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[0:08] Grace Benigni: Hello and welcome to the Feinstein’s/54 Below podcast. I'm Grace Benigni, the club's senior digital and graphics associate. And today I'm sitting down with a multi-hyphenate sensation. A musical theater writer, YouTube creator, songwriter, and dramatist. They're perhaps best known for their off-Broadway musical, The Mad Ones, written with longtime collaborator Kate Kerrigan. The Mad Ones has launched a hit cast album and thousands of performance videos, which are beloved by millions all over the world. Upcoming projects include an immersive house party called The Bad Years, a sung-through adaptation of Henry the Fourth set in Northern Ireland, directed by Michael Arden, called Republic, and Kill the Boy Band with playwright Ji Hay Park.

Bree's work has been everywhere from the Kennedy Center, Camel Center, and Lincoln Center to Manila, Seoul, and Berlin. Her children's musicals, including Henry and Mudge and Rosie Revere have toured the US for over a decade, and her YouTube videos have over 25 million views. Our guest today is Larson Award-winning composer Bree Lowdermilk. Bree, welcome to the podcast.

[1:12] Bree Lowdermilk: Hello, glad to be here.

[1:14] Grace Benigni: I know it's been a while since performances were able to take place in person. How do you feel about getting back on stage and doing it in Broadway's living room?

[1:22] Bree Lowdermilk: Oh my gosh. Well, when Jen Tepper first reached out and was like, Do you want to come hang and play at 54 Below, Broadway's living room? I had been in my living room just playing the piano for no one for a very long time. So I think it took a minute for my puny mammalian brain to even wrap my head around what that meant. The first thoughts I had were, oh, this means I'm gonna be able to sit in a circle with humans I love, some of whom I know very well, some of whom I don't, and sing harmonies together. I can have sing-alongs with people. I can get people singing together and make eye contact with them and like feel the vibrations of sound rolling off some of these extraordinary singers. And then more recently, as I've been watching people post about their experiences, I'm like, oh, right, I'm gonna like forget how to do any of this stuff, and I'm gonna be up there on stage falling off the piano bench. I think that's what I'm feeling right now, is I'll probably fall at some point because I just don't remember how to walk on stage.

[2:26] Grace Benigni: I think people will love that.

[2:28] Bree Lowdermilk: It's part of the live theater experience, right? So big bucks for.

[2:35] Grace Benigni: Yeah, but I am for this focusing on a lot of sing-alongs and a lot of group singing because it's the thing that I have missed most, the ability to raise our voices together. And also I feel like if I had brought a full band together beyond me at the piano, I feel my heart would have exploded from too much joy. So I have to dole it out to myself more slowly.

[2:57] Bree Lowdermilk: Of course, yeah. I love the idea of the sing-along because I feel our space is a perfect place for that. I walk along with all of our shows. Obviously, a Norm Lewis kind of concert, you don't really sit and sing along with, but it's getting to sit back there with everyone in the same space. It just is a magical feeling.

[3:15] Bree Lowdermilk: I'm actually thinking about making a program that even has you ever go to, I'm like very into Catholicism. I'm kidding, I'm a lapse Jew. But once or twice I've been to a Catholic wedding or something, and in the programs, there's often a little one-line music staff to just be like, here's the tune to Our Father Our King or whatever. And I kind of wanted to include in the program little snippets of the sing-along stuff. I want to do anything possible to get people to do that because I didn't even do outdoor music performance because I got really scared of droplets when you sing loud. And when I sing, I sing, no. It's huge. It's like crazy. And it's something that does seem optimized to distribute droplets.

[4:03] Grace Benigni: I love that.

[4:05] Bree Lowdermilk: Speaking of seeing humans again, obviously you and Kate Kerrigan are a powerhouse duo. And I know she'll be joining you, right?

[4:14] Bree Lowdermilk: As of now, she is able to be joined. I keep expecting people to be like, no wait. But so far, everyone who we've announced is with us. We had a child care snafu with one performer that resolved itself, but everyone's very committed to making this happen. So there's a lot of child care involved, but it's good. But yeah, this will be probably on a couple hours before. That'll be my first time being in a room with Kate in a year and a half.

[4:39] Grace Benigni: That's great.

[4:40] Bree Lowdermilk: Yeah, she has a second daughter, Lucy, who I haven't met yet, other than through Zoom. You've created so many extraordinary songs and shows together. Can you take us back to how that all started? How you met and decided to team up?

