Meet Chris Sabol and Billy Aberle the creative team behind the new musical, Straight Forward a musical built on a true story.
Billy is the Founder and CEO of a theatrical tech startup, Prodooser and the co-founder and a board member of StraightForward’s producing partner, Pivotal Productions, a non-profit educational-based theatre company.
Chris is a proud public school music educator in New Jersey. He is also a co-founder and current Artistic Director of Pivotal Productions.
Their collective directorial credits are vast and if we ever want to get to this interview we don’t have time to list them all.
Connect with Chris on Instagram. Connect with Billy on Instagram. Follow Straight Forward on Instagram.
Listen to Heather’s original interview with Mike Iamele where he shares his and Garret’s story first hand.
- Make sure to follow this podcast everywhere you find podcasts, leave a rating and a review, and slip into our Instagram DMs at @wasitchance.
- More about Heather via @heather_vickeryandco on Instagram, @Braveheather on TikTok, and listen to The Brave Files
- More about Alan via @theatre_podcast on Instagram and listen to The Theatre Podcast with Alan Seales
EPISODE TAKAWAYS
- Chris and Billy met at Wagner College and sparks just flew.
- Pivotal Productions was born right after College.
- They started officially working on Straight Forward way back in 2014
- Bringing this musical forward right now is perfect timing as we’re, finally, seeing a lot of Queer love representation in public art.
- Chris and Billy embraced opportunity and reached out to Mike and Garrett and asked to turn their story into a musical.
- This was their first co-writing project and it took a long time to learn each other and how to compliment one another.
- The Pandemic allowed them time to really dedicate the time needed to get this show together.
- After the workshop of Straight Forward, they took it to the New York Theatre Festival.
- Through Pivitol Productions, Chris and Billy are able to train, educate and employ young theatre artists to find their own voice and gain meaningful experience so they can have long, lasting careers in the industry.
- Prodooser is digitizing production and moving away from all of the archaic stuff in the industry.
- Billy’s thoughts on failure: What did I learn? What will I do differently next time? Being receptive to more failure as a form of growth.
- Chris’s thoughts on failure: My relationship with failure is more complicated. I tend to relish in the negative but am working through it.