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[0:00] Jeryl Brunner: From Shakespeare to Schwartz, from Falsey to Alvin Ailey, from San Time to Burelis, from McNally to Faye. It happened to the greats, it still happens every day. When lightning strikes is the moment you know. When lightning strikes, where you're meant to go. You can stand in tellure, do whatever you'd like. You'll never forget the moment when lightning strikes.

[0:25] Jeryl Brunner: Hi, this is Jeryl Brunner, and you're listening to When Lightning Strikes, where we talk about the tingly mic drop moments that led you to becoming an artist. Actor-musicians Van Hughes and Nick Blaemire wrote and are performing in Space Dogs at MCC Theater. The new musical tells the heartbreaking, mind-blowing, true story of the first living beings to go into outer space, even before humans. The musical centers on a stray dog named Laika and the top-secret Russian scientist who sent this pup and other dogs to space during the Cold War. Space Dogs is now playing at MCC until March 20th. With me is Nick Blaemire. Welcome, Nick!

[1:20] Nick Blaemire: Thank you so much, Jeryl. It's an honor to be here.

[1:24] Jeryl Brunner: It's such a pleasure to have you, and congratulations, you've been extended and extended and extended.

[1:31] Nick Blaemire: Thank you. It's a real joy. You know, it's a dream to do theater in New York and off-Broadway, especially. I think Broadway obviously has this kind of pinnacle attached to it, but I've always thought of off-Broadway as like the indie theater.

[1:50] Nick Blaemire: Yes. And seeing things like Floyd Collins or listening to cast recordings like Assassins, I've always wanted to be a part of that, and this is my first show that I've written off-Broadway, and the fact that people are loving it is just a dream come true.

[2:10] Jeryl Brunner: Yeah, and I love MCC because they're risk-takers. I know their mantra is that they want to inspire conversation and thought and inspiration.

[2:24] Nick Blaemire: Yeah, I'm just such a big fan of them, have been for a decade plus. I was just talking to Bernie Telsey, one of the artistic directors, and he articulated exactly what you said. In a way, he thinks of them as what he used to call MCC when they were just starting out, kind of the Angelica of theater, you know, the place that you go to see that indie idea that no one else has the courage to take on. I do think that film, you know, there's just so many spots where a movie can go, and it's just not the same for theater. The real estate game is too hard. So when anyone takes a chance on something, I'm always in admiration of that, and to be the beneficiary of that at a place I admire so much is just, I'm still pinching myself.

[3:22] Jeryl Brunner: It's incredible. So take me to your lightning strikes moment with Space Dogs. When did it happen? I heard that it started in a basement in Van's basement, so take me to how it all began.

[3:38] Nick Blaemire: I will. Okay, great. So my best buddy Van Hughes, who is busy doing the Almost Famous workshop right now during the day, he and I have been artistic compatriots for almost a decade as well. He lives in Bushwick and has this great little basement apartment. He rents out the top floor and has made a nice little life for himself, minimalist Marie Kondo kind of vibes down below. I've watched him really invest and commit to becoming an audio artist, and he's become an incredible producer of music.

[4:28] Nick Blaemire: So he's got this desktop down there, and we've now produced, I think, four albums together down there. I go over there all the time, and in one of those trips, he mentioned that he was on this YouTube rabbit hole about Laika and the dogs that went into space, and he was just like, I can't believe how disparate the information is. There are some publications that say one thing and another will say the exact opposite, and the dates are all fudgy, and yet there's this kind of central, crazy absurd idea that dogs would be the first beings in space.

[5:10] Nick Blaemire: It was absolutely, I love the title of your show, a lightning strike moment. It was like, oh, that's a great idea for a show. We've been talking about making something together and had both expressed our frustration that the risk of making theater because of the real estate game I was describing earlier, and just what a risky financial proposition it continues to be. That really puts a damper on the kind of theater that gets major productions, especially in New York. I came up dreaming about theater companies like Malaparte, where Ethan Hawke and Jonathan Mark Sherman started, doing theater for a dollar in a basement. Basements are very important to me.

[6:00] Nick Blaemire: This immediately felt like that. The absurdity of this story lends itself to an absurd telling of it, which would be directly in conflict with this idea that theater is expensive, so you have to keep the idea safe and commercial and linear and easily digestible. I think Van and I have both been in a bunch of Broadway shows that have lived by those rules, and there have been blasts, but I do think we've been evolving towards a more abstract form of storytelling, and this has just been that from day one.

