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[0:00] Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the fabulous Feinstein's 54 Below. Before we get started this evening, just a polite reminder. Please take this moment to silence your cell phones. Also, there is no flash photography, please. Thank you and enjoy the show. Ladies and gentlemen, Andrew R. Butler and Mark Sonnenblick.

[0:24] Adrian Karnani: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Feinstein's 54 Below Podcast. I'm Adrian Karnani, Marketing Associate.

[0:31] Grace Benigni: And I'm Grace Benigni, Digital Marketing Coordinator and Producer of the Feinstein's 54 Below Podcast.

[0:37] Adrian Karnani: On our last episode, we were joined by two of the incredible artists participating in our New Writers at 54 series, Rona Siddiqui, who kicked off the series on January 9th, and Billy Reese, who is bringing his show to Broadway's Living Room on January 23rd. And today we have two more of these fabulous rising stars sitting down with us.

[0:56] Adrian Karnani: Our first guest is a composer, lyricist, and scriptwriter whose credits include Midnight at the Never Get, which garnered a slew of nominations last season, including nods from the Drama Desk, Lucille Lortel, and OCC Awards. You might also know him from Independents, Ship Show, Stompcat in Lawndale, and Dragons Love Tacos with Theatreworks USA. He has been nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award and is a recipient of both the Harold Adamson Lyric Award and a Jonathan Larson Grant. Our first guest today is Mark Sonnenblick.

[1:28] Adrian Karnani: And we actually have another Larson Grant recipient with us today, a writer, composer, and performer. He is known for creating and starring in the Lucille Lortel Award winner for Outstanding Musical, Rags Parkland Sings the Songs of the Future. His composition credits also include four musicals co-written with playwright Andrew Farmer. As an actor, he has performed in productions from theaters such as Ars Nova, SoHo Rep, and Theatre for a New Audience. He also writes and performs with the longstanding musical comedy group Political Subversities. We are so happy to have Andrew R. Butler with us today.

[2:03] Andrew R. Butler: I'm Andrew R. Butler.

[2:04] Mark Sonnenblick: And I'm Mark Sonnenblick.

[2:05] Adrian Karnani: And you are listening to the Feinstein's 54 Below podcast. Mark Sonnenblick and Andrew R. Butler, thank you so much for joining us today.

[2:13] Mark Sonnenblick: Thanks for having us.

[2:15] Adrian Karnani: So I think we're gonna definitely want to hear from both of you, but we'll start with Mark on this one. Could you just get us started by telling us a bit about your journey as a writer and kind of how you discovered this was a path you wanted to go on and how right now it is coming together in a show at Feinstein's 54 Below?

[2:31] Mark Sonnenblick: Oh my gosh, my whole life. All of it, yeah. Uh well, as uh I guess I'd always um loved music and playing piano uh and was lucky that my parents for some reason decided to get me piano lessons. Uh and uh so played piano for a long time and started uh playing like in a jazz, like school jazz rock band. Um we played at like sporting events and things like that in uh middle school and played in that all through high school, but I remember showing up kind of the first day and getting a book of like 300 songs uh that just had chords on them and you know, it's like a fake book.

[3:23] Mark Sonnenblick: Um, and that was sort of my first experience playing getting to know songs and songwriting by actually playing them. And uh loved being in that band and kind of by the end of high school started writing my own music and um senior year of high school wrote like a short musical with my English teacher and uh it was called Apples. So really uh fantastic title. It was about Greek gods and the misadventures that they had. It was very fun, a lot of uh kind of like got a lot of friends um in the senior class to be a part of it. And that was the first time that I'd put um I had the chance to sort of write musical theater.

[4:13] Mark Sonnenblick: I moved to Denver kind of the fall after college, uh, to be in a band with a friend of mine and was out there for about a year and a half, two years. Um just kind of writing music for this band, and uh realized that I really missed theater and would come back to New York every few months and try to cram in like four shows in a weekend, and uh realizing I really missed kind of being surrounded by like the, you know, especially musical theater writers. There are there's a reason everybody comes to New York, it's because other people who are doing what you're doing are also there, and it can feel crazy to be not in that community of other writers, where at least even if you know your show's not getting produced, no one wants to listen to your music, you can be around other people where that's the case with them as well.

