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[0:00] Pauls Macs: Backstage Pass, we're world class, with even more in store. Get your Backstage Pass, master class, with even more in store.

[0:22] Teresa Attridge: Ever wonder what it takes to make a new musical sing? Our mission is to make the exclusive, inclusive.

[0:28] Pauls Macs: We're interviewing the creatives who are changing musical theater one 11 o'clock number at a time.

[0:33] Teresa Attridge: This is your Backstage Pass.

[0:35] Pauls Macs: Get your Backstage Pass. Get your Backstage Pass.

[0:43] Pauls Macs: Welcome, welcome everyone. Welcome Barnacles to another episode of Backstage Pass. It's Pauls.

[0:48] Teresa Attridge: And Teresa.

[0:49] Pauls Macs: And we are so excited to have another extremely talented musical theater writing team with us today.

[0:54] Teresa Attridge: Oh my god, y'all aren't ready. Y'all aren't ready for this talent. It's like having two balls of fire, two suns, as it were, in the room with us today.

[1:02] Pauls Macs: Ooh, I like that metaphor. We have the team from Sunwatcher with us here today. Hi, Tidtaya. Hi, Isabella.

[1:08] Tidtaya Sinutoke: Hello.

[1:09] Isabella Dawis: Hi.

[1:10] Pauls Macs: How are you both doing today?

[1:12] Isabella Dawis: I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having us.

[1:16] Tidtaya Sinutoke: I mean, so excited. I have wanted to have this specific writing team on the pod for a while.

[1:22] Isabella Dawis: And little did I know it would be for a show I didn't even know about.

[1:26] Tidtaya Sinutoke: Sunwatcher is a gorgeous script. I'm really excited to dive into it with y'all.

[1:31] Pauls Macs: I think the audience will want to know how did you two meet each other and start working together? Because I think that's sort of the beginning of everything, right?

[1:39] Isabella Dawis: Yeah, I met Tidtaya as a performer of her work, actually.

[1:45] Isabella Dawis: So I was living in New York about, wow, like 10 years ago, a little less than 10 years ago. I was a performer first. So an actor, also a singer and a pianist.

[1:59] Teresa Attridge: In case anyone's wondering, Isabella is such a multi-hyphenate in like the up-teeth degree. Like the talent is talenting, honey.

[2:04] Isabella Dawis: Thanks, Teresa. I've also had the pleasure of performing with Teresa multiple times.

[2:13] Tidtaya Sinutoke: Oh, no, I've been exposed. I didn't expect that.

[2:17] Isabella Dawis: We were not going to talk about this, Teresa.

[2:20] Tidtaya Sinutoke: We weren't supposed to let everyone know that Teresa and Isabella are friends, but the secret is out.

[2:24] Isabella Dawis: Oh my God, stop. No, it's okay. It's nepotism.

[2:27] Tidtaya Sinutoke: Teresa is also extremely talented in her own right.

[2:30] Isabella Dawis: Yeah, so I moved to New York. I was really interested in new work development, new musicals, new plays, new operas, and being in the room with really talented, creative people.

[2:39] Isabella Dawis: And that's how I met Tidtaya. And I really admired her work. And she actually reached out to me one day with the proposal of sending in a submission for the inaugural first draft commission program at the Fifth Avenue Theater in Seattle.

[3:02] Isabella Dawis: And it was a one paragraph description of a musical that we wanted to write. And basically the rest is history. That launched our whole collaboration.

[3:14] Isabella Dawis: We did end up writing that musical, which is called Half the Sky. And now we're in the process of making Sunwatcher.

[3:22] Pauls Macs: Amazing. Tidtaya, did you just notice Isabella and were like, hmm, I think this person is a good writer? Or could you talk about how you came to approach Isabella to be your writing partner?

[3:33] Tidtaya Sinutoke: Well, like Isabella said, we met doing performing work together. And I know that she's an amazing performer, singer, and she's also an amazing musician.