[4:53] Bree Lowdermilk: Kate and I have known each other since elementary school. Her dad directed community theater in the Philadelphia suburb that I grew up in. Kate was in more of a central Pennsylvania or northeastern Pennsylvania kind of human. She grew up near where the office is set near Scranton. They didn't have as much community theater there. She would traipse down to Philly to do things there. I had an illustrious career in that community theater, often playing things such as an umpa loompa. But I was the prettiest umpa loompa. And then, yeah, in high school, Kate and I started to connect a bit, and we were legendarily in a summer camp production of Little Shop of Horrors as Audrey and Seymour. I tried to sing all of her high notes.

And when I was dropping out of Harvard after my freshman year, because I didn't want to do it anymore, and moving down to New York to do copy work and assistant work for Jason Robert Brown for the legendary show Urban Cowboy. And I reconnected with her. She was in school at Barnard, and we just started writing things. And one of those first things was a show that was at the New York Musical Theater Festival. And from there we got our first commission to have an off-Broadway show. At that point, I was 20, 19, 20, something silly like that. And we just launched and we've been writing musicals for it feels like centuries now. And there are children in the Philippines who sing them and don't understand much about my life, but that's the long and short of it.

[6:29] Grace Benigni: That's amazing. Along the way, I believe it had something to do with animatic videos, which I also don't understand very much about, but I'm grateful for their existence. So talking about kind of for the writing process, I feel like you both started the popularity of song cycles, especially through your YouTube channel, which just absolutely blew up. And so when you sit down for something more like an off-Broadway musical, do you have that plot in mind and then sit down and write the songs that go along with that plot? Or do the songs exist in almost a song cycle first, and then you weave in the plot as you go through and create these different songs?

[7:12] Bree Lowdermilk: Kate and I have never written a song cycle. We had one commission from a publishing company asking us to make a song cycle, which we pitched for and wrote some songs for, but ended up not actually making it or releasing it. So functionally, oh, and there was one weird internet licensing thing we did where we licensed some of our songs to be in song cycles. But no, what happened is Kate and I have only written book musicals. It's just that Broadway producers come in and they're like, this shouldn't be the tiny gem of an off-Broadway thing that you think it should be. And we're like, no, really, it shouldn't be. They're like, this should be a huge Broadway musical. We'll option it, and we'll and it's like if you picture Kermit the Frog from Muppet's Take Manhattan, legendarily with Lonnie Price.

The frog comes in and everything's going to be amazing. We'll buy all these things and we're gonna put you on the Broadway. And then instead, it takes very long time, does not ever make it to Broadway, actually. And in the meantime, people fall in love with these songs because my friends who I think are very talented and who I get to sing my songs, it turns out the internet also thinks they're very talented and also very attractive. And so then these songs take on a life of their own, and because you can't just go see this show, and you can't watch a full bootleg of this show, because it's equity rules, and you can't read a script because it's not easy to find. People kind of I think start making up their own stories to them.

And to be fair, that's what I did when I fell in love with musicals when I was 14. I was just listening to New Brain, being, I don't know what this is about, but I'm gonna assume there's not a man dressed as a frog in this. I was wrong. There was a fan dressed in the frog, but I wrote it out in my head. So I guess that's what everyone else is doing. The truth is we write plays, we write stories, we write book, we write lyrics. There's more beyond it goes beyond the belting and the heartfelt piano motifs. There's story. It's just hard to convey that story when you're watching a five-minute video on YouTube. But I think there's also sanctity and great beauty in someone making up their own story for themselves.

And if the songs feel so much of a piece with themselves that you can imply story and learn something about what they are and believe you've found something, some truth in there. If these songs feel they belong to you because you've found them, and obviously for the thousands of people who sing these songs, they mean something to them, and not just because of the notes of their words. There's implied story and implied dramaturgy around them. And I won't deny that of them. And so I don't know. I guess the too long didn't read of this sentence is me saying fan art is valid, fanfic is valid, fan communities are the most most valid, and also it doesn't necessarily correlate to the shows that I've actually written.

[10:02] Grace Benigni: Yeah, obviously we've all seen that legendary air-to-bate YouTube video and all of that.