[5:06] Mark Sonnenblick: And uh you I mean, Andrew's very much one of them. I I feel like we're I I think we met like l maybe three months after I'd moved back to the city. Um uh I ended up music directing like a workshop that he was in, and just immediately was like, Oh my gosh, like this is this is the thing, you know, you're you're meeting these collaborators, you're meeting the people who inspire you, you're listening to the writers and the actors and the people who are involved at the like highest level of what they do, you feel like you're a part of a group that uh kind of has each other's backs but also is making stuff that makes you want to go home and sit alone in your room and make cool things too.

[5:51] Mark Sonnenblick: Even if again nobody will finance your show or put it up or you never get to see it fully realized. You get to write an amazing song because you got, you know, the other people around you are also working just as hard and being just as scrappy. Um and that's kind of what brought me back to the city and it was absolutely the case when when I got back here and uh just started writing and I think I tried to lean into that community a little bit and uh that was where um you know first opportunities sort of came from.

[6:21] Adrian Karnani: So Andrew do you want to tell us a bit um I guess about for you how you kind of came into writing and decided that that was the path for you?

[6:29] Andrew R. Butler: Yeah, you know I I feel like um I have a younger sister um and um I think from a young age feeling compelled to compete for attention is probably a large driver of like how can I get everybody's attention back. Perhaps both as a performer and a writer. Um so that's like pretty foundational. Uh although I started playing guitar because my sister Lizzie started playing guitar. I had played piano similarly I was in piano lessons. I did not go on to become uh an amazing pianist like Mark or even like a competent pianist.

[7:05] Mark Sonnenblick: You picked other instruments that you're amazing at.

[7:07] Andrew R. Butler: Well, thank you. And I have Lizzie to thank for that. Lizzie was like, I don't want to play piano. I want to play guitar and start taking guitar lessons, and then I like piggybacked on guitar lessons and got good at guitar until I I guess ruined that for Lizzie, and then I went on to become a musician and songwriter. And then, you know, I was making things in school as a kid. It's nice everything's all mixed up, you know, getting to do uh theater programs from a fairly young age. I grew up in the boondocks in the Florida panhandle, like way out in the sticks, and it was hard to go see things, like I couldn't go see musicals.

[7:40] Andrew R. Butler: I didn't really grow up seeing musicals. Musicals weren't really a part of my life. Uh it wasn't a thing in any of the social worlds that I was in. I didn't have like cast albums that I listened to. Um, it wasn't really until I moved to New York that I started to be exposed to musicals, and my idea of them was largely shaped by this like early scarcity of resources and like rural America, where the idea of like musicals were a thing that like a rich school could do, and ultimately was able to study theater in college, um, and just had really amazing professors there and was started getting tapped into this incredible community of other people who at that time we were all but in like a drama program, studying to become actors, but also learning about theater and migrating in different directions therein.

[8:29] Andrew R. Butler: Um yeah, and then just you know, kicked into it and working as an actor, trying to do music stuff, being an actor musician kind of opened some like funny doors into really interesting projects, and I just kept writing. I think my like senior like thesis project was a musical tragedy with puppets, um, framed inside of a comedy that was uh basically some musicians telling a story, which is kind of maybe all of my work in a nutshell.

[8:57] Adrian Karnani: Mark, your show, Midnight at the Never Get, was first presented at the Musical Theater Factory's 415 and then moved to Don't Tell Mama as a developmental concert, then continued as a limited run production, then went to Nymph and did a six-week engagement in Provincetown, um, and then went to the York Theater Company. So it kind of went through all these different iterations.

[9:20] Adrian Karnani: So for you as a writer, when you see um a work go through that many different productions and that many stagings, how does that shift your process and how does it shift the work itself?

[9:31] Mark Sonnenblick: Uh well, I mean, first of all, it's a really lucky thing to get to see something so many times. Although, like every time we've done it, it's been a pretty you know, the Musical Theater Factory 4x15, that's 15 minutes of, you know, the what we ended up doing there. I mean, in what Musical Theater Factory um is so incredible at is just kind of being like you have and especially that program, what do you have? Just kind of put it out there and see what it is.