[3:45] Tidtaya Sinutoke: And someone told me that she's also an amazing writer, too. And the rest is history.

[3:52] Isabella Dawis: It's almost like a full package just fell in your lap and you were like, oh, I see. How nice.

[3:57] Tidtaya Sinutoke: Well, the interesting thing I have to say, the interesting thing was that I had never written a musical before. So Tidtaya was really taking a leap of faith in terms of inviting me to collaborate with her on a new musical.

[4:10] Isabella Dawis: I had never done that before meeting Tidtaya.

[4:14] Tidtaya Sinutoke: I guess to be fair, I think Isabella has been developing new works since she was little compared to me who discovered musical when I was a teenager.

[4:25] Tidtaya Sinutoke: So I think she's actually more experienced in terms of participating in being part of new works, new musicals, before I ever know what musical was.

[4:34] Pauls Macs: Well, that's really interesting. Can you talk a little bit about how you were introduced to musicals? I'm always very curious to hear those stories because so many people find their way to the musical theater in such interesting and diverse ways.

[4:46] Tidtaya Sinutoke: Oh, I have a weird story, I guess, because I grew up in Thailand. And I mean, now musical is kind of flourishing in my country. But back, we're talking about like 20 plus years ago. Not really.

[4:59] Tidtaya Sinutoke: So I moved here in 2004, I think. My host family's children's school was doing Grease.

[5:07] Tidtaya Sinutoke: So Grease is the word. I mean, how could you not get addicted for the rest of your life?

[5:15] Isabella Dawis: Well, yeah.

[5:16] Tidtaya Sinutoke: So they took all the kids to Grease on tour in Ohio. I was living in Michigan back then. Coincidentally, my school graduation for the choir, we sang For Good from Wicked.

[5:26] Tidtaya Sinutoke: For Good should have been written for choirs in general. I feel like it's like the perfect senior graduation song. And like the two senior girls always cry.

[5:34] Isabella Dawis: I love that.

[5:35] Tidtaya Sinutoke: Oh, my gosh. I think having a family that's really into theater and getting introduced through a family, that's something they do as a bonding experience together, also brings in the idea that theater is for everyone.

[5:49] Tidtaya Sinutoke: And I think that's really cool that you were introduced in this way where you're like, oh, this is something that we can all enjoy as a group. This isn't like a teen thing or an adult thing.

[5:56] Pauls Macs: Also, I teach a musical theater history course in the country of Latvia. It's so interesting to me because half those students are deeply passionate about musicals, or some are like especially passionate, and half of them are like, I'm not sure exactly what this is, which is a really interesting mixture.

[6:11] Pauls Macs: So it's always fascinating to me to learn how different people find their way to the art form. Why don't I go ahead and do bios just so everybody knows about the fantastic people we have in our room with us.

[6:21] Teresa Attridge: Oh, yeah. Buckle up, Barnacles, because there are some credits in here.

[6:24] Teresa Attridge: Well, we're going to start with Tidtaya. Tidtaya Sinutoke is a Jonathan Larson Grant, Billy Burke Ziegfeld Award, Drum Hill Artist Fellowship, and Fred Ebb Award winning musical theater composer and writer.

[6:34] Teresa Attridge: Theater credits include Half the Sky, which was part of the Fifth Avenue Theater's First Draft Commission and their 2021 digital season, Sunwatcher at the Civilians R&D Group, Dear Mr. C, which was part of the Diverse Voices Playwriting Initiative Award at the Polyphone Festival, The Adventures of Sky and Friends, which is part of New Victory Theater's Lab Works, and Little Dewgong and Her Seagrass Song with the American Opera Project.

[6:55] Teresa Attridge: Her works have been developed and supported by the Composer Librettist Studio and New Dramatists, Yale Institute for Music Theater, New Victory Lab Works, Johnny Mercer Foundation, NYFA IAM Mentoring Program, Robert Rauschenberg Residency, Kurt Weill Foundation, Drama League, Tofta Lake Center, and Ryan Beck Writers Retreat.

