioning his father with cameras and microphones, and it's just all very inappropriate. And so his father, who is frustrated with the media circus, decides to put them in their place. And that's what this is. So here is You Only Know His Name.

[15:23] ♪ Musical number: "You Only Know His Name" — performed by Lauren M. Gunderson ♪

[17:36] Joriah Kwamé: Awesome. That was so wonderful. Tell us about the second song, which I mentioned before, also uses the motif that you originally created in the original song.

[17:46] Lauren M. Gunderson: Yeah, so this song kind of takes us to the high school. So just for some context, Noelle, our protagonist, is the class president. So she's trying to secure her college acceptance. She doesn't have her future planned out like her best friend, so she's feeling a little insecure, like, what am I going to do after high school? One of my friends is going to be the valedictorian and going to Harvard, and my other friend is about to go to the MBA, it seems like, so what am I going to do? So she's just like, she's conflicted because she's the class president. She has a lot of responsibility all of a sudden. So the school is in shambles after the incident with Elijah's arm, and the students are even going to the length of not coming to class until justice is had and Officer Douglas is fired.

They make that the ultimatum. Amani, Noelle's other best friend, comes to Noelle, hoping that she can help with the power that she has, but Noelle expresses that she wants to remain neutral in order to save face with the school. This, of course, really upsets Amani and questions their friendship, and Amani goes off, and that is what this is.

[18:46] Lauren M. Gunderson: Who is singing the song?

[18:47] Joriah Kwamé: This is the beautiful and talented Savannah Fisher.

[18:51] Lauren M. Gunderson: Who will be on your concept album.

[18:53] Joriah Kwamé: Yes, she will.

[18:55] Lauren M. Gunderson: Here's Before We Go.

[18:57] ♪ Musical number: "Before We Go" — performed by Savannah Fisher ♪

[20:27] Joriah Kwamé: My God. But just to highlight, think about all the songs that we've heard so far and how different they are melodically, pacing. There's so much diversity in sound and the ways that Joriah tells a story in a song, and you can see why I jumped at the chance to work with him.

[20:49] Lauren M. Gunderson: So I think we want to end with a final question. So, you know, as everyone knows, this show has been very much defined in the last year by the TikTok generation, just like our next writers are as well. And it's really made your show a big difference. And it's made other musicals right now as well, too. How has that response reflected you in the show? Has it changed the way you've looked at the show, the way you've written the show?

[21:06] Joriah Kwamé: It's really awesome because these kids online are so vocal about what they're expecting from it already in a great way. I was able to I'm able to read comments of kids being like, oh, this show really resonates with me because of this reason. And I really hope that this happens and I'm able to take that and it's kind of collaborative being able to know what they are interested in and knowing like, oh, I love this part of this song. And it's like, oh, maybe that's a moment of the song that can happen in different places. Just being smart about listening to them has been really awesome. And also, it'll be really awesome as the songs are coming out to see their live reaction on TikTok and on my YouTube channel and everywhere that they will be, I'm sure, posting and get live feedback as we're workshopping the show. I think that will make all the difference.

[21:58] Lauren M. Gunderson: Yeah, Joriah, you're already having that with Jeanette and to go on this show now as well.

[22:02] Joriah Kwamé: Yeah, I mean, this is the way I think that musicals are born, certainly with the generations younger than myself, which is it's their show before it's Broadway's, you know what I mean? And it's one song at a time that people connect and it becomes theirs. And that, to me, is one of the greatest gifts of this social media world that we're in. And frankly, of this, as terrible as this pandemic is, people are turning to all the different ways that we can connect.

[22:30] Daniel Merzlufft: Jacob Hunt is a forensic-obsessed teenager living with autism in modern-day Vermont. With the help of his devoted mother and oft-overlooked younger brother, Jacob relies on strict routines to navigate daily life as smoothly as possible. The family is thrown into chaos, however, when Jacob's beloved social skills tutor is found dead, and Jacob is suspect number one. And now here's our conversation with the writers of House Rules, Daniel Merzlufft and Kate Leonard.