[9:55] Mark Sonnenblick: And I don't know that anything that we did in in those 15 minutes actually was ultimately a part of the show. And that's kind of been the case as we as we've gone through is it's a show that um uh Max Friedman uh uh directed, and Sam Bolan is is uh kind of the the singer in it.

[10:21] Andrew R. Butler: The show was his idea. And unlike any other show I'd worked on before, it was really, you know, writing for a specific person and also workshopping it in the room with this director and this actor. For that first three incarnations, I was also in the show. And so it was basically Sam and I, very easy to edit, change. That joke's not working. Let's fix it. Let's figure out how to make this tighter. But it's been a huge process of discovery at every stage. And I think that's something that, you know, that's why theater has previews when you're lucky enough to have them. I'm very much someone who, once you see something on its feet, you revise it. And the organizations that support new musical theater and give you the chance to try things out when they're still raw and unfinished, that let you then go, let's shape this into something that, you know, can be what it ultimately needs to be.

It takes a lot of people to build a show that isn't just here's the writing, here it exists, put it on. Midnight is really the one show I've had where I've had the opportunity to tighten and revise over the course of four years in many different incarnations, and I learned so much not only about the show, but also, yeah, this is what it's like to have the opportunity to really build something.

[11:35] Adrian Karnani: Alright, so Andrew, you are also a performer. So, how does that influence the way you write or the kind of voice that you write for? Do you often find that you're writing for, you know, your personal range and the performer comes later, or does the music just come first? How do you go about such a good question?

[11:53] Andrew R. Butler: I feel like Mark just said something that really rang a bell for me, which is the power of being able to write by performing. And I talk about this a lot with one of my writing partners, Andrew Farmer, who's an amazing storyteller and playwright. We often write work that we both perform. And the performance can be one of the most valuable writing tools, and that being the writer in the body of the performer gives you a lot of information about what's working, what's not working, pacing, vibe, style, connection with the audience, the thing that you're looking for, and gives you the ability to edit really quickly, sometimes too quickly, since you feel a lot of license to adjust the thing that you have prepared in the moment of performing it.

So that's one big way that I feel like performing my work for that part of my work that I'm a performer in. The process of being on my feet in front of an audience doing it is actually a part of the writing process itself. And then if I'm just, you know, writing a tune, it kind of just depends on like where it starts. You know, every once in a while there's a song that kind of starts as a random piece of music, and that might come very much in my voice, and I might be writing it kind of on my own body, and then I will want to translate that and work with a performer to make sure that it is sitting authentically in their body. But then sometimes, you know, you're writing a song with a real clear idea of like, oh, it's this character, this is, you know, the type of person they are, this is the type of voice that I would love singing this song, and you wind up in that funny writer scenario where you are just never gonna be able to, you know, make your bedroom demo of this song in a way that at all communicates what the tune is, which is fun to do, and then concerts like this are really thrilling because it gives you the chance to reach out to that performer and say, oh, hey, I have the song, and you would be so incredible for it.

I've never even gotten to hear this song with my ideal, you know, type of voice or style or energy or whatever that person is bringing. It's a chance to like see a thing you've made come to life in a way that you yourself, even as a very capable performer, are unable to do.

[14:19] Adrian Karnani: That's really fascinating to hear just the different ways you can approach a song and see them kind of come together and see it finally come to life. Mark, could you tell us a bit about the way you kind of approach the songwriting process? Like, do you tend to start melody first, or do you have, you know, a lyric that comes into your head, or do you have a sacred space where you sit down and say, you know, this is where I'm writing? Just kind of your general process.

[14:41] Mark Sonnenblick: I would say typically for like if it's a musical, there's a scene or there's a story, I know what the song needs to do. Start by going, what is the idea, and really like what are a couple pages of ideas of kind of what the moment could be, and then figuring out what, okay, great. This is an idea that seems like it's gonna be able to sustain the three or four things the song needs to accomplish, and I know how it can like evolve over the course of the song. And once I have that idea, then I'll start like doing kind of music and lyric stuff a little bit together, finding kind of the initial chorus or the initial verse section, something that's really clear. Then I tend to go and write all the music to make sure that like the overall musical arc is gonna work, and then I'll go and put, because I've already outlined what sort of the beats of the song need to be, go and put the lyric to the music on top of it.