[7:12] Teresa Attridge: She received her MFA from NYU.

[7:14] Pauls Macs: All that from Grease.

[7:16] Tidtaya Sinutoke: All that from Grease.

[7:17] Pauls Macs: We owe this to Knicki.

[7:20] Teresa Attridge: What a journey. The show is a journey. This is exciting.

[7:24] Teresa Attridge: Oh, and by the way, I should just throw in here, I'm in Seattle right now, and I'm a former employee of the Fifth Avenue Theater. You know, it's very exciting, that Seattle connection.

[7:30] Teresa Attridge: Isabella Dawis is a Filipina-American writer and performer from Minneapolis. As a book writer and lyricist, she is the recipient of the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, the Cleveland Prize in Musical Theater, and the Frevet Award.

[7:41] Teresa Attridge: Her musical with composer Tidtaya Sinutoke, Half the Sky, is the recipient of the Weston Ghostlight New Musical Award and the Fifth Avenue Theater's First Draft Commission.

[7:49] Teresa Attridge: Recently, Isabella served as composer and live musician for 10,000 Things, Twelfth Night. Her writing has been supported by Musical Theater Factory, Ryan Beck Writers Retreat, Theater Moo, the Kurt Weill Foundation, Weston Theater Company, Tofta Lake Center, The O'Neill, the Atlanta Opera, the American Opera Project, Theater Latté Da, and the Coalition of Asian American Leaders, and more.

[8:08] Pauls Macs: I mean, wow, what an incredible list of accomplishments.

[8:11] Teresa Attridge: We're just out here, like, really, really, it's giving Asian excellence.

[8:16] Isabella Dawis: It's giving, like, so many accolades. Are my parents proud?

[8:22] Isabella Dawis: I did have someone recently ask who my grant writer was, and it's me.

[8:28] Tidtaya Sinutoke: Yes, it is.

[8:30] Isabella Dawis: Tidtaya and I do all of our applications ourselves.

[8:34] Tidtaya Sinutoke: There's no one behind the curtain.

[8:36] Isabella Dawis: It's just you.

[8:37] Pauls Macs: It's so refreshing, I think, to have young women of color writing shows together. It's like a combination we actually don't get a lot, because it's usually, like, some sort of blend of either culture or gender or orientation.

[8:52] Pauls Macs: But this is very, very cool. It's one of the reasons that I wanted to have y'all on the pod from that connection.

[8:57] Teresa Attridge: This happens every once in a while, where, like, Pauls or I will just have a show that we've been hanging on to for many months. We're like, how about that show? We want that show, right?

[9:05] Pauls Macs: And yes, we always do, but it can just take a little while in terms of scheduling.

[9:09] Teresa Attridge: But I love that Pauls said refreshing, because that is definitely a word that came to my mind as I was absorbing these materials.

[9:16] Teresa Attridge: Your music sounds unlike anything that I've heard in the musical theater canon. The voice that you bring in your art is really, really exciting, so I'm very excited to talk about this piece today.

[9:25] Pauls Macs: Why don't I go ahead and read a synopsis, just so the Barnacles, our listeners, we call our fans Barnacles. Why don't I read the synopsis so that the listeners can know about Sunwatcher?

[9:33] Teresa Attridge: In 1944, a young woman in Tokyo dares to stare at the sun. Though she lives in a city under attack from American bombs and in a body limited to the role of housewife, Hisako is determined to become an astronomer.

[9:45] Teresa Attridge: Her struggle leads her to the mighty Japanese sun goddess Amaterasu, who is in the midst of her own epic battle and needs a mortal's help. But can Hisako rise to the challenge?

[9:53] Teresa Attridge: Performed by an all Asian women and non-binary cast with an innovative score featuring electronic live looping and taiko drumming, Sunwatcher is a new musical about one woman's extraordinary dedication to the power of observation.

[10:05] Isabella Dawis: Oh, I love that. The power of observation kills me every time. Like, get out of here.

