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[0:00] Robert Bannon: Are you ready? It's The Roundtable with me, Robert Bannon. Welcome to The Roundtable, everybody. My name is Robert Bannon. You're listening to us on Broadway World over here on the Broadway Podcast Network, iHeart, Spotify, wherever artists talk about art. Today, we have three incredible artists who are literally coming to us from around the world. We are around. We made it. We found a mutual time and date where everyone's time zones can be here. I'm excited to talk about a brand new project that you need to know about. It's called Good Guy With a Gun. The album is going to be streaming. The singles are out. It's viral. There's millions of views. They have hundreds of thousands of followers, and they are here to tell us all about it. Philip, Micah, Hal, welcome to The Roundtable.

[0:47] Philip Labes: Thanks for having us, Robert.

[0:48] Micah O’Konis: Thank you.

[0:49] Robert Bannon: So, Philip, to start things off, you are the book writer, music, lyrics. You have been around doing television and writing, touring with Jason Mraz. Shout out to your PR team. You all share a PR team with Jason. Do you always want to do musical theater? Has this been a dream of yours?

[1:08] Philip Labes: Well, yeah, absolutely. And just to clarify, Micah and I co-wrote the book, music, and lyrics for this project. So while I am the book, music, and lyrics writer, I did that with Micah. Yes, I love musical theater. I'm definitely like a former theater kid. And I studied theater in undergraduate. And I think even to this day, I do musical improv at the UCB Theater in Los Angeles. So musical theater is sort of where a lot of my passions meet. And I think it's such a beautiful, concise, powerful form of storytelling. And, but yeah, so yes. It's really exciting.

[1:58] Micah O’Konis: How did you become involved? Whose idea was it? You yourself, Fringe Festival, Upright Citizens Brigade, writing, doing theater, especially fun, experimental theater with a voice and a cause and a purpose. How did this all idea come about?

[2:12] Micah O’Konis: Yeah, well, Philip and I went to college together. We did sketch comedy together. And actually, there was one sketch that we did together that was a song. It was a, it was like a funny musical thing. And we, it was like everyone's favorite sketch. And we were like, we should write a musical, we should do a musical together. And the idea really came about through some personal things that happened. Philip, at one point, we were rooming together, and he got held up by gunpoint. He came home just super rattled from taking the train in LA. Shout out to LA Public Transportation. And no, and so he, like, got super politically charged by that and like organized letter writing campaigns. And eventually, we were like sitting down to write a musical and just brainstorming ideas.

And that idea, this idea came up of like, what if we took this, this figure that we hate, like a lobbyist from the NRA, the National Rifle Association, what if we took him and made him the hero of a musical, as sort of like an anti-comedy, anti-hero kind of thing. And really, it just blossomed from there. That was 10 years ago.

[3:39] Robert Bannon: It's so funny, because when I first got the email and was reading about this, and I saw the single, NRA men go viral, I was like, a show called Good Guy With a Gun. I don't know if this is my kind of show. I'm a little, I'm a gay, liberal as can be person. I don't know if this is my show, Hal. Then I read it and I found like, this is a brilliant, fun idea. Hal Rosenfeld, everyone is in Abbey Road cafeteria, Paul McCartney may be making him eggs right now, and has stepped out of a session to be with us. Hal, you have done over 300 TV shows, movies, like you are in a recording studio, working on Oscar, The Greatest Showman, Into the Heights and all of this incredible work. Why did you feel like this project was something that you need to carve out time and be a part of and executive produce?

[4:30] Hal Rosenfeld: Well, so Philip and I actually went to middle school together. We both grew up in South Florida, still have known each other for a long time. I've known Micah through Philip over the last maybe probably 10 years or so, I guess. Philip and I kind of keep finding each other in the most random of environments over the years. When they both had spoken to me about kind of repackaging the initial show they had done from 10 years ago, which was at that time called More Guns, about kind of music producing and kind of doing all the sort of music and stuff and collaborating. I don't know if I out loud said no, but in my head, I was like, I don't have time for this, even though it sounds cool. And they're like, well, just come to a reading, we're going to do a reading.

And at the end of the reading, I think I'd pissed myself more than once. And I was like, now I have to work on this. So, so funny, so great. And just, I don't know, I've always wanted to work on a project like this. Half of my life being a music composer, producer, orchestrator person, and then the other half being drummer or more musician type. A lot of the stuff I've worked on movie-wise has been as a musician and orchestrator kind of in that realm. And I've worked on a bunch of Broadway stuff, but I've never gotten to kind of help develop a musical from the ground up. And I had sort of been saying that I wanted to do that. And this kind of just sort of fell on my lap. And I thought, this is something worth doing.