But then if I'm just like, well, you know, I'm writing just for me, or I'm writing for my band or something like that, it tends to be I'm like, you know, just alone. Like, what do I, what am I feeling? Like what do I just like want to say or put together, or what seems fun? And that's also what's fun about this concert is there's a lot of songs in it that are just not exactly from shows or just kind of a chance to share things that I wouldn't have a chance to share otherwise, some of which no one has ever sung before, some of which nobody has sung since my concert five years ago. I don't know. I'm that's part of the reason I'm excited and like was like, okay, I need to do this, is because there's just material I want to share and performers I want to sing the material that, you know, is not what you would see if you were just going to see the shows that may or may not be produced at any given time.

[16:31] Andrew R. Butler: Andrew, your show, Rags Parkland Sings the Songs of the Future, is kind of an uncommon combination that it takes a lot of folk-inspired music, but it's science fiction subjects set in the future. So, what kind of drew you to pairing those together?

[16:45] Andrew R. Butler: It was sort of a conflation of things that I was interested in at the time that I was digging through. I grew up with folk music, and so that is a thing that has always sort of lived in my world, and I've always loved science fiction. I was, this was in like 2009, 2010, and I was just in a heavy songwriting phase, and was also in a phase of checking out a bunch of science fiction shorts from the library. Thank you, Brooklyn Public Library. And they just sort of converged these kind of two universes. And the more that I was playing around in each of them, they just co-reinforced in a really nice way. Science fiction is this genre that's full of possibility, but also is full of, you know, describing different foundational elements.

Like the world can be completely and totally different. And that kind of requires a lot of learning when you're taking in science fiction, and folk music is extremely oriented around ideas and words and communicating and stories. So the two things kind of fit together nicely. And then, like, to be super specific, there's Philip K. Dick's short story, and like the story is about this guy, and when he writes songs, they come true, and the stories are really about like politics and like trade organizations in the far future and spaceships and stuff. The thing that I latched on to was this folk singer who just lived in the future, and I was like, oh, this is the exciting combination of these two things that I'm pursuing right now, and so I started taking some of those songs and thinking about them in that way.

And also I was just trying to figure out a show that I could make, a musical that I could do is a musical that is just me and a guitar and a microphone, and that's all that it needs. And if those are my restrictions, what's the biggest story that I can tell? A science fiction story is maybe a great answer to that question.

[18:51] Mark Sonnenblick: Actually, with your show, like I think a lot of the pleasure of it is the world building that happens over the course of the show and the way the information comes in. Part of I feel like the suspense and the pleasure of it is suddenly realizing the rules of this world that you think you're familiar with to a degree, but actually it's a completely different place. And that's something that science fiction and storytelling in general, like are both amazing at. That the show did an incredible job with. I feel like my favorite science fiction writing is like that. It's not like you're reading a description of what things might be like, it's like you're reading a story that's probably feels like another type of writing a great American novel or a mystery or whatever, but it's set inside of this science fiction context.

So the writer is sort of doing two things at once where they're telling you this one story, but then they're also telling you the story of what the world might be like and the way those two things interact, create this great third text.

[19:49] Andrew R. Butler: That's really interesting to hear where kind of the seed of the idea for Rags Parkland came from. And then obviously it took kind of a long time for that show to develop and grow into what it ultimately became. Could you talk a little bit just about how the idea kind of grew and formed into what it eventually became?

[20:07] Mark Sonnenblick: Totally. It was a very song-first process where I was writing tunes or melodies, and then just sort of like free associating and building out some big images that were exciting to me.

[20:21] Andrew R. Butler: Um, so some of the early songs in particular felt like kind of these collections of images or discrete ideas that had to do with my feelings about the future and what was terrifying about that or exciting about that, or potentially could exist then and there. And then I sort of took this collection of songs that I had written all in this folk style, and uh at first kind of reverse-engineered uh the world. I took them all as pieces of information about who this singer was and the world that the singer lived in, and it extrapolated from there, like what are the rules of this world, what's going on in this universe. And the original show was a solo show, it was just me with a guitar, and it didn't have a lot of uh like internal narrative event.

