This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:08] Anna Altide: You're listening to The Ensemblist, the only podcast that shows you Broadway from the inside out. Welcome, I'm Anna Altide.

[0:21] Anna Altide: In the wake of this pandemic that has altered the face and shape of how we consume so much popular media, particularly when it comes to musical theater, we are spotlighting One Million Musicals. Created by Jacob Ben-Shmuel and Alan Blake Bachelor, One Million Musicals is an ambitious, independent endeavor to produce, you guessed it, one million high-quality musicals to the podcasting space. With a team of artistic collaborators, not to mention many notable swings and ensemblists from Broadway, Jacob and Alan drop a new podcast with an entirely original story and set of songs and characters every month. To explain the creation and execution of One Million Musicals in their own words, here is our interview with Jacob and Alan.

[1:14] Anna Altide: Can we start with your names and where you're both calling from today?

[1:17] Jacob Ben-Shmuel: My name is Jacob Ben-Shmuel and I am calling from California.

[1:21] Alan Blake Bachelor: And I am Alan Blake Bachelor. I'm also calling from California, just a little bit south of Jacob.

[1:28] Anna Altide: So for our listeners, can one of you quickly summarize what exactly One Million Musicals is about in your own words?

[1:35] Jacob Ben-Shmuel: Absolutely. One Million Musicals is our attempt at bringing musical theater to the podcasting space, which is something we've been excited about for a long time. It's a new podcast in which every episode is a brand new podcast musical. We wanted to sort of combine the newness of a new musical with the conceit of a radio play and bring that together into little episodes that we can release every month.

[2:07] Anna Altide: Talk to me about the inspiration for One Million Musicals. Was it something born out of lockdown or was it an idea you both had for a while?

[2:15] Jacob Ben-Shmuel: Jacob and I have both been working on musicals together for a few years now. We went to theater school together at UC Irvine. That's where we started dabbling in writing our own musicals and we had a lot of fun doing that. As lockdown came around, we've been kind of itching to continue doing so and also doing so in a way that's on our own terms where we can just do whatever kind of wacky concepts we want. The idea itself came about relatively quickly and relatively recently. It was towards the beginning of September. We had already kind of been talking about the concept of podcast musicals and how valuable they could be in this time of lockdown. I think it was first Jacob who suggested that we do something for Halloween to bring a little bit of Halloween spirit to a season when most people are not going to be able to do a lot of the things they might typically do.

I thought that was a great idea and then we started talking about doing a musical every month if it seemed possible and we just really had a great time talking with our friends because Jacob's on the tour for Book of Mormon and we know people from the musical theater world and also from our theater school and so it was a great way to get people together to work on something collectively that you know is really special to us. Creating new musical theater work is really difficult. The time it takes and the amount of resources you need and obviously right now in the middle of lockdown it's sort of impossible to get a new piece of theater live and on stage. The freedom that comes with podcasting is we can make whatever we want and we can put it out to the world ourselves on our own terms and that is what was so exciting about this project.

We could tell a weird little Halloween story about a ghost who can't turn invisible and we can turn around the next month and make a western. Then we get to gather all of our very talented friends like Alan was saying and bring them the opportunity to put their immeasurable talents into working on something creative in a time when that has proven very difficult for a lot of people.

[4:23] Jacob Ben-Shmuel: And actually I did want to pivot to the casting aspect. Was there a casting process or was it just a matter of a bunch of your friends getting together and collaborating right now through this weird time?

[4:34] Alan Blake Bachelor: Because Alan and I are writing this show we kind of had some idea of the types of voices we wanted to work with. We are lucky in that we went to school with a lot of very talented people. I was on the road with the Book of Mormon for almost three years so I met a ton of talented people through that. To begin you know for these first couple of episodes the casting process has very much been, hey friend, are you interested in working on this little podcast project? And luckily everybody has been super game. We are hoping as we move forward to find more and more folks that we haven't necessarily had the opportunity to work with yet. To expand upon that a little bit more, when we're writing these musicals we sometimes will have someone in mind but we won't necessarily, especially with How to Be Spooky, our very first episode, it was a brand new concept for us even.