[10:08] Bree Lowdermilk: And so not only that, I shot that. That's my janky little phone taped to the back wall of some theater. You know who's in the audience that night? That guy from The Counting Crows who was dating someone in the cast of I want to say like American Idiot, whose name I won't say. But yeah, there was just this couple of weeks where what is his name? He has huge hair or had huge hair. I think he cut his dreadlocks off recently, finally.

[10:37] Grace Benigni: Oh my gosh.

[10:38] Bree Lowdermilk: I don't know anything about the counting crows. I am the absolute wrong person. Sorry, is this not a Counting Crows fan podcast?

[10:45] Grace Benigni: Oh no, that's later.

[10:47] Bree Lowdermilk: That's okay.

[10:49] Bree Lowdermilk: Fabulous. You've had such an exceptional career from success off Broadway with The Mad Ones and Henry and Mudge and New York City Tory and beyond. When you look back at all these accomplishments and experiences, are there any memories that really stand out to you? I'm sure that's like asking you to pick a favorite child. So if you can't pick just one, that's okay too.

[11:10] Bree Lowdermilk: Every time I think about the various development processes of our immersive house party musical, The Bad Years, I always can only look back at it as something that should never have happened and could never have happened. And looking back, I'm like, did that really happen? Were we really doing a musical in a 20,000 square foot warehouse with 150 songs that sometimes had five or six going at the same time with tracks of humans walking through the space, full choreography, people getting wasted, the audience getting drunk, and like making out with the cast, the cast making out with the audience, and people's clothes are coming off. And meanwhile, there's some girl who's a god up on a platform singing Janel Monet, and there's like live music and Charlie Rosen had orchestrated sitar or something.

I don't even know. And I the whole thing was just so wild and felt like only in New York, but with the asterisk of and also only in Bushwick, and also only when you're old enough to have the clout to put this together and young enough to be stupid enough to do it, and only when you've facilitated a situation where everyone's on cocaine, but also enough of a situation where you're not aware at the time of the cocaine. So it has nothing to do with you or your insurance liabilities. But you're just like, how is this happening? And then at the end you find out, oh, powered by cocaine. I understand.

[12:50] Bree Lowdermilk: In light of this, what I'd like to share is that my concerts at 54 Below will not be bad at all. They will be powered by herbal tea. What I intend to do is to make everyone sit in a circle with me. Take some deep breaths, sing some beautiful, beautiful songs together, regardless of how you're feeling about your voice. If you're having anxiety about how your voice sounds right now, great. That's fantastic. All emotions are welcome. Bring that into the room. Let's get you feeling comfortable about singing with other people again. Pick a note. Where do you want to sing? How can we reclaim parts of what performing and gathering in artistic community, what they felt like. And we're gonna sing some songs that any musical theater kids, me would know very well from the past 10 years.

And also, I'm really excited to share some newer songs, a lot of which are music and lyrics by me, and are songs that are written about trans and non-binary experience and queer experiences, and will be performed by some of my dearest friends who are amazing theater performers who are also trans or non-binary humans. So that's also thrilling to me. And I think we'll add to that sense of warmth and homecoming. More cumbayal than cocaine, for sure on this one.

[14:10] Bree Lowdermilk: I know you spoke about writing during this last year. And I know a lot of artists have expressed a lot of trouble with being creative in this time. How did you find your process being affected by being stuck at home and going through all of these different things and still being able to be creative and really express yourself? I really thought I was going to take up knitting. I also thought I was going to do things around my house. I thought I would have a functional music studio for the first time in my life, instead of just buckets of wires and always just throwing musical equipment around. Instead, what happened is I spent a year thinking, wow, I really have just done nothing. But at the end of that year, I have all of these projects that are very far ahead in the writing process and even in development processes, all of which are new and really thrilling, that I suppose I must have written at some point.

I don't really remember having done it. I think it was maybe when things got really bad. I just started writing, I guess. I hit a place where I just got very low anxiety about it. And I was like reaching out to people where it's like, I know we haven't talked in a year or two, and I know you're an extraordinarily successful television writer now, but I have this idea. Can we just hang and chat about this? And then suddenly the next thing you know, it's a real thing that's moving forward. And that was true for some other stuff too. And that's just been cool. I've been feeling rave, but I also felt like my gender journey. I'm a trans femme nonbinary human, and I use pronouns she her, they, them.

