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[0:04] 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. And with me, with a brand new album. Listen, people, you don't understand. Firstly, it's called Bumps in the Bathroom. I know that so I have a lot of questions. A lot. And I'm assuming there's an LGBT element to this because I'm not trying to say the gays are doing bumps in the bathroom. I have not. Will, I'm not judging. Will Larche, LaRoche, LaCroix, Lay. I mean, LaCroix LaCroix works. That's fine, you know. It's always uh 2013 in my house, so that's cool. Will LaCroix. Will no, don't search that. Don't search that. Will LaRo is it LaRoche? LaRoy. Larish. Well Lars. Well, I told you this was not a professional show. And you know what? I'm not a professional, so it's a perfect match. Then this is then you're my kind of people. Congratulations.

[1:11] Will Larche: Thank you, Robert. Thanks for having me here. I'm so excited to be here. So what I know about you is that you have a bunch of friends who really can sing. Because Emily Skinner and uh people like Beth Malone and Ben Jackson Walker, all these incredible singers, are singing music that you wrote, Will.

[1:30] Will Larche: Yes, that's right. On my new album, Bumps in the Bathroom and Other Lost Shows.

[1:35] Robert Bannon: Will, how did you get them to say yes? You're in Brooklyn, you're living your life, writing shows about lesbian love octagons and things like that.

[1:44] Will Larche: Yes, well, I do have a secret weapon, and I I don't know if if this helps anybody else get great people on their album, but my sister's a Broadway casting director. So she was like, just so you know, probably nobody's gonna be on this. It's little, it's tiny, but you know, it's free to ask. And then people were like, Oh, this is actually really interesting. We want to do it. Then I couldn't be more grateful.

[2:10] Robert Bannon: So well, kudos to your that's the show business, everybody.

[2:13] Will Larche: Yeah, my EP Megan Lars Dominic, shout out to her. Hey, I'm available and I'm offer-only, by the way. But okay, no, I'm kidding. No one's offering me anything.

[2:22] Will Larche: Well, but uh what I love about your album is it's funny and it but it's saying something. So when did you discover you were a songwriter and what kind of songs do you write?

[2:31] Will Larche: You know, I think I discovered I was a songwriter probably the moment that I saw a piano and started walking up to it and you know, did things. I have vivid memories of looking up at the keys, actually, being so short that I couldn't even be up there. And then being like, look at what I can do, and being like, isn't that great? And people being like, sure, great, sounds great. But it turns out a little bit of training can actually make people sincere with their compliments. And so we're in a much better place today than we were at three.

[3:01] Robert Bannon: And what was your first musical that I wrote?

[3:05] Will Larche: Yes. Um, I think it was called Lost in the Mall, or maybe that was just the with the to one of the songs, but I wrote it with um uh uh Jennifer Um Ashley Tepper, who like 54 Below superstar. Yes, she does the series of like um if it only runs a minute. She and I um grew up near each other in South Florida, you know, the sixth borough of New York. And and uh there it was a little children's show. She had written the script for it with her friends. We were, I think, I don't know if we were single digit or pre-teens, but real sh real small, and I wrote a song for it and it was a lot of fun. And then in high school, I went to I went to like the fame school of Palm Beach County. It would strife school of the arts.

It was amazing. And uh we did lots of competitions like desbian stuff, and there was always a playwright one, and I would submit and I would um you know do well in that. And then my senior year I was like, How do I do something different? I'm like, well, I can write songs, I can write plays. Well, and I put them together, and I wrote a musical for the first time, kind of like almost full length. They want them to be kind of short, and that was it. And then from there, I you know, came to New York and went to other places and they've gotten to meet some really cool people, and then also a lot of people from back in Florida. So, like Lesbian the Loctagon, which you mentioned, hello, my drink is talking.

Um, uh was written with Kim Cressel, and she also went to my high school, but you know, she was also in New York, and then that's how I ended up writing the music for her show, which is on this album. You know, you just things happen and you have to express yourself. Lean into it.

[4:37] Will Larche: I uh lean into it. You know, I did an interview yesterday while we're talking, everyone will Larchi is. I mean, sometimes it's Larche, right? I mean, Bad Bunny's making us all feel like we should sound uh a little more Espanol. I'm down with that. I love that. If they're Bad Bunny Super Bowl, I'm here for that. I mean, he kind of made everybody look bad because he looked really, really good. That was kind of the the best Super Bowl production I've seen in a while. Same since Diana Ross and flying out of the helicopter.

[5:10] Robert Bannon: Look, yes, I'm all I'm always here for a helicopter. Uh me too. I didn't know. Which is which brings us back to Miss Saigon, which brings us back to musicals.