We had only come up with it a few weeks before we planned on really having the thing almost ready to be released. So we were writing these parts with people in mind and it was very nice that they were willing to not just be a part of it but we've seen so much support from our friends. Thank goodness they were game and ready to work quickly. We had an idea in September and that episode was ready three weeks later. Kudos to all of our talented friends. Big shout out to Dan who does the orchestrations for us. An amazingly, amazingly talented composer and just a musical mind in general. He puts these things together with such dedication and such speed that it really just blows us away and we couldn't do it without him.

This project would not at all be possible without Dan Clintworth. He was Associate Music Director on the Book of Mormon tour while I was on the road. I count my lucky stars every day that I met him because I've never met a more impressive musical mind, truly. He's absolutely incredible.

[6:32] Alan Blake Bachelor: The sound of the music itself was top tier. In the first episode, I caught, I mean, the obvious one is Castle in the Cloud.

[6:38] Jacob Ben-Shmuel: Yes, yeah, yes. They had a little musical allusion to that. I don't know much about musicals in terms of, like, theory but it sounds like it was in a minor key if I'm not mistaken. It was really cool. I really liked it.

[6:48] Alan Blake Bachelor: That's correct. That opening number I wanted to evoke a spooky version of Castle on a Cloud. I took that melody, I put it into a minor key and then I adjusted as the melody went on so that we could end on a sort of spookier place and then you add some theremin and suddenly you've got the opening number of a spooky musical.

[7:11] Jacob Ben-Shmuel: And at one point I think I even heard inspiration from Phantom of the Opera with Think of Me.

[7:17] Alan Blake Bachelor: There's Phantom of the Opera, a lot of Rocky Horror Picture Show in there, a little My Chemical Romance. Drawing inspiration from a lot of places, absolutely. And part of the fun of this project is that we kind of get to do that. We get to just toss in inspirations from anything we want.

[7:29] Jacob Ben-Shmuel: Yeah, we can decide this is a genre that we haven't worked with before and we just want to be able to test our abilities in terms of creating a song and crafting a musical that embraces whatever genres or feelings that we want to work with.

[7:48] Alan Blake Bachelor: And was that a conscious choice in the development process to draw inspiration from other musicals?

[7:53] Jacob Ben-Shmuel: Yes. Alan and I write, we write basically everything together, especially like the book and the lyrics. We are always looking for inspiration that we can kind of draw on. Our second episode is a Western. I was listening to all these YouTube playlists of classic Western music and themes from big movies like The Magnificent Seven to draw on what are the instruments that are used in these songs and what are the melodies? How do they tell these stories and how can I take inspiration from that and then put our own comedic musical theater twist on it? Because we do want everything to be recognizably musical theater, even when it is also heavily genre-based.

[8:30] Alan Blake Bachelor: Yeah, we both went out of our way before we started working on Western stuff to study up on the genre and we were listening to all sorts of really old, especially like pre-Wild Bunch, pre-deconstruction of the genre. We're talking about the height of Western popularity and we were looking at a lot of songs from that era, you know, sort of black and white things as well as Magnificent Seven and things like that to take inspiration from.

[9:00] Jacob Ben-Shmuel: That sounds like it's going to be really, really cool. I did want to ask from a creative standpoint, of the 30-minute limit you give yourself for these amazing musicals, do you find that to be a hindrance using 30 minutes or is it a relief knowing I only have to fill 30 minutes? What's going through your head when you're developing this?

[9:14] Alan Blake Bachelor: Well, we have not limited ourselves to 30 minutes. The first musical Alan and I wrote together is a 90-minute piece called Brad Knows Nothing that we've been working on for years and years and years and at some point we do want to turn that into one of these episodes, so that'll be a great big 90-minute episode. While we're getting our feet wet in this space, this podcasting theater space that is very new and strange, we do like the 30-minute time cap because it makes it feel like we're writing a cartoon or a TV show, you know, because those tend to be around 22 to 30 minutes. There's something very neat about crafting a story that fits nicely with the beginning, middle and end into that time frame.

I very much enjoyed that sort of restraint. I think that it's something that we don't view as a hindrance. We view it as sort of a creative challenge. We do have to make accommodations for it when we are writing these things. We don't always write as many verses to the songs as we might otherwise do just to keep the running time a little bit down and we try to be very aware of our pacing and how many characters we're including so that we aren't including an unnecessarily large amount of plot threads that we have to tie together. It's a great way to evoke that feeling of just telling a short story with a beginning, middle and end and there's something so satisfying about seeing something that comes together so quickly and it's also something that makes things logistically a lot easier for us in terms of making one of these per month because there are a lot of moving pieces when it comes to musicals and making sure that we can put everything together in a way that works within the time frame we've given ourselves. But yes, as our team expands and as our show expands, we may explore more opportunities to go outside of that time frame. So it's all just stuff that we're figuring out as we go.