[10:10] Teresa Attridge: There's a quote at the beginning of your script that I wrote down. One can never know when nature will show us something unusual. And I thought that was so fantastic because I know for myself, I am very guilty of getting like the blinders on in my daily life.

[10:22] Teresa Attridge: Sometimes I just forget to look around at the world around me and remember that nature can show me something that I was never expecting, which is very, very present in this story.

[10:32] Isabella Dawis: I call it the Tolkien effect. Like, do you stop and look at every single plant on the way to what you're doing? Do you write about every tree and every forest you've ever been to? That's like very the, very the thing.

[10:44] Pauls Macs: Teresa, I like forgot that you're a big,

[10:47] Teresa Attridge: I completely forgot how much both of us are Lord of the Rings.

[10:52] Pauls Macs: Lord of the Rings geeks.

[10:53] Teresa Attridge: I didn't get to see the musical in Chicago. I regret it for the rest of my life.

[10:57] Pauls Macs: It's fine. It's fine. It's fine.

[10:59] Teresa Attridge: You should have those guys on the pod.

[11:01] Pauls Macs: If we had a Lord of the Rings guest on the podcast in any capacity, it would be me talking for the full 90 minutes, crying, weeping.

[11:10] Teresa Attridge: Maybe Billy Boyd or Dominic Monaghan.

[11:13] Pauls Macs: I'd stop. I'd cry.

[11:14] Teresa Attridge: You know, it's not impossible. We still have to do our cabaret Lord of the Sings.

[11:19] Pauls Macs: That'll come up another time.

[11:21] Teresa Attridge: Patented, trademarked, nobody take it.

[11:23] Pauls Macs: Edit it out.

[11:24] Teresa Attridge: I'm not editing that out.

[11:37] Teresa Attridge: Oh my gosh. You know what it is? I really want to see them do The Last Five Years. I would love to see Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellen.

[11:45] Pauls Macs: Teresa, you gotta be careful. Everyone's gonna start stealing your ideas again. This is just like Jeff Calhoun.

[11:49] Teresa Attridge: I can't help that I'm an incubator, an innovator. Alas, not a scientist. Unlike our lead character, Hisako.

[11:56] Pauls Macs: One, I love any story that's about an unexpected hero. Where we have this woman who is a widow from the war in World War II. But she so desperately wants to look at the sun, specifically the sun, right? With a telescope she got when she was a kid. Where the only thing she can see through it is the sun because it's not a very good telescope. That ends up kind of being the whole point of the show is that sometimes you have to look at what's right in front of you. What gave you the idea to even write a show based on this very real person?

[12:28] Isabella Dawis: We were in an internet rabbit hole looking up Asian women in science and found this person, Hisako Koyama. Some little kind of like thumbnail NPR type articles had recently come out. This is a few years ago. There had recently been an article in a scientific journal that was an attempt to really put Hisako's biography out there kind of for the record and to preserve her legacy. Even among astronomers, because her work is so paramount to the field of solar observation, but she hasn't really gotten her due.

[13:08] Tidtaya Sinutoke: Her field of study is fascinating and we found it really interesting. Clearly, there was a level of obsession that as artists we can all relate to. But there's something extraordinary about the way that she perceived the world and the way that she took to science as someone who was not formally trained in science at all and was not at all the type of person in 20th century Japanese society who would be expected to be a top-performing scientist.

[13:47] Isabella Dawis: Even just by reading kind of stubs, like two-paragraph news items about her, it just seemed that she was a singular kind of person. And specifically a person whose drive and inner workings would be compelling if put on stage. And specifically through musical theater, we talked right away about musicalizing her story because we felt like there was something emotional and spiritual about her life and her work. And that that would just land in the world of musical theater in a really beautiful way. It's just been a fun journey to investigate that.