[24:08] Kate Leonard: Hello, hello. I'm so excited to be here with you guys.

[24:18] Daniel Merzlufft: Yeah.

[24:19] Kate Leonard: Well, thank you both for joining us. You are both most popularly known as the co-writers of Ratatouille, the TikTok musical. I'm also working with you on Breathe, Portraits from a Pandemic, a new musical about the pandemic, and a collaboration between five songwriting teams with a book by Timothy Allen McDonald and Jodi Picoult. We've been workshopping and rehearsing, and we will film our piece later this week. Together, you also created the Broadway junior show Dot and the Kangaroo, commissioned by iTheatrics in MTI Australia, and you're both members of the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Advanced Workshop. Dan, you're also known for your viral sensations, the Thanksgiving musical featured on The Late Late Show with James Corden and the Grocery Store musical featured on ABC's Good Morning America. So Dan and Kate, when did you decide to collaborate together and what inspired you to want to adapt this bestselling novel into a musical?

[25:17] Daniel Merzlufft: Great question. So we met our first year doing the BMI Musical Theater Writing Workshop, where throughout that whole time, you're paired up with different individuals, like you're assigned something, and then you're paired up with someone. And Kate and I were never actually paired up. But I always admired her work. I'm not going to say that. And we were chatting at the bar one time, because you know, everyone always goes to the bar after. I like to call it the world's weirdest dating game, because literally what you're doing the whole year is like, well, I sort of like them, but like, I don't know if I'm going to gel with them. So maybe we should be friends and not like, because you're in a relationship, you know, when you're in a songwriting team, you really are.

So it's like, oh, like, maybe this. And I remember chatting with Kate, and I had been chatting with Jodi about possibly adapting one of her books, I mentioned it. Kate was like, yes, I'm into it. And then like, next week had come back with like pages of notes. And I was like, great, love this. So that's when I was like, oh, my God, she's brilliant. Her lyrics are brilliant, like just in general, brilliant person, her lyrics are brilliant. And I'm obsessed with her as a person. So like, this should happen.

[26:26] Kate Leonard: I'm obsessed with Dan. Dan can write the heck out of a song. And I basically spent the entire first year of BMI being like, oh, wow, he does this every week. He just always, always puts out something that sticks in your head for the rest of the day. So we started we committed to writing together for this project for the second year of BMI, which is always a long term adaptation with one partnership, without ever having written anything together. And it was very lucky that we work that we enjoy the partnership.

[26:56] Daniel Merzlufft: Yeah. And basically, how we landed on House Rules was, I, I've known Jodi for a few years via other projects. And I said, you know, like, I'd really love to chat with you about adapting one of her books. And she was like, well, these are the three that I want to do myself. And then any of the other ones you can like, God bless you, Jodi Picoult, wherever you are. And I came up with a shortlist. And when Kate and I were chatting, and she did the same, and we realized we overlapped on a few, read those, and then landed with House Rules.

[27:30] Kate Leonard: Yeah. So we have been working primarily on the songs. And because that's the way that the second year of the BMI workshop works is that it's just songwriters and you aren't actually looped in with a librettist within the workshop. And so we would talk about the directions we want to take with the story with Jodi from time to time and see how she felt about choices that we were making that differed from the book or expanded on areas in the book.

[27:56] Daniel Merzlufft: Well, while you have a lot of freedom, you're still doing assignments sort of things. You're basically trying to write certain things. So we were, we didn't want to expand out too much in what we were doing. And you know, bring in a dramaturge and all that stuff yet we're really focused on that. And then we decided, okay, like, now we've had a little time after BMI, you know what, why don't we, like, really, like, start to move forward with this. So we decided to make some demos with my buddy, Conor Keelan, who's incredible. And I believe I got his first instrumental drafts on like, March 9th of last year. So I like have, I remember I had notes for him that I was like, gonna send him and then all the stuff happening.