[11:02] Jacob Ben-Shmuel: How many musicals are you developing at once as you're producing this series?

[11:08] Alan Blake Bachelor: That is a great question. The best answer to that question is one million of them, because we're going to reach one million, gosh darn it. The practical answer to that question is right now as we're recording this, it's beginning of November. Episode two is in the final edits. We're getting the final orchestrations finished. One of our producers is doing the final sort of mix on all the sound effects and making it all sound real crisp and clean. And meanwhile, Alan and I are in deep writing the third episode, which should come out in December. We are actively working on two episodes at once. But we have also started talking about themes and concepts for the next two, three, four episodes that will be coming down the line.

The next million or so, I'd say? The next million or so, yeah, that's about right. I think the practical answer is somewhere around, I'd say, three at a time, where one, like Jacob is saying, is basically done, one we're in the middle of writing, and then we're thinking actively about next month. Which is just so much fun for us, get to constantly come up with new ideas, which is something we've kind of always done. This project gives us the opportunity to actually implement those ideas when before they would just end up on notes in a journal. And because we're doing so many of them, it gives us the opportunity to explore ideas. We've spent years writing our 90-minute musical, because the longer the musical gets, in some ways, especially if you're playing and putting it on stage, it becomes exponentially more complicated in terms of the writing process, the rewriting process, getting all the music together.

Perhaps the most exciting thing about it for me is that it allows us to just go all in on whatever off-the-wall thing comes to our minds. There's so many things that we've come up with over the years that for a long time we're just kind of sitting and being like, oh, well, especially if you're trying to focus on getting these things produced and trying to find a theater where you can actually put them up and actually get casting and choreography and all these other additional elements that come with stage musicals, it just feels eventually like, realistically, most of these ideas we'll never get around to because they're too odd or risky or hard to explain to convince enough people to get us into a theater where we can sell tickets.

This gives us the ability to just fully commit. Yeah, just bypass all of the theatrical red tape that comes with producing a stage show and just put our ideas out there online for anybody to listen to. And that's the other thing, right? Our audience, theoretically, in a dream world, we could reach millions of people with this, which is never something that you necessarily get the opportunity to do with a show on stage. That's part of what makes this so exciting for us. There's also an economic barrier, I think, to live theater where a lot of people potentially can't afford to see a Broadway show, especially younger people. It allows us to reach those people as well because, you know, we're young ourselves.

We know a lot of people who are in this post-college millennial age group. Yeah, it's nice when you can get student rush tickets to see a musical and get in there for cheap, but a lot of musicals have that barrier to entry that makes them only more accessible to people with those means. To speak particularly about that sort of Broadway economic barrier, it costs a lot of money to see a Broadway show. Well, our very good friend Kaelin Fu was standby for a couple of the plastics on Broadway in Mean Girls, and she's the lead of our first show. You get Broadway-caliber talent from the comfort of your iPhone. Yeah, not to mention Kevin Clay, who is the star of our second episode, Lawman with No Gun, which comes out on the 16th, I believe.

He is one of the go-to guys to play Elder Price, not just on Broadway, but on tour and also in London. Very high-caliber talent. The point I want to gleam from this is there's an amazing return on investment in terms of investing in digital media right now with the accessibility. Kind of harking back to when you compared this to animation or saying that this could easily be animated. In fact, that's something that I was considering as I was listening to it of how would this be animated and voiceovered. It kind of reminds me of this Howard Ashman quote that there is a link between musical theater and animation in terms of suspension of belief. The same element of watching somebody on stage doing something wacky and hearing somebody in your ear doing something wacky is not that big of a leap to take. Would you agree?

[15:40] Alan Blake Bachelor: Absolutely. And I love that you bring up that Howard Ashman quote. It's one of my favorites. When they were creating The Little Mermaid and they were like, this is just already a musical. Like it's meant to be a Broadway musical, but we're putting it into animation and there's that magic. I do think, not to toot our own horns, but I think there's some of that magic that we're tapping into in this space because you're right. There's a suspension of disbelief when you plug your headphones in and you're just whisked off to a different world. It's like you get to imagine how these characters are interacting and what they look like and their movements. We just get to provide you with the soundscape and the story.