[6:45] Jeryl Brunner: You know, it's fascinating is what multitaskers you are. I mean, you wrote the musical, you star in it, you play all the instruments, you move all the scenery, you are puppeteers. I heard that you said it's like a TED talk. I mean, it's epic in scope. Can you talk about that choice of telling it in this very unique way, telling the story in such a fascinating way with stuffed animals?

[7:23] Nick Blaemire: Thank you. Yeah, I'm in love with them too. I mean, that's really the driving force is that we're both such animal lovers, and there's such a profound relationship there to be mined that I haven't really seen mined. The decision to do it ourselves was partly practical in that any version of this that had a 10-person cast immediately became harder to pull off.

[7:47] Nick Blaemire: Also, there's just something about the fact that really the crux of the story is Van telling me what he was learning online and me doing my own research and being so fascinated by it. Because we were not setting out to write a commercial vehicle for ourselves, it was much more of a lark, and it freed me up creatively to sort of think outside the box. That's been really a dictating principle: how can we stay immediate and intimate with this? Because the story is epic, right? The context is epic, the Cold War, and what we're living through now with Russia in Ukraine only refracts the story further. It's so heartbreaking, and the treatment of the dogs is too sad for words.

[8:44] Nick Blaemire: So it actually needs a counterbalance of joy and spontaneity that doing it all ourselves not only made it practically easier, but it offered really interesting creative opportunities. You know, what if I play an American leader and a Russian leader, and a dog, and what if Van plays a scientist and a dog and a Russian leader and an American leader, and we do all of those in tandem? It became this really fun game as we were talking about the show. Van would say, isn't it insane that XYZ happened? And I would write down the cadence that he used in telling me whatever fact he told me. That became this real game of how can we really preserve the enthusiasm that we had for discovering this story and give that to the audience.

[9:43] Nick Blaemire: And also, it's a love story, you know. When you think about the scientists, I don't know if you want me to give it away. I don't want to, but you really, there's a real dilemma he has to send Laika and the other dogs to space because he has such a deep connection to them. As the audience, if you see there's a stuffed animal, you're thinking, oh, I care for you so much. Don't be hurt, please come back so you can live your life and be a hero and get that steak.

[10:21] Jeryl Brunner: Oh Nick, you're totally hitting me in the heart.

[10:25] Nick Blaemire: I feel the same way. I'm fascinated by the power of suspending disbelief. We all know that it's a puppet, but because we have such a relationship to stuffed animals that's very childlike and primal, and we understand this telepathic relationship between animal and human so well that it is a love story, you know, between man and dog. I do think that it's also a story about the tension between human progress and the costs of that progress. The real conclusion that I've walked away from is that dogs kind of transcend humanity. There's something so pure about that love and so unfettered by recrimination or jealousy or the sort of trappings of reason that come with the human brain.

[11:33] Nick Blaemire: When we get the chance to connect with a dog, it sort of reframes everything. It's like being in nature, you know, you just sort of start wondering, well, why was I so obsessed with my phone and what was happening with work? It just kind of makes it all feel much more ephemeral. I think the tension between that, because it's not to say that we're indicting progress, I think there's certainly something really quite miraculous about exploring the stars and learning about the context with which our planet sits in the larger system. But there is a real tension between loving animals and then putting animals through something that they don't get to choose. It is heartbreaking.

[12:26] Nick Blaemire: So without spoiling too much, I do feel fascinated continually by that question, and I don't think there's any easy answer to it, which is why it makes for good theater.

[12:39] Jeryl Brunner: And how did you get to the facts, or how did Van go from a YouTube rabbit hole to really getting to the truth? Because as you said, it's very murky, and as Americans, we probably, you know, who knows what really happened back then, you know, in the height of the Cold War, how their space exploration program was happening. So how do you get those facts?

[13:14] Nick Blaemire: Yeah, it's fascinating. I mean, especially because so much of it was classified until 2002.

[13:21] Nick Blaemire: So there's stuff that has come out only recently about the depth of the lies that Russia perpetrated to keep Laika's fate secret from society and the way they vaulted her heroism in the face of all of the things they were doing behind the scenes.

[13:40] Nick Blaemire: And it really makes you kind of question all of history in a certain way. It's like, what are we being told and what is the press release? And you know, not to be a conspiracy theorist about it, because that's certainly not our goal. But I do think that the research we've done has been really comprehensive. We've read a bunch of different books, some from the Russian side and some from the American side, and been able to cross-reference dates. And you know, more than kind of passing judgment on either faction, it's more just reporting what we know to be true, which is, you know, that Werner Von Braun, who was an aerospace engineer for the Nazis in World War II, was hired by President Truman when we realized that we were losing the space race, even though President Truman himself had passed a law that said that hiring Nazis would be illegal after World War II.