My name is Bree Lowdermilk. That wasn't true six months ago. That wasn't true a year ago. I was someone who did not know their name during those times. And so that's different. But prior to the pandemic, I was very much making my way around the theater district, connecting with friends and industry and folks that I hadn't spoken to in a long time, and kind of one by one in person, being like, hello, here I am, and this is what's up with me, and this is what I look like right now, and this is what I sound like, and this is what I'm up to, and the words I use for myself and hello. And that felt really good in person. And I was like, I'll just keep doing this until it feels so good that then I'll I guess I'll do it on the internet too, and then it'll be good.

And then the pandemic hit, and I was like, Oh, okay. What do I do now? And so I guess there's been a sense that that journey of showing up in space as myself was put on pause. And yet I also know that it definitely hasn't been. I don't know. I feel like the amount of time it's taken me to feel comfortable showing up on stage as Bree Lowdermilk as my full self, showing the work that I feel most proud to show, and facilitating and then putting together an evening that fully represents me. I feel like that's work that I couldn't have done in the same way a year ago or six months ago. And so I'm grateful for the now.

[17:09] Grace Benigni: That's incredible. Because a lot of times I feel like everyone's been focusing on how difficult all of this has been, but in a lot of ways, it's facilitated a lot of self-reflection as well and time to ourselves that we've never had before. And I think it can be very powerful time. So I think it's great that you had the chance to do that. And we're so excited that you're going to do it at Feinstein's/54 Below with all your amazing friends.

[17:36] Bree Lowdermilk: Yeah. In terms of the virtual versus in-person of it in general, for me, the loss of in-person therapy was really, really hard. Virtual therapy doesn't work for me and for what I need. I'm a deeply somatic person. Being in the room is something that really matters to me. And I think of being in a room collaborating with other people, a physical space where you're rapid fire, interrupting people in a beautiful way, going back and forth, building on ideas together. When we think back to in Jen Tepper manner, when we think back to lightning fire, old timey 1920s, real building, let's put it on a show, little gonna throw together a song in two minutes and here's the A section is that he said, Let's kick it out.

Oh, but put it on a typewriter. There's a magic and an energy in that that's irreplaceable. So there's been a deep longing from me for that. And from an identity perspective, I prior to pandemic was surrounded by a community of other trans folk in my life in person. And I thought of that as being really foundational to where I was building from. And to not have that anymore was really hard. The digital versions of it didn't feel substantive or solid enough. And yet, here I am feeling so much stronger than I did a year ago, feeling so much more myself, feeling more comfortable, feeling like maybe I don't need as many people around me telling me how to be as I thought I did. Maybe I can just be me.

So I guess to anyone else out there who's still feeling the lack of some in-person rituals that were important to you that aren't necessarily back yet, I don't know what I'm saying. Probably just I see you, even as I see the ways that certain things are better. My goodness, I miss anything that involves my heart being close to another person's heart, a stranger's heart, where we're both hearing and experiencing the same music and experiencing the same sensations and in that together. So that is an energy.

[19:34] Bree Lowdermilk: Truly, Grace. The thing I have to say to you is that my freaking yoga studio near my house that is queer and trans yoga every Saturday and was my favorite place in the world is still not open. So I will be bringing all of the energy of my queer and trans yoga class to the 54 Below. You're welcome.

[19:56] Grace Benigni: Perfect. We need to rebrand the whole show. Starting now.

[20:00] Bree Lowdermilk: Oh my gosh. And a newer name for you that you're presenting to the world now, which is so incredible. You've previously talked about being eager to name your characters in any piece that you're writing. Were there any characters that were especially difficult or satisfying to name for you? Talk a little bit more about why that's so important to you.

[20:25] Bree Lowdermilk: I'm really excited right now with a commission I'm doing that I can't talk about yet. I can say that the entire cast are gender non-conforming, non-binary folk, and creating the names for that are amazing. It's really cool as I have so many people in my life who are either trans, non-binary, or even queer and going through identity changes and having identity words that they come into deeper in life around asexuality or being aromantic or demisexual or words that they come to know, ways that they like take ownership of language. I would include in that polyamorous people and consensually non-monogamous people and people who are co-parenting in different configurations. People who are creating their own language.