That leap that you already have to make to be able to imagine it in your brain, there's something inherently musical theater about that. I come from a place of film writing. My brother and I, we write mainly horror screenplays. Something that's so drastically different between theater, and this also applies to podcasts and film, is that film is a very literal medium where people are expecting to see what's there. If you want to make something that is like a billion dollars, it's going to cost you a billion dollars. This has been so liberating to be able to write as though we have whatever kind of budget we want to have and have it cost basically nothing because the main component that goes into making everything is the audience's imagination. What were the challenges that arose with collaborating right now on a musical in a socially distant virtual world?

[17:13] Jacob Ben-Shmuel: There are a bunch of challenges that we could not have foreseen because we've never done anything like this. Our friends and colleagues in the cast, they'll record their own dialogue and then send it to me and then I edit these things together. I add sound effects, I make sure everything flows correctly, I leave room for songs and for underscore and all this stuff. The challenge of, oh, these people are not in a room together, but I need to make it sound like their characters are responding to one another. That was really challenging. Moving forward, what I ended up needing to do is redo a lot of the takes and just have myself on Zoom with the actors, essentially directing them, being like, okay, let's do this line again so I know how their takes are going to be going so that I know how to stitch them together.

Another thing is just the technical challenge of, I need music from Dan Clintworth, so he needs to be able to upload it to a Dropbox that I have access to, but then I need to make sure that Dropbox is also accessed by Travis, our producer, who can do his edits, but then he needs to be able to upload this thing to a Dropbox that we're all connected to. It's like just the insanity of modern technology has occasionally thrown some wrenches in the process. There's also the organizational challenge of having people in different time zones because we're working with people all across the country, basically. Luckily for me and Jacob specifically, with him being on tour for years, we're quite used to writing with him and me not being in the same place and just kind of working on crazy schedules.

For other people, you know, we're trying to organize. So far, only three different time zones, luckily, but it might expand even more beyond that if we start casting people who are located internationally. So that is also just one additional slight challenge.

[19:06] Alan Blake Bachelor: What's to be expected in future episodes? I know you teased the Western episode, but what's to come?

[19:12] Jacob Ben-Shmuel: As we mentioned, I think Alan mentioned it earlier, Kevin Clay of Book of Mormon fame will be the star of our second episode, The Lawman with No Gun. In terms of what's coming, anything and everything. We have a myriad of ideas. The cool thing about this project is we get to do whatever we want. Expect lots of different musical genres. We were talking the other day about how to make a pop punk musical and like what kind of story would fit that. We got a plan for a heist musical based around a crew that is basically a boy band. Probably will be called Crime Boys with a Z. We can promise for sure that we are currently working on a Christmas special. Yes, we are. A Christmas special. Brad Knows Nothing will be turned into one of these at one point. So really, like, anything and everything is coming because this project gives us the opportunity to go hog wild and create just any insane idea we want.

[21:17] Alan Blake Bachelor: Okay, guys. Anything else you want to add?

[21:24] Jacob Ben-Shmuel: Well, listen, if you are interested, we're on all the socials if you want to follow us at One Million Musicals. We do also have a Patreon that helps us sort of fund the folks who are working on the shows and looking to give back to all the amazing artists who have agreed to help us with these things. So if you want to help us do that, you can go to patreon.com slash one million musicals and donate. That would mean a whole heck of a lot to us. But really, the biggest thing is please listen, share them with your friends, your family, your kids, your enemies, your enemies, absolutely. Because I think everybody can enjoy these shows. Listen, share, leave a rating and a review, do all the things. And we would be incredibly grateful.

[21:59] Anna Altheid: Special thanks to Jacob Ben-Shmuel and Alan Blake Bachelor for speaking with us today about One Million Musicals. The Ensemblist was produced today by Mo Brady, Jackson Klein, and me, Anna Altheid. There are two great ways you can help The Ensemblist right now. One is by leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. The other is by becoming a Patreon member, which you can do at patreon.com slash the Ensemblist. Please follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts, whether that be on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or at our home on Broadway Podcast Network at bpn.fm. You can also follow us on Instagram, where we share all of our latest episodes. Stay safe and thank you for listening. Until next time. Bye.