It's like I can put other things to the side or kind of make time for it. And it's been, I don't know, it's been just a really rewarding process, both personally and professionally, getting to kind of bond with my two friends here and also just get to work with musicians who I love. And it's been really great. We sort of started working on this a week or two after Micah had gotten married, which I wasn't invited to the wedding, but I'd like to think that now I'd be invited to the wedding.

[6:32] Micah O’Konis: Yeah, you can keep dreaming, Hal.

[6:41] Hal Rosenfeld: Damn, damn.

[6:45] Micah O’Konis: Well, you could come to my wedding, Hal.

[6:45] Hal Rosenfeld: Well, I'm married already.

[6:51] Micah O’Konis: Somebody.

[6:51] Robert Bannon: You missed all the weddings, Hal. You missed Philip.

[6:54] Hal Rosenfeld: Maybe Philip's I can go to.

[6:54] Robert Bannon: Philip, besides Philip having a very good camera and a very fancy setup here, I want, because I'm so distracted by it, Philip, it's very professional. See, look, he's ready. What is this show about? How do you describe what this show is about for people who are going to want to listen to the music who maybe don't know what it's about? Maybe they're like, I'm confused by the title. I don't know if this is for me. What how do you describe your elevator pitch about what the show is?

[7:22] Philip Labes: Absolutely. So Good Guy with a Gun is a musical comedy about a conservative NRA lobbyist and his liberal daughter. The tone is a bit like Book of Mormon for the NRA. It's satirical, pokes at both sides and is not just a slam dunk on conservatives or a mea culpa for liberals. It's a both sides exploration that's really about how to close the distance with people that you think you could never understand, especially when it comes to the complicated dynamics between parents and kids that I think is increasingly common for the youngest generation.

[8:02] Robert Bannon: I couldn't have said that better. Micah, what is it like when you write together? Is it in person? Is it someone is the is the lyricist? Somebody is writing music? What what is the process like? And then how does it get to Hal and what does Hal do with it?

[8:22] Micah O’Konis: Yeah, wow. Great question. I mean, it looks a lot of different ways. I mean, we, Phillip and I kind of learned how to write funny songs together. And so we just like there's so many songs on the cutting room floor, but we're often in person. We're often just like thinking of different ways into songs and and bopping back and forth. Sometimes Phillip's just on the piano and since he's an improviser, he just goes and I just write it all down. Often, I'm just like, that doesn't make any sense. And let's edit it. Sort of pointing him the right direction. And then really, second, sorry about that. No, you're back. Oh, great. Yeah. And then when we're bringing Hal in, like, really, like, I mean, we sort of some of these songs, like NRA men, it's like a gospel.

And we just say, hey, this one's a gospel. And then he goes, all right, like, hold my beer or whatever the expression is. And brings in all these incredible players. And basically, there's a video we recently posted of him surprising us with the arrangement of NRA men. And that one was just such a delight to see. I mean, really, like, I think what Hal brings is like a sense of fun and poppy energy that a lot of musical theater soundtracks don't necessarily have, because they're, I mean, I'll let him speak more about this, but they're constrained to the pit or they, you know, musical theater has this sound, right? And he's been really like pushing me and Phillip towards a sound that is a little more, a little more hip, a little more mainstream, or just, yeah, just, I think the combination of our three voices has made a really cool, really cool product. I love it. I'm feeling really proud of.

[10:21] Hal Rosenfeld: The art of arranging is something that is kind of forgotten about when people talk about shows, especially theater. It is and the modern theater has a different sound. It's taken away the stereotypical stereotypes of what musical theater is and can be. So how do you describe the sound of this modern show?

[10:35] Hal Rosenfeld: Yeah, I mean, I think, I don't know, I think when, when Phillip and Micah were initially talking about the album being kind of like the, the perfect final product for this show right now was the most exciting thing. I mean, you know, other than just like the genius writing and storytelling behind it, because, you know, as sort of Micah started touching on, like, with theater, musical theater, you know, a lot of this, what Broadway used to be in the initial sound of Broadway was basically defined from what you can fit in a, in a pit. And at the time back in the, you know, the fifties and sixties, it was, you know, a sort of small kind of iteration of an orchestra, right. With like a rhythm section.