I feel really inspired by the people in my life who are doing that work of being pioneers in how they talk about themselves and with their vulnerability. And there's something really beautiful to me about being able to name characters after them in places and being able to take some of those ideas lovingly and to map them onto larger commercial projects and to try and amplify those stories and to try and be able to see stories on screen and on stage that reflect the communities I love so much in my real life. Those are the good ones. I also like the mom in The Mad Ones, whose name is Bev. I just like the name Bev a lot. And I liked when we found Bev and we were like, oh, our name is totally Bev. You're not fighting on it. It's just that was your soul. Bev, definitely.

[22:12] Grace Benigni: Speaking a little more on inspiration, obviously, you have a lot of collaborators, a great group that you've found, great artists that you've surrounded yourself with throughout your career. Would you say there are other artists that you don't personally know that have really influenced your writing?

[22:30] Bree Lowdermilk: As writers, definitely I'm one of the many generations that can't help but have been deeply touched and inspired by Steve Sondheim's work. I only met him once. He told me that I was misspelling my name, that there was supposed to be an umlaut over the O. I'm certain that he was correct. But his work was I come back to it over and over again in terms of the wild ambition of it. Candor and Ebb, just my first encounters with their songs, and like getting to be even just I think I shared an elevator with John Cander a few times, and each time I was like, Can I lick this elevator? Can I just stay here for a while and just breathe in the air in this elevator? Lynn and Steve, Lynn Ahrens and Steve Flaherty are humans that I can't believe I'm lucky enough to be able to call friends.

Their work is just amazing, and they inspired something in me that made me believe in what you can do just putting one foot in front of another, building up your craft. I think it also deeply impacted my work with children's musicals because they wrote things that work really well for younger audiences. And their songwriting works on so many levels. Never forget that Lynn Ahrens wrote all of those Schoolhouse Rock themes and stuff, and yeah, which is amazing. But I've written something like eight or nine children's musicals at this point by accident that are like not something I did once and is forgotten, like that continue to be performed around. If you go looking for them, there's probably a Bree Lowdermilk musical playing at the children's theater near you. It's a funny thing, and they're almost always about girls in science.

[24:01] Bree Lowdermilk: Which we need more of, so it's great. Listen, hit your wagon to Lauren Gunderson, who's someone I work with a lot, and you better believe that you're gonna get a story about the girls in science. Schoolhouse Rock is the only reason I know my three stack stables so quickly. So shout out to all of the musicals that are making us smarter when we run children.

[24:22] Grace Benigni: Sounds like three might be a bit of a magic number for you.

[24:26] Bree Lowdermilk: In fact, be a magic number for me. What drew you to writing children's musicals? I feel like that's something that's harder to just fall into, but clearly you've excelled in home.

[24:37] Bree Lowdermilk: I felt like there was just a magnetic pull. I got asked the first time when I was 15. They paid me $3,000 or something, and I'm 15 years old. I'm like, that's amazing. Looking back, would I have been happier had I gotten a job at, I don't know, the cafe at Border's Books in my town? Maybe. But at the time I was like, I'm so fancy, I'm just like Adam Guettel or whoever at the time I was idolizing. Yeah, I'll write this children's musical. I don't know. I wasn't very good at thinking about the children who were gonna be watching them at the time. So I think my first couple that I kicked out because people asked, they were adult musicals with kids in mind, where there was all that Muppetsy kind of like winking at the adults in the audience.

And I was more interested in the jokes that would fly over the heads of the kids. But my second or third children's musical was with TheatreWorks USA, and they actually test out your children's musicals in front of a couple thousand children. And at that point, you start to really care about whether or not the four-year-olds actually like your show. They are harsh critics too.

[25:44] Bree Lowdermilk: They really are. And so at that point, I would say that was when I started to care about whether four-year-olds liked my shows. Also, I realized that you actually get money from people seeing children's theater shows. Cause unlike when I do shows and there's a hundred people there, sometimes there are four thousand children in some of these venues seeing my musical. And I was like, oh, it's in my best interest to do a better job at this. And now I would say, particularly when we work together, Lauren Kate and I did our last two shows. One was for the Kennedy Center about the first photo taken of Earth from Space called Earthrise. And we just did Rosie Revere Engineer and Friends, which is based on these wildly successful children's books for TheatreWorks Again.

And we're very good at hitting the tone of what's possible and telling story really well, staying away from ballads, keeping their attention. But also, I genuinely believe like I overheard a girl turn to her parent after a performance of Rosie and was talking about how she wants to be an engineer. And it's like, oh my heart.