[14:30] Tidtaya Sinutoke: Something else about the piece I love is that even though it is very much telling the story of this woman, you said in your notes on design that the style that you chose to write the show in is a nod to Japanese noh theater. N-O-H. Which is something that's meant to bridge the divine and the mortal. So I'm also really curious why you decided to add this magical realism element to a show. Because while the character is already so fascinating, this whole extra world in terms of the sun she observed and the goddess of the sun, and making it something that's about so much more than just what's in front of us, which again is such a huge theme in the show, is what's in front of us and what we can observe, but also what's beyond expectation. What made y'all choose to incorporate that element into the show? Did that happen from the beginning? Or did you organically say, I think the sun is a character, actually?

[15:21] Isabella Dawis: Yeah, and I could just add, after Hamilton, it feels like there are a bunch of kind of hidden figure musicals that came out. And don't get me wrong, they're absolutely fantastic. But going back to that word, refreshing, the whole aspect of a mortal interacting with the divine, interacting with the sun goddess, is truly fantastic. I'm also very curious to know where that came from in your process.

[15:42] Tidtaya Sinutoke: Initially, we wanted to borrow the structure of noh storytelling into this piece. And noh is always about a mortal person with a spirit or god. And that's when Amaterasu came in. But then further along, while we were developing this piece, we feel like, I mean, first of all, writing a musical has a specific structure that we need to follow. And there are certain things that we can utilize a song moment from noh, but not all of them. So it became more of an inspired by noh structure. And then we kind of reconstructed that into, like, we merged it into more of a musical theater structure. But because originally it was kind of utilized the noh structure, the character of the sun remains.

[16:31] Isabella Dawis: I love that. And I can say it was Tidtaya's idea right away to have the sun goddess Amaterasu as part of the story, which was a really good idea, made a lot of sense and opened up a lot of doors in terms of the storytelling. And so it's also another way to dramatize what science looks like. This has been one of the joys of writing Sunwatcher is it's illustrating what practicing science looks like. And I think there are a lot of stereotypes about that. Definitely when it comes to modern storytelling, a lot of gendered stereotypes, a lot of like really specific cultural stereotypes, but also just stereotypes in terms of a really result-oriented outcomes, product-oriented outcomes, big discoveries, eureka moments, a big kind of flouting conventions in a very loud and showy way.

And that's not what Koyama did. She was certainly, I think, a subversive figure. But the way that she practiced science was as meditation, I believe, as meditation and visual art. That's one of the joys of working on this project is just helping open people's minds to what the experience of being a scientist is or can be.

[17:59] Pauls Macs: This actually seems like a great, great opportunity to play "Travel Song." I'm sure the audience is very excited to hear how the show sounds. We've been talking a lot about it. Would you like to set that up for us?

[18:09] Tidtaya Sinutoke: Yeah, I think "Travel Song" is one of the remaining elements that we aspire by noh structure, which is the model character would in a way, introduce themselves to the audience and then go on a journey. It is the first song we wrote for this piece. Back then we looked at the structure and then we thought this could be an I Want song. It kind of tells Hisako's story that in the beginning, she wanted to stargaze using her telescope. And that's, you know, traveling through space. But then the lens is not good enough to do that. At the end of the song, the sun's rise. And so she decided to watch the sun instead. And so beginning her journey of her sun observation, her sun watcher. And the singer on the demo track is Gemina, who's a wonderful, wonderful singer. All right. Here is "Travel Song" performed by Gemina.

[19:12] ♪ Musical number: "Travel Song" — performed by Gemina ♪

[22:45] Pauls Macs: Backstage Pass will return after these messages.

[22:49] Teresa Attridge: Oh, but it's giving I want. It's giving I want so bad. What you just said is so fantastic, Teresa. I will just confess and admit out loud, I didn't realize what you were doing was marrying noh theater with musical theater in this moment. And the thing that I love about it, it's called "Travel Song." There are a lot of musicals that start with people on a journey or they're traveling, but I am absolutely in love with the fact that Hisako is traveling through the telescope.

[23:14] Isabella Dawis: There's a scene where she's preparing for a fight with her brother.