But that original show was much more of a like a pastiche of these different elements from Rags Parkland's life, and he talked about this early in his life and what's going on now, what was happening then, and we talked about all these other things, a very recent nuclear disaster uh that's like a part of that universe, but is it doesn't come up in the show that the Ars Nova show at all. Part of the process was focusing in and saying, like, these are the things that are speaking to me now. Uh the questions and the sort of reverberations of these particular ideas felt more and more pressing given the world that we're living in right now. These are the conversations that I want to be having, these are uh the historical patterns that I want to highlight how they're happening now by telling a story about them recurring again in the future, which helped me to sort of pare away some of the events uh in the original solo show that uh I loved but that didn't feel pertinent to telling this particular story. Uh and the other was as I continued to work on it, I was eventually given uh opportunities to do slightly bigger things than just a me show.

[22:11] Andrew R. Butler: And as I built more of that community that we were talking about, I hit a place where I was like, you know what? I know people and I have these relationships and I feel comfortable asking, inviting somebody into that collaboration and being like, do you want to work on these songs with me? Like, do you want to be a part of this world? And people who had seen my early work on the shows and were excited about it, uh, were excited to step into that room. Um, but having more opportunity also helped to shape what wound up in the show. You know, it's like if I can have a band, then we're gonna wind up focusing on the part of Rags Parkland's life when he had a band, um, which kind of helped to decide that portion of it.

And then also having an institution like Ars Nova who uh at some point encouraged me to take off my um like what can I functionally pull off all by myself hat and broaden it out to, well, if you could just do whatever you wanted, um, what would be the biggest most theatrical version of the show that you would love to tell? And that was huge.

[23:15] Andrew R. Butler: But it's that thing too of like all those other elements, right? In a concert, the song is just the song and the performer, and the performer adds a tremendous amount, as does the band, I guess. But it is that thing where a lot of times I feel like you're designing songs to be lit a certain way or with a certain set element or all these things that there's a really rich thing that theater gives you, uh, that you know you don't get if you're playing a set at Rockwood, then you try to write for, and so it feels exposed sometimes to, you know, just be like, and here's the song. Um, it's always really interesting to just hear kind of how that idea can grow and shift and change and how all these different people can come together to bring a show into what it is.

But something you said that I think really resonates with a lot of new work these days is that it asks really contemporary questions, and as a result, I think we see that the landscape of musical theater overall is shifting because there are so many new writers and people all over the city and all over the country and all over the world creating work that really challenges the forms that we have right now.

[24:16] Adrian Karnani: Um, and you know, we've seen that at every scale. So for you, existing within that, both as not possibly as people who are changing the landscape, but as people who are existing within a landscape that is changing around you, how do you think that that evolution impacts you as a writer? And do you think that it's allowed you to kind of broaden your creative horizons?

[24:36] Andrew R. Butler: I don't know that I was ever chasing the old form. Like I didn't know it and I didn't study it. Um, so I think it's extremely exciting for me that these doors have been opened, that there's interest in especially more commercial spaces for work that has a different shape to be seen and to be funded and to invite audiences into it. Definitely my exposure to musicals uh was like traditional musicals uh and you know being in whatever Seussical and Bye Bye Birdie and that kind of thing growing up. And I think what is incredibly exciting is just uh especially coming to New York, you're just reminded that like, yeah, musical theater, there's songs, they're on stage in some way. What does the stage look like?

What are the like the vocabulary is really really broad, and again, part of the reason I think so exciting to be in this community is is people are doing very, very different things, uh, all of which are inspiring in different ways, and just being like, oh man, that's something that's amazing that I could never do, or that's something that's amazing, and I want to take like that little bit of it and try to mess with something that I think I could do something really cool with that.

[25:44] Andrew R. Butler: There's like you know, you're part of you've at least try to be part of a conversation. It's just an incredibly exciting time to feel like, yeah, the doors are open, the route is not clear, maybe it's never been clear, but certainly the formula of what a show is and what it can do feels really uh wide open right now.

[26:03] Adrian Karnani: So I just have one more question for both of you. Could you just tell us a little bit about what audiences can expect at your Fine Science 54 Below show and some of the exciting guests you have joining you, and any other fun things you can tell us about now?