[26:51] Grace Benigni: That's incredible. Getting to actively see your influence on young people.

[26:56] Bree Lowdermilk: That's crazy. It's cool. It's hard to take in, but I can believe in general that the mission that our whole team did to be in a room filled with young girls who are largely people of color seeing that and like a piece that just idolizes the arrival of women in STEM-related curriculum. I don't know. It gives me goosebumps. And my dad does transportation work in Philadelphia. And he then took it to like a bunch of people from his transportation firm were going because the show culminates with all of them using their science to build a bridge. All these bridge professionals are all like using this as a touchstone as they're talking about their diversity initiatives and the ways that they're trying to get people into engineering tracks who wouldn't otherwise be choosing that and trying to get new voices on their teams and stuff.

And I don't know. At the beginning of it, it's always just me screaming at my piano and the idea that they become forces for things that I believe in. That's almost too beautiful of an idea for me to even own for myself.

[28:03] Grace Benigni: That's so powerful. That's amazing. Going a little bit backwards, shock about all of your incredible performing friends. I know obviously you've had so many people take part in your previous cabarets throughout New York and touring everywhere.

[28:20] Bree Lowdermilk: Are there any dream artists that you would love to perform your work? Or have they, I guess they might have already. This is gonna be embarrassing because I sometimes can't remember if we did or not. What I can say is that I think Laura Benanti and I have performed together, but also she is deeply on my list of people who I'm desperate to do something with, and also someone who I'm always on the cusp of doing something with at some point. I keep volunteering to show up and be her rehearsal pianist because I just want to be in the room with her at all times because she's the most talented person on the planet, but it keeps not working out for us. That said, I distinctly remember her singing something I wrote at some point.

Why do I want to say it was "Run Away With Me" or something? Whatever it was, it wasn't the thing I wanted her to be singing. I have some other stuff that I just kill for her to do. But at some point, Betsy Wolf. Oh my god. I was watching clips of her doing a concert with the Chicago Symphony, and now I'm bugging her. I'm like, can both for her and Jess Vosk, who are both doing so much symphony work these days, I just keep bugging them and being like, do you need any help with horn parts or something? Slash, how do I get to just hang around you and bring you water? That said, Betsy Wolf did a reading of a show for me right before the pandemic. So it's more like and I've done things with Jess, I did something with Jess Vosk a few months ago.

For me, it's more like when I fall in love with performers, and I do, including Charity Dawson, who's doing the concerts next week. There's just never enough. And I just need more and more. I don't know. I've worked with Emma Hunton over and over again and with Andy Mientus, and I would say once a year, I text both of them, and I'm like, so are we making you a full album of you singing my songs this year? Or are we doing that Dashboard Confessional cover album we've always talked about? What are we doing? But I don't know. The list of humans that I'm desperate to work with, it's just never ending.

[30:17] Grace Benigni: It's so amazing that you've gotten to work with most of it, seems like, or are two seconds away from working with the rest of the people on your list.

[30:24] Bree Lowdermilk: I would say Audra's farther away. The best I had is I thought I had a good intro. I got introduced to Audra by Lin-Manuel, which is a nice way to get introduced. To have Lin say, here's Bree. She writes really great songs. Audra, you know Bree. And yeah. And so the thing I say to Audra is, oh Audra, I was actually like someone sent me your song, sent you my song last week. We were trying to book you for something or other, like send a song. Long pause, and Audra goes, I get sent a lot of songs and walks away. And I was like, cool, cool, cool, cool, awesome. It seems we might not be best friends, and that's totally fine. Um, but listen, whenever she's ready, I'm happy to just do her laundry. Yeah. I don't know. I'm looking for kidding. I make really good dumplings. I don't know if she likes dumplings. I'd be happy to just come over and make her dumplings.

[31:17] Grace Benigni: Yeah. Going off of that, in addition to all of your writing credits, you're also founder of a startup, newmusicaltheater.com. Talk a little bit about that.