[27:14] Tidtaya Sinutoke: This is also a great example of taiko drumming being used in the score.

[27:24] Isabella Dawis: So tight. Tight as a drum.

[27:29] Tidtaya Sinutoke: Oh my gosh. So taiko drumming is used throughout the score in different ways.

[27:34] Isabella Dawis: There are some moments of improvisation and there are some scored out moments.

[27:39] Tidtaya Sinutoke: This is one of the scored out moments in which the taiko drumming is being used as part of the instrumental accompaniment for the singer. Is that correct, Tidtaya?

[27:49] Isabella Dawis: And who is singing on this demo?

[27:54] Tidtaya Sinutoke: Anna Hashizume is the singer.

[27:59] Isabella Dawis: Kira's fight song performed by Anna Hashizume.

[28:04] ♪ Musical number: "Fight Song" — performed by Anna Hashizume ♪

[31:03] Isabella Dawis: If you are wondering what is in my ear pods at the gym when I am getting pumped, it's this now.

[31:10] Tidtaya Sinutoke: It makes me want to fight everyone.

[31:12] Isabella Dawis: And shows again the refreshing palette of this song, the multiple voices you get to hear.

[31:17] Tidtaya Sinutoke: Kisako's voice sounds completely different than this flavor of powerful epic taiko drumming.

[31:22] Isabella Dawis: Tidtaya, I'm really curious for the music. When you were trying to develop sort of like the musical DNA for mortals versus gods, what is that process like in terms of trying to figure out what the divide is and how they come together?

[31:37] Tidtaya Sinutoke: Like as someone who, plot twist, I can't read music. I perform, but I can't read it. I like Nick Cannon drumline my way through my entire career. But because of that, I'm always really curious about sort of like building a musical vocabulary for a character and the ways that those motifs blend into each other. Can you talk about that a little more?

[31:54] Isabella Dawis: I think we just need to talk from the beginning. I think the inspiration of everything is, and you can look this up, but NASA released the sound of the sun on SoundCloud, I think. It's like a minute long. It's not really like so in tune. The universe is not in tune. But if you kind of plunk it on the keyboard, it's kind of close to the pitch D.

[32:19] Tidtaya Sinutoke: From the get-go, typically musical theater writers, I think we are very flexible when it comes to changing the keys of the song. But for this piece, we made a decision that whenever it's the song that the gods are singing, God means Amaterasu is singing or Hisako is singing, or anything that is about science of the sun, D will be in the key. It doesn't mean that everything is in D, but it means that like, for example, Travel's song was E minor in a way, which D is tonal to the key. Fight's song is D minor, and then it modulates to E minor. So D is still tonal to the key. All the songs that is science, like there's B flat, there's some sort of A mixolydian. Basically, anything that is dealing with the sun and Hisako, D has to be atonal in that keys.

But when we are writing songs for the war, then the D has to be dissonant. So most of the songs, if I remember correctly, are in C sharp, D flat, F sharp. Anything that D is not part of the key. So that's something that we just make decision from the get go.

[33:37] Isabella Dawis: Oh my gosh. My mind is blown. Musical theater subtext, it's crazy.

[33:43] Tidtaya Sinutoke: First of all, I understood half of it from Zosia. People who play music are probably peeing themselves, because you're both so cool.

[33:52] Isabella Dawis: So what I described, also a way to think about it is like, the way that like a costume designer has color palettes for the different characters and class structure or families that they're from or whatever. It's like, that's what Tidtaya does with the collections of pitches that she uses for each character.

[34:10] Tidtaya Sinutoke: And it's really fun. I mean, yeah, it's really fun to, as a music theory nerd, it's fun to uncover those little nuggets in Tidtaya's work.

[34:21] Isabella Dawis: Thanks for joining us on New York Theatre Barn's Backstage Pass, hosted by Teresa Attridge and Pauls Macs. Join us next time as we continue our conversation about the new musical, Sunwatcher.