And I was like, I don't know what's happening. And then, you know, we sort of just let everything die for a little bit. Because I think all of us had to do that with things. But it was so funny when when we were chatting about doing this and like, you know, Kate and I've been writing the things and haven't really thought about it for like, nine, 10 months at this point of, like, the demos were sitting there, the instrumentals were done. And we just, you know, could you even get in a studio at that time, which was fascinating.

[29:04] Kate Leonard: Well, we'd love to hear the first song, which is called Just One Dance. And I'm so excited that you're going to be singing the song with Michelle Beth Herman. So tell us a little bit about that.

[29:16] Daniel Merzlufft: Yeah, sure. So in the song, Jacob is in a session with Jess, the psychology grad student who serves as a social skills counselor. And they're discussing the upcoming dance that is happening at Jacob school. And you know how he might ask a girl to dance, how to simply dance. And then eventually, as the song progresses, Jess gets consumed by her own memory of these experiences. And we have a dream sequence of the first time she ever met her horrible boyfriend, but she doesn't think he's horrible. We do, though. And then when she comes back into reality, Jacob sings directly to another character for the first time in the show. And this does happen near the end of Act One. And this is sort of a language that we've established for the show is, you know, Jacob really struggles with connecting with other people.

And I know there's a beautiful paragraph in Jodi's book that is almost verbatim from one of the interviews she did with the person who's on the spectrum about what it feels like to look someone directly in the eyes. And you can't really do that on stage very clearly. It's one of the pieces of the language that we established that he never sings directly to another person. People can sing to him, and he can sing his thoughts to the general world, but he'll never look someone in the eyes and sing directly to them until this moment with Jess. And then she dies 10 minutes later.

[30:35] Kate Leonard: So here is the last one dance with Michelle Beth Herman and Daniel.

[30:40] ♪ Musical number: "Just One Dance" — performed by Michelle Beth Herman and Daniel Merzlufft ♪

[33:46] ♪ Musical number: "Now is the Time" — performed by Joriah Kwamé, Lauren M. Gunderson, Kate Leonard, Daniel Merzlufft ♪

[40:48] Joriah Kwamé: Shout out to Connor Keelan who orchestrated and produced both of those tracks because he's so incredible. Music directors are the unsung heroes of the theater. Daniel has a lot of MDing himself so he knows.

[42:46] Daniel Merzlufft: Yes. That is my statement on that. Yes. You know Joe and I were talking about this earlier. There aren't a lot of shows about autism and Asperger's. The only show we could really think of is Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. Why do you think it's important to spotlight autism and Asperger's in the theater? How can we get more shows like this in the theater? Because it's important.

[43:14] Kate Leonard: Yeah. I mean it's funny that you say Curious Incident because that's you know the one. And I remember just seeing that and having had friends many friends who are on the spectrum and like experiencing that and understanding their experience in a very different way. So like me as a person not on the spectrum just being able to understand that experience in a different way was really important.

[43:36] Joriah Kwamé: And then same thing with Reading House Rules because Jodi did I mean hundreds and hundreds of interviews. And I know a lot of those like direct quotes when Jacob is describing his experience are like almost direct. So I think one just to raise awareness but also you know I have a lot of people who I've been close to in the past who are on the spectrum. So that's why I was specifically drawn to it.

[43:58] Lauren M. Gunderson: And I think it's you know the arts help us cultivate a greater understanding of the people around us and the variety of experiences. And the more people who have some ability to relate to and understand the experience of being on the autism spectrum the more likely it is that we can cultivate a community where those people get the best support available in everyday interactions.

[44:23] Joriah Kwamé: In addition to the justice system which is what the second act of our show focuses on.

[44:28] Daniel Merzlufft: Yes.

[44:30] Kate Leonard: And I feel like this also creates opportunities for actors who are on the spectrum which is really fantastic.

[44:37] Joriah Kwamé: Absolutely.

[44:38] Lauren M. Gunderson: Exactly. Thank you both for that those beautiful answers and we can't wait to hear more from House Rules.

[44:51] Joriah Kwamé: Join us next time for more of The Musicals of Tomorrow.

[44:59] Joriah Kwamé: The Musicals of Tomorrow.