[31:25] Bree Lowdermilk: I believe that capitalism is evil, and I don't know what to do about it. And baby Bree 10 years ago got together with Adam Guan and Nick Blemeyer and Justin Paul and Benj and Joe Iconis, and capitalism is evil, and there are these horrible changes. I was dating someone at that point who worked at the New York Times and um on their digital front, and this was when Amazon had just posted it was just becoming clear that Amazon was about to move into a bunch of other industries, and they had just begun decimating the booksellers and had just begun decimating digital publishing, and now there was gonna be a fight over whether the New York Times was going to own its own digital reporting or if Amazon was gonna functionally own the New York Times digital reporting.

And so the thing that I was feeling really freaked out about was that we were not going to get completely destroyed as a little micro industry that someone from the outside was gonna sweep in and claim all of the digital publishing, and we would not get a good deal when actually it would take $2,000 total to build a site to build like a password-protecting algorithm to do all the things to be able to sell the work ourselves and to try and have people get paid for their work. Standard publishing deals, the artist gets 10% and the publisher gets 90%. So we thought, well, what if we flipped it? What if we gave an absurdly high rate to the artist? What if the artist got 75% or whatever we do? And it was, oh, we could just do that.

And so we've gotten by. It turns out if you're running a company not with the intention of not making money, you don't make any money, and so you can't really afford to pay people well to work on it. So we can't really do much. For example, I would love for all of the sheet music on newmusicaltheater.com to be not divided by gender, but by vocal type and by voice elements, and there should be a phenomenally streamlined way to get music changed into different keys. I feel passionate about that. I also don't know how to do it without spending a lot of money that I don't have. It's very weird. So we're technically still a company. We probably need to become a 501(c)(3) charity at some point because we're a non-functional entity.

I don't know if I can tell anyone to buy sheet music from us. It might work. I don't know. We're hanging in there. It's hard to be us. The website fair. I stand by my central premise that capitalism is very, very bad. And sometimes rather than sitting on the side and whining about it, try and get in there and siphon off some profits off of other people to try and lead by example and say, no, no, no, this is doable. This is what and like MusicNotes settled on a 50-50 rate, which is not as good as what we wanted, but it's also not 90-10. No. And so like I take a little pride in that.

[34:28] Grace Benigni: That's incredible. It's hard just wanting to get your work out there. I'm sure a lot of artists are just really excited to have their sheet music accessible to people all over the world.

[34:38] Bree Lowdermilk: There's something as big as MusicNotes.com, but being able to fight for them as somebody who has more of a voice and a place in the industry is you're using your time really well.

[34:49] Bree Lowdermilk: Well, I don't know. You tell that to the poor kids who are halfway through checking out on Pretty Funny or something, and the freaking thing freezes. I'm sorry, I can't help you, but make your own website. Really? Make your own websites, I guess, or get off the internet entirely. I'm not sure what the answer is. I'm always halfway between both.

[35:10] Grace Benigni: Totally out of left field. You had to miscast yourself. It's a role you don't think you'd ever be cast in, but you've always wanted to play.

[35:20] Bree Lowdermilk: I think I'd like to be the mom in Caroline, or Change. Yeah. Hello, it's long distance. I think the fact that my singing voice is not that great is kind of fine for that role. You get to like be around all of the other people doing extraordinary things. I think it's a pretty weird role. I think I'd be good at that. I think I'd like to be in Hair or something where there's nudity. I think that'd be really fun and really affirming body positivity would be really, really dope. I think I'd like to sing the pineapple song in Cabaret. A pineapple for you from you. I feel so grateful that there is a pineapple song in Cabaret. And so I feel like I'd like to feel that gratitude from the audience. It's like, and now back to Nazis. I'd like to do that for people. I think that's about it. I don't think there's a good role for me in Wicked, sadly. I guess I'd like to be, I don't know, the Bach cover just to like stand in the wings.

[36:28] Grace Benigni: No!

[36:28] Bree Lowdermilk: Oh, I want to be Nessa. She gets to sit, right? She gets a freaking sit in that freaking chair and get pushed around.

[36:36] Grace Benigni: Yeah, she gets pushed around the entire time.

[36:38] Bree Lowdermilk: That's great. Are you still saying it's okay for that role to be played by someone who is not differently abled?

[36:45] Bree Lowdermilk: I think that it is exclusively played by well, fully able bodies, is it not? I mean, not rightfully so, but I don't think they've necessarily cast a differently abled person.

[36:56] Grace Benigni: Well, that's pretty messed up, but in the meantime, I would be down to play Nessa. And yeah, I think that's about it. I don't see myself as a Spring Awakening type. And I would not want to be in a Sondheim musical. That seems, I don't know, challenging. I'd be a stepsister in Into the Woods, right? That's fun.