[5:20] Will Larche: To musicals and back to writing musicals, and and and people who are yes, I was talking to someone from Florida yesterday. They wrote a mu they wrote a horror film, and it was takes place in Florida. And I had said that sounds about right. Controversially that I think Florida is one of the scariest places in the world.

[5:41] Robert Bannon: Right. Exactly. So Charlemagne the God who's got the radio show here in New York and around the country says that the craziest people in the world are from the Bronx and Florida. And I think he's but you know what? I say we gotta own it, you know. I mean, I I guess I've spent in New York since 2001, so I guess I count as a New Yorker now, but um, you know, growing up in South Florida will always have had a big effect on me because I know I know what trees look like, right? You know, I know what it's like to sweat all the time, but then I also know what it's like to leave somewhere terrible and come somewhere better and find where you're supposed to be, which is I think what a lot of people who stay in New York feel if they came from somewhere else.

[6:24] Robert Bannon: So I'm gonna go through the titles of your musicals, and they're very entertaining to me.

[6:28] Will Larche: So go for it.

[6:30] Robert Bannon: We have the lesbian love octagon, which nothing's beating that except maybe bumps in the bathroom. I mean, we used to say a love triangle is far too small, but an octagon can include us all, you know.

[6:39] Will Larche: That's eight people, yeah, and it ends up having more principles than that too. Yeah, it's a big show.

[6:43] Robert Bannon: That's eight lesbians fighting over each other. It's like a WWE Divas Championship battle royal moment.

[6:50] Will Larche: Yeah, and it's really funny.

[6:53] Robert Bannon: It sounds it. Then you have bailout the musical.

[6:56] Will Larche: Yep. This one was really interesting because I wrote it collaboratively with the Reccio Ensemble, um, which again was with uh some people from South Florida who are in New York, and we kind of, it was in the 2008 financial crisis. We had this crazy idea of like, what if performance artists were starving and the only way they could get funding is if they wrote uh art that they thought the Republican administrations would support, you know, if they could get a bailout, but only if they were jingoistic and patriotic and anti-abortion and anti-immigrant and stuff like that. We thought, what a crazy dystopian science fiction-y sort of idea.

[7:33] Will Larche: Precient. Present Robert. If you can think of something bad, it will happen in the future. Because then what happened last year? Like the NEA started saying that that's how your shows had to be.

[7:43] Robert Bannon: So well, you're my kind of people. You are a trip.

[7:45] Will Larche: Sometimes I feel like several people, Robert. So I'm glad I can be your people.

[7:51] Robert Bannon: Please excuse him. Like we bumps in the bathroom, which I'm assuming has.

[7:57] Will Larche: Well, so you know, I I'm a messy person, Robert. I've been through a lot. I've lived I'm not judging. I've lived through several lives, you know. Um I that was a show that I started in college, actually at the Boston Conservatory. That was the first place I did a kind of like performance of any of those songs. It was me at the piano with backup singers who were all dressed in flannels and they were the plaid panthers. And it was a lot of country music. Um, and it was, I didn't have a form for it, but it ended up becoming the show where I explored my issues with um addiction and uh drug abuse and kind of like not in a sort of way that I was ever trying to be sad. I tried to bring the like the joy that I felt of having, you know, substances to lean upon at times that were bad.

But then people would often listen to it and feel uh, you know, really moved and kind of sad that I had ever gone through that stuff, which is which is very kind that they that they loved me and they would feel that way. So I think that's that's a kind of a theme in a lot of my music uh and theater work where I bring up something that's kind of difficult, but I try not to do it in a maudlin way, and then it ends up having this ironic juxtaposition of like um very uh sweet and cheerful sort of like presentation and very like serious and sometimes you know even disturbing content. So that's sort of like sweetness and subversion is really exactly where I thrive.

[9:22] Robert Bannon: Well, all jokes aside, thank you for sharing that, and thank you for sharing this for other people because I think to get through things that are hard and difficult, sometimes we have to break the stigma. And one of the ways to break the stigma is to be funny and to it it lets us all feel like we could have this conversation.

[9:36] Will Larche: So it's too many people out here who have looking for something to inspire them, make them chuckle, or if not feel alone, this album may be something for you, and you'll hear something that may move you or make you laugh or feel relatable to other you're not alone in whatever you're going through.

[9:49] Will Larche: Definitely not it, you know, it's a little cliché, but it gets better after it probably gets a lot worse, but it gets better, and so you know, listen to some of the stories that I and my collaborators have written about and know that it I think a lot of Broadway stuff is kind of cleaned up a lot, and you know, they're trying to reach large audiences, pay back huge amounts of money that they've had to raise and have a hit that they really need in order to make it financially viable.