And that's just fact. So, you know, that right there is enough to mine. And a lot of what we're doing is sort of putting pop idiom into these historical moments and thinking, well, what must it have felt like to be in that moment? Because, you know, at the end of the day, the secrets and lies that the Cold War is made up of are almost unknowable. And the thing that is really universal about that time is that we were driven by this fear of each other and this hope of winning the world that is so confounding to both Van and I, and we've been, you know, constantly fascinated by the kind of white maleness at the core of that, that these insecure white guys are needing to be the number one for what exactly, you know?

And then when you bring nuclear war into it and think about the precipice that that puts us all on, it really shows, you know, the poles of humanity that we can be that callous and that confused as to the purpose of life, and then on the other side of it, that we can have such a profound relationship with, you know, our pet.

[16:08] Jeryl Brunner: Yes, yes, and also the show is equally or partially also about your journey to understand this, you know, you're learning these facts.

[16:20] Jeryl Brunner: So it's really, as you say, it's such fascinating out-of-the-box storytelling because you're talking about your education in this process of learning it, and then you were and then teaching it to us, and yeah, and then all the technology, you know, the TV, and I just love all the details that you have.

[16:45] Nick Blaemire: Well, you know, I mean, we're fans. I think that's that was a really helpful and kind of freeing action to mine because, you know, when you're making something, especially an original show that isn't based on some famous movie or book, there's a sense that you worry about if it's good enough, you know, the whole time. And we were really freed from that because the story is interesting no matter how you render it. And that really allowed us to follow our instincts about how we rendered it. And we love theater and love theatricality, and there's something so inherently theatrical. Van always says this about space, that you know, the idea of being pulled from your naturalistic, you know, gravitationally bound self and brought to the stars is something that only a theater can really pull off.

Even a movie, you know it's a screen, but there's a three-dimensionality to what's possible in a theater. And I've had some of the most affecting, inspiring moments of my whole life inside of theaters. So to get the opportunity to bring everyone to a theater, especially after the pandemic that we've all been living through and the amount of theater we've been deprived of because of it, the chance to be one of the first shows back, we were just like, we gotta give them a show. You know, we got to give you all something to really sink your teeth into. Because the other thing is that, you know, New York City is just full of some of the most intelligent, discerning, and fascinating people in the world.

And we wanted to live up to, you know, that kind of quality of audience. And that meant doing things that neither of us had seen before that we didn't know were gonna work or not, but to constantly be turning that dial and challenging ourselves to visualize this story in more and more creative ways.

[18:57] Jeryl Brunner: Talking about your experiences with theater, you've so many incredible credits here, I think about just Tick, Tick... Boom! and Found. I love that music, that show.

[19:10] Jeryl Brunner: Oh, Hunter Bellisha. Just so many shows you've performed in, you've written. Um, so when was your lightning strikes moment? Or can you talk about a few of them when you knew you had to be an artist, that this was your path?

[19:27] Nick Blaemire: Oh, yeah. I mean, I really appreciate the question. It's a lovely feeling to look back at that because I do kind of have trouble believing the life I'm getting to live. I mean, those Tick, Tick... Boom! and Found and Dog Fight and Glory Days and Baby and these shows I've gotten to be a part of—Godspell—they're things that I would have been a fan of, you know, had I not been in them, and I was a fan of and still am, but I got to be there on the inside of it. And I think really what it comes down to is that when I was like three years old, I did a piece called The Homework Machine at a like an after-school drama program with a great man named Tim Reagan, who was so clear and instilled in it with such effortless ease the idea of community and creativity being inextricably linked and that when you make something creative, you are inviting people into your world and you are making us feel less alone, and as an artist, you're becoming less alone because you've sent out that invitation.

I remember feeling that, and I felt that so many times over the years, and I really have been addicted to that feeling. And I ended up—I had a very kind of boilerplate, nerdy kid middle school experience where I was bullied and didn't quite know how to fit in and changed schools in seventh grade because Tim Reagan, that same man, moved to a drama school in the area and started teaching middle school drama. And so I thought, okay, well, this is a safe guy. I'm gonna go, you know, continue to learn from him. And because I went to that middle school, Sidwell Friends is what it's called in Washington, DC, where I go—it's a great school. It was Chelsea Clinton was there when I was there. It was like a just like, okay, whoa, this is a different, you know, swath of society that I hadn't experienced.