And then as sort of theaters become more modern and introduction of more electronic instruments, like guitars and keyboards, a lot of that started to be used to supplement live instruments. And, and I think, you know, because it's an album, we can do whatever we want, you know, it's like, and with the, with the way that Phillip and Micah's kind of work sort of, kind of, kind of works is that music is part of the humor and humor is part of the music and vice versa. And so a lot of the, a lot of the sort of humor moments work really well on the album because you could go so far in that direction musically without there being any kind of limitation where it's like, you know, the, the third single that we dropped, good guy with a gun, which is the title track is like a country Western because it really is.

It's like a kind of humorous cutaway of our main character, Ron sort of describing, well, back in the old days, you know, this is, you know, America was built on guns and it's like him, like in a cowboy hat with a bandana and like a standoff in front of a saloon, which we could do that. We could bring in like a trumpet player and a, and like a low kind of cowboy voice and like that vibe. But then also on, you know, on a lot of the numbers that highlight God voiced by Jason Alexander is set in, you know, some of them are set in heaven. We've got like a giant full orchestra with harps and the kitchen sink and everything. And, and I think there's just that ability to kind of mold. Yeah, sure. The modern pop record sound, which I feel like a lot of Broadway stuff isn't, it's, isn't quite hitting, but also we can really do some of the kind of more Sweeney Todd, Les Mis-esque stuff, but also.

[13:24] Robert Bannon: How did you get them to do this?

[13:54] Philip Labes: It's a combination of things. One was that opportunity had not yet been afforded to us. We are both based in Los Angeles, which is a different kind of theater city and doesn't have the sort of direct connect to that. We weren't plugged in at the university or postgraduate level to the sort of programs and workshops that often feed that world. So we were building our own path. But the other is truly, as Hal mentioned, accessibility was quite important to us. Broadway tickets are at an all-time premium and theater, it's definitely on people's minds how to make theater more accessible as it becomes shorter runs, more expensive tickets, air travel is more expensive, and we don't want theater to be a luxury good only available to the ultra-rich in an already K-shaped economy.

Storytelling and theater are for everyone and it was really important to us to create a version of the story that a freshman in high school in a red state could listen to and have new language to talk about politics or to laugh about their circumstances or to connect with a parent. So we wrote sort of the way that we entered the musical theater space as kids, which was largely through cast albums. If you don't live in New York or are lucky enough to have parents who vacation there, then your entry point to musical theater is largely going to be on a music streamer today, like Spotify or Apple Music, etc. And while those platforms are not particularly great to the musicians and copyright holders who use them, they are incredibly accessible for listeners and it's our hope that sort of giving it away functionally, like we're just kind of giving this away saying, you know, we worked really hard on this.

We spent a bunch of money. We spent years of our life and hours of our spirit energy. Please, please dig it. We're hoping things will come back to us, maybe not even in professional returns, but like spiritual returns.

[23:41] Micah O’Konis: Oh, it will. And what's interesting is I talk to more and more people. This is the way because you don't have 10 years to workshop a show where in 10 years from now, I don't know, we might all be living in a bunker or things will be better. I don't know. The world's on fire. So get it out. Let the people hear it and get the message they need now.

[23:54] Philip Labes: Just to end things together and our time together, where can we stream it? What is the goal of you guys that when it's over, how will you all, what do you want us to walk away with? What's the intention behind this whole thing?

[24:03] Micah O’Konis: Well, it'll be streaming everywhere August 14th. And the goal is that people love it. They share it, that they listen to it over and over and fall in love with the characters and as much as we have in writing it.

[24:35] Robert Bannon: I love that so much. Everybody, the singles are out. The entire project is coming out. The link, the Instagram below for the people that have joined us, this creative team, that's a superstar team. The future has just begun for this incredible show that I hope you check out. Love it. Enjoy it. Share it with somebody. Send it to a dad or a mom or a parent or somebody. Maybe you don't necessarily agree with everything, but you can open it up to have a fun comedic conversation about it and maybe we can find some common ground or at least a moment to laugh or joy or sing along together with it. I'm really excited for this entire Good Guy with a Gun is the show. This creative team, congratulations, break legs and we're ready for this and the incredible run in the future that this show holds. Thank you for making it.

[25:06] Philip Labes: Thank you so much.

[25:22] Micah O’Konis: Thank you, Robert. It was such a pleasure speaking with you.

[25:24] Philip Labes: Such a pleasure to talk to you all. Let's go. That was so well put.