[10:18] Will Larche: But you know, when we're working downtown, we're like, hey, we've already lost money, all we have left is our artistic truth, and let's just bring that out.

[10:27] Will Larche: And so this album was a chance for me to preserve some of that history, some of those shows that we had done that, of course, don't get cast albums because that's not how it works down there.

[10:35] Will Larche: But that's what's so cool, is that your album is out and people can stream it right now, and that is what makes it exciting for me.

[10:42] Will Larche: So people, well, the 27th of February, and then the single is out.

[10:47] Will Larche: You can hear the single right now, Julian.

[10:50] Robert Bannon: Tell me a little bit about Julian.

[10:51] Will Larche: Julian is a song that's Julian.

[10:53] Robert Bannon: What who's Julian?

[10:54] Will Larche: Julian is this really gorgeous guy. He was this really cool guy that you know.

[10:59] Robert Bannon: What do you call someone that you're seeing, you're sleeping with, you're making mistakes with, you're going out with probably not dating your husband.

[11:09] Will Larche: Okay, you're probably not dating your husband.

[11:11] Will Larche: You aren't, you're married to him.

[11:13] Will Larche: Um, but you know, but think about less commitment, um more beer. That that's kind of like what the main character is singing about Julian, somebody like that. Somebody that you're pining over, but you still have access to, and you guys have a kind of like gulf between each other still.

[11:35] Robert Bannon: Is Julian real?

[11:37] Will Larche: Julian was a real person, yeah.

[11:38] Robert Bannon: He was a guy that I dated, and so does he know you wrote a song about him?

[11:42] Will Larche: I don't know. We're not in contact anymore. That was like 2002 or three.

[11:46] Robert Bannon: Good. I hope he does because he's been very influential to me, you know.

[11:50] Will Larche: I feel like Julian is not healthy, Will.

[11:53] Robert Bannon: I think you gotta stay away from him, Will.

[11:55] Will Larche: Julian, are you kidding? Julian, oddly enough, despite the fact that Julian was making mistakes, I think he had a lot more put together than I did. Man had a job, man had a boyfriend besides me. He was doing things a little bit better than I was, okay. On the scale of things, he was definitely more mature than I was at the time.

[12:14] Robert Bannon: Tomorrow, everyone on the round table, by the way, Julian is here to tell us about a song I did.

[12:19] Will Larche: Julian is right behind door number two. He's gonna come out right now.

[12:23] Robert Bannon: You know, he's not the father.

[12:25] Will Larche: Um, I wish that Mori Popich was my inspiration for the show.

[12:30] Robert Bannon: Well, that would have been that was Jerry Springer.

[12:32] Will Larche: All of why do you love The Simpsons?

[12:35] Robert Bannon: Why do I love The Simpsons?

[12:36] Will Larche: Because probably I was told I couldn't watch it, and I have a tendency to do the things I'm not supposed to do.

[12:41] Will Larche: Yeah, because Bart Simpson, I don't know if everyone who listens to this was around when they first came out, but Bart Simpson was naughty. He was considered a misbehaving child with a bad attitude, who was rude to his adults.

[12:55] Will Larche: And so when he first came out, people would say, do not watch this show. They'll make you a bad kid, which was so like the thought at the time that if you played the video game or watched the TV show, that it would ruin your behavior in school. So my parents said I couldn't watch it, so then of course I did.

[13:11] Will Larche: And then it became an obsession. It essentially co-raised me along with my awesome parents, to teach me everything I needed to know about popular culture. I think how to craft a joke and also how to be off the wall and you know, do your own thing. The Simpsons never tried to do what other people wanted them to do.

[13:31] Will Larche: Um, like, and so that's why I did this show. You're probably referring to, you know, we put the spring in Springfield, The Music of the Simpsons, which was this great music review I did where we I transcribed the songs from the TV show that had never been published, and we put them together in a night and we would tour with it.

[13:48] Will Larche: We performed in San Diego, and we were actually on the Simpsons Comic-Con panel for their big, I think it was their 25th anniversary season. And so, like Matt Groening and Al Jean were on there and they brought us on to be the kind of like the performers singing their songs, and so that was a fun thing that I did with people from college, really proud of it.

[14:08] Robert Bannon: That is a really exciting thing. That is another thing that is a part of your catalog as well as podcasts.

[14:14] Will Larche: Not on this album, because you can go listen to the real people sing that song already on the TV show that had a much better budget.

[14:22] Robert Bannon: Absolutely.