[37:14] Grace Benigni: I think you had a big break.

[37:17] Bree Lowdermilk: I love the variety of the roles that you just chose. It really says a lot about your taste of musicals and your sense of humor.

[37:28] Bree Lowdermilk: I'd be Kamiko Glenn in Waitress. I forget what that role is, but good news for me. I'd be, uh, yeah, these are the things. I haven't seen Six yet, but I assume I would like to be in Six.

[37:40] Grace Benigni: I think you should do every role in Six. Just one person on stage.

[37:43] Bree Lowdermilk: You just are every queen. I hang sometimes with the Averno children, and I'm writing some music for the Averno verse, which if people listening to this don't know what that is, I'm not gonna be the person to explain it to you. Some of them are coming to my concert, and I don't know if I have a character yet in the Averno verse, but I'm looking towards having some kind of a character in the Averno verse.

[38:04] Grace Benigni: So speaking of your concert, which we're also excited about, you describe your Feinstein's/54 Below concert as a mix of classics, new Bree tunes, and some surprises. Can you give us some hints about what we might be able to expect?

[38:19] Bree Lowdermilk: Problem is two of these songs I'm from hearing are like two songs that I'm more proud of than pretty much anything I've ever written, but they're also from an ongoing, but going very, very well pitching process. It's original IP. I can say that. It is not based on anything, except I can say it is based on my big feelings about J.K. Rowling. I can say that. Yeah, I can say that I had a real, real emotional reaction to her statements last summer, particularly as someone who has friends who discovered, for any of you who don't know, J.K. Rowling issued really intense anti-trans statements on Twitter, couched in bullshit trans-exclusionary radical feminist ideology, TERFs for short. And then she backed it up with these long diatribes that really added up to nothing, but that made it very clear that whoever she's talking to, she is being supported by thought leaders in these dangerous pockets of the internet and specifically in the UK.

And for me, I have a lot of friends who they discovered their gender identity or discovered their sexuality through Harry Potter fanfic communities. And they like discovered that they were non-binary because of the way that they played with gender through being at a Harry Potter con or being in fanfiction community where the reading stuff deciding to get rid of tattoos, deciding to change their name, like really intense stuff. So I kind of bottled a lot of the anger and the big feelings and empathy I was feeling around all of that into an idea for a piece that I won't say what the idea is, but I will say that a lot of other people are just as excited about the thing that I chose to do with my anger and my empathy.

And so it's something that is big and beautiful and glorious, and that you'll hear some songs from. You will hear some reimaginings of beloved musical theater songs that Kate and I wrote a ways back, reimagined to suit the beautiful array of performers that we have. We have a song called "How to Return Home" that's about returning to it was allegedly written, not allegedly, it was originally written about the experience of coming home from Thanksgiving break for the first time after being at college and how you've changed, but you might look the same, not knowing how to interact with your family and the physical house feeling imposing. And I have some friends for whom that song was a touchstone, connected to gender journeys and connected to when you go through a big identity shift in some way or coming out or anything.

And so that return to your home is very loaded, and you feel a lot of those things. So that's a song that I've been starting to perform lately, and that means a lot to me. I'm doing that song as a trio with Sav Sousa, they/them, who's about to make their Broadway debut in 1776, and Corey Wade, all pronouns who they were on America's Next Top Model and are sort of an icon as a gender fluid person. So the three of us are gonna sing together that song, and that's really cool. Christina Alabado is gonna do two songs from The Mad Ones, neither of which are songs anyone's heard her sing before. So that's really exciting. So a bit of the familiar, a bit of the unexpected, but definitely sing along some big feelings, is what I can tell you. My goal is a nice big cathartic cry for everyone.

[41:47] Grace Benigni: I can't wait. We can catch Bree Lowdermilk and friends August 3rd and 4th at 9:45, Feinstein's/54 Below. And she just joined our live from Feinstein's/54 Below series, which is new to us. So your August 4th show will be streamed, right?

[42:08] Bree Lowdermilk: Mm-hmm.

[42:09] Grace Benigni: So you can access that anywhere. Tune in to see Bree and all of their friends sing some amazing new music. So thank you so much for sitting down with us today. We're so excited to have you here.