[26:16] Mark Sonnenblick: I'm incredibly excited. Uh, I'm doing songs from three different shows and a lot of other songs that aren't from any shows. There's some incredible performers. Lily Cooper, who I think is absolutely amazing, and then performers that I've gotten to know more recently, like uh Will Rowland and uh Jason Sweetooth Williams, uh some people like Tiffany Mann, my friends Daniel and Patrick Lazour who are amazing writers, Julia Madison, uh Sidney Meyer. I'm really excited for this lineup, and mostly because like it's a chance to have so many people sing things without you know having to put on a show that has a cast of 20 people or whatever it is. The songs are all over the map, the arrangements are gonna be amazing, and uh I think there's gonna be a lot of surprises, it's gonna be upbeat uh and funny, and you'll get a chance to see, I think, especially you know, people who came to see Midnight at the Never Get, you're gonna get some of that, but like that is a slice of the way that I write, and I'm just incredibly excited uh and grateful to Max and Madeline for uh you know helping helping me make this happen. Uh and my boyfriend Isaac, who is producing, and he's done an amazing job.

[27:27] Mark Sonnenblick: Um, but you have a good team. January 22nd, 9:30. Come out and check it out.

[27:30] Adrian Karnani: Andrew, could you tell us a bit about what audiences can expect at your show?

[27:35] Andrew R. Butler: It's gonna be a lot of songs. Um, I am I'm sharing a bunch of songs from uh a whole bunch of shows uh that I have been working on. Um, the Rags Parkland cast is gonna be there. We're gonna do some Rags Parkland numbers. Uh we recorded an album uh at the end of the year.

[27:54] Adrian Karnani: What?

[27:54] Andrew R. Butler: Yeah, we recorded a cast album.

[27:56] Adrian Karnani: Oh my gosh.

[27:57] Andrew R. Butler: Uh, but so we had just recently gotten all the music together, so this was like the perfect timing to get them back together and do some tunes. So I'm really excited. Stacey Sargent is gonna be rocking it in the whole band. Um, and then I've got you know other shows that feature bands. Like I have this kind of bluegrass swamp musical uh that's set in Florida. I'm from Florida, and we're doing a bunch of tunes from that.

[28:19] Andrew R. Butler: So I've got like there will be banjo, there will be upright bass, there will be me on a guitar. And then it's some you know singers who I love. Uh Britt Ashford, who I've just like have been a fan forever, is singing a tune from a show of mine that's about a uh small town in coastal Alabama.

[28:38] Andrew R. Butler: Um, more Southern stories. Uh she's amazing. Uh Nicole Weiss is gonna sing some tunes from that like Floridian show. Nicole is like an incredible force. And Kuhu Verma, who is in Octet is also singing a tune. Um, she's singing a tune from the Alabama show. All of my shows are associated with the Southern States. Rags Parkland, it's Virginia, which you may miss in the show, but it is set in Richmond. And a couple of like fun oddball tunes. I want to do like a cut Rags Parkland song. It wasn't really cut, it was actually never for the show, it's just like part of the universe. Uh and I have a bunny murder mystery musical that I'm working on with this company called On the Rocks. Uh, they're amazing, and it is a completely ridiculous song.

Mimi Scardula is singing it, who, if you don't know Mimi, I promise you that you will. So I think it's gonna be like a really rock and good time with some serious lady ballads in there. Just like it's just southern folk rock vibe ballads.

[29:32] Adrian Karnani: Thank you both so much for joining us.

[29:34] Mark Sonnenblick: Thanks for having us.

[29:35] Adrian Karnani: Andrew R. Butler will make his Fine Science 54 Below solo debut on Thursday, January 16th at 9:30 p.m. Mark Sonnenblick will take the 54 stage on January 22nd at 9:30 p.m. Tickets for both shows are available at fiftyfourbelow.com. Be sure to follow Andrew on Twitter at @ANDREWrBUTLER and on Instagram at @andrewrbutler. You can keep up with Mark's new work at marksonnenblick.com. You can follow us everywhere at 54Below. The Broadway Podcast Network is on Instagram at @BroadwayPodcastNetwork and on Twitter at @BWayPodnetwork.