[14:23] Will Larche: But if you want to hear all the songs from Bail Out the Musical, Bumps in the Bathroom, including the Song Bumps in the Bathroom, Lesbian Love Octagon songs. If you want to hear the music from, you know, if I was Paul Bunyan.

[14:35] Will Larche: Oh my god, and these songs, I have to say, they were orchestrated to absolute perfection by Scott Ninmer, who is one of Jonathan Tunick's students, you know, is Steven Sondheim's orchestrator. He's the arranger and orchestrator for the Marine Corps band. He's like so amazing, and he did this album with me for years. We were working on the orchestrations, and then these incredible musicians from Broadway shows they came and did it, and then of course the performers there so good.

[15:04] Will Larche: And I worked with Ring of Keys, this organization for queer non-cis male performers, and that's how I found all these really great lesbian and trans performers. So that for the lesbian love octagon songs, this was actually the first time we had a fully queer cast performing all of this music because when we would do productions, being music theater, like we often had to, you know, work with people who are from you know the straight side of the spectrum as well, and they were always so nice and incredible and gave great performances. But there's something also very special to getting to have one canonical version of it that's from the community that it's about, and so very excited about that.

[15:44] Robert Bannon: Agreed, I'm excited about it, and that you were able to do that. And we all know everybody that's watching this and listening, that's gay, lesbian, trans, queer, that we are more talented than straight people.

[15:56] Will Larche: So now no, not true.

[15:58] Robert Bannon: No, I think we're just allowed to be. I think since we're already a little bit different, they go fine, whatever. And then we get to go off and do our own thing. I'm gonna get canceled for this interview with you, Will, now.

[16:09] Will Larche: I'm straight people are supposed to have babies and get married in these and all the things that society's put upon them from, you know.

[16:17] Robert Bannon: I don't know. I think we're still living with stuff from the Victorian era upon ourselves. You know, gay people get to have a wild card on our lives.

[16:25] Will Larche: Yeah, absolutely. That's why Will wrote a song called Bumps in the Bathroom.

[16:29] Robert Bannon: It's a party.

[16:29] Will Larche: Yeah, I mean, it's about stuff we don't do anymore.

[16:33] Robert Bannon: Right. No, no, no. I'm of a certain age, Will. But it's about the joys of a college experience, you know?

[16:40] Will Larche: Agreed. I love the cats. And it was kind of like my chance to do an Alan Menken song. I was so inspired by like by Out There and Go the Distance from Hercules, and then I had also just heard this song when I wrote it from I think it's my favorite year. It's at the RKO by Aaron's and Flaherty, right?

[17:02] Will Larche: Oh yes, yes. And I thought it was so beautiful this idea of like wistful sort of 90s music theater pop, you know, it all had that sort of gorgeous sound to it. I said, Well, what if somebody took that song, but it was about looking happily at all these things they're doing that people are telling them not to do. Sleeping with everybody, doing drugs with everybody, skipping school, going into debt. This is my life story.

[17:37] Robert Bannon: I'm obsessed with this album. I can't wait to listen to the whole thing, and it will be everywhere that you can listen to music coming out very, very soon, February 27th. The single is out, it's called Julian.

[17:47] Will Larche: And another single dropping tomorrow, WWE from Lesbian Love Octagon, featuring Gretchen Wilder and Gwyn Wood and Ring of Keys.

[17:56] Robert Bannon: And if I was Paul Bunyan, Will.

[17:59] Will Larche: Oh, which is honestly the song they will play at my funeral. It is the one that sums me up. No, everyone's like, anyone can whistle is the Stephen Sondheim like distilled song. It's if I were Paul Bunyan for me.

[18:09] Robert Bannon: I can't wait to listen to it. I love Ben Jackson Walker. He was in and julia, he's been here and so terrible.

[18:14] Will Larche: So good. And of course, you notice that his partner Evan Canaan is singing on this too.

[18:19] Robert Bannon: And beautiful songs. See, I love what you're doing.

[18:24] Will Larche: I love Will. So you can imagine that there's a little story between these two. Like one is about meeting a guy, and then the other guy falls in love with him too, and then the breakup song is Mikey, which is very sad. But they don't break up in real life. But you know, make a story.

[18:38] Robert Bannon: Thank you for thank you so much for your time.

[18:40] Will Larche: Thank you so much for being here.

[18:41] Robert Bannon: Thank you for and I so appreciate you. And we're gonna be listening streaming and being ready for the whole thing.

[18:47] Will Larche: Yeah, that's it, baby.

[18:48] Robert Bannon: Thank you.

[18:49] Will Larche: Thank you.