And the level of artistry and passion from the people that I was around, it just kept giving steroids to my interest. And in seventh grade, I remember being in Tim's class, and Sarah Gray walked in with a tape, cassette tape of Rent, and made me December 24th, 9 p.m. And that was the only piece of the show that I knew for like at least a couple of years because my parents weren't sure, you know, if the cursing and all the sex and drugs were gonna be okay for their seventh grader. But by the time I saw that show in, you know, sophomore year of high school, it flipped the script once again. You know, it was like, okay, so I've seen Phantom of the Opera and I've seen Les Mis, and there's, you know, such an epic size and imagination to those shows and a real maximalist feel that I think Space Dogs is certainly paying homage to, and Tommy and Jesus Christ Superstar and big shows like that.

But then you have this other thing in Rent where it feels like it's being made by a group of friends, and it feels incredibly intimate, even though it's taking on, you know, La Vie Bohème. And I started seeking out shows that were smaller in that way, that, you know, something that was producible, that was small in stature but big in theme. And that's when I started finding stuff like Sunday in the Park with George and Assassins and Floyd Collins and Tick, Tick... Boom! and driving around listening to Tick, Tick... Boom! and thinking, you know, I'm having so many of these thoughts. This man is speaking, you know, for so many artists in the same way that La Pina and Sondheim do with George. It just—they're mapping the artistic process almost in like a kind of coded how-to book.

[23:45] Nick Blaemire: Yes. Um, you know, how do you deal with the loneliness or the uncertainty that come with living in your imagination and then having to kind of bring that, you know, into real life and deal with the business and all of the disappointments that come with trying to get people to appreciate what you appreciate? Um, and so I just have continued to feel buoyed by art. Whenever I get, you know, when I have moments of despair or despair about humanity and the way the world is going, it's art that reframes that into hope and gives me, you know, another kind of dose of the reason why it's worth continuing on whatever path we're on. And I just keep getting cues of that, even in disappointment, because I wrote this show Glory Days that is a small musical about, you know, the kind of pathway between boyhood and manhood, that liminal space and the toxicity of being taught to be a man by other boys who are also, you know, regurgitating toxic ideas and trying to find true love and kinship.

Um, there are some big ideas that drove the writing of that show, and then the success of that show in DC brought it to New York too soon, and then we closed on opening night. And so I watched that kind of dream bubble on Broadway, right?

[25:32] Jeryl Brunner: Yeah, yeah. Sorry, and you said you watched, yeah.

[25:35] Nick Blaemire: I just watched that dream bubble kind of pop. And, you know, now I'm 37, I was 23 at the time. I couldn't be more grateful for that kind of public failure because not only did it teach me that failure doesn't kill you, but I got a crash course in Broadway, I got a crash course in writing a musical with some of the smartest people around me teaching me, and I also kind of understood the long game because that show didn't define my life and it didn't—my life didn't stop, you know. If anything, it allowed me and opened the door for me to have the kind of career that I have, dropped up, warts and all, you know.

[26:22] Jeryl Brunner: And isn't that show performed all over the country?

[26:26] Nick Blaemire: There's been like 50 productions of it, so it's had a life.

[26:31] Jeryl Brunner: What do you have Broadway?

[26:33] Nick Blaemire: Yeah. You know, people dream of that, you know, getting their work.

[26:38] Nick Blaemire: No, totally. It's a dream. It was a dream come true and a box checked. And we just had a production during the pandemic in Japan, our second production in Japan, and like just gorgeous work being done by people who, you know, look at the show through with an entirely different language and culture and finding something human in it. And that to me, you know, it just speaking of as I was saying about dogs, that there's kind of a purity that transcends our selfishness or our violence. There's something about the true purpose of theater in terms of that connectivity that transcends modern ideals of success, you know, and it allows me to realize that, you know, being Tom Cruise or Steven Sondheim or Steven Spielberg or any of these kind of luminaries that sit at the top of their field is just not the only way to have a fulfilling creative life.

[27:37] Jeryl Brunner: I hear you. Well, how did you go from Sidwell Friends to working professionally? What was it? Was it Crybaby one of your first professional jobs? How did you go from there to there?

[27:52] Nick Blaemire: I appreciate. I mean, I graduated high school in 2002, and I wrote a musical in my senior year called When I Grow Up, that was a one-man musical. Apparently, I'm into this small thing, and when I was doing that, I got waitlisted at the University of Michigan because my hero Gavin Creel had gone there. Yeah, and one of the best humans alive. He just came to the show the other day, didn't warn me. And I saw him in the audience and was like, oh my god, now I have to really watch my pitch. But my best friend Brian also went to Michigan and he was a freshman when I was a senior in high school, and I went out and visited him and just thought it was the most nurturing place and applied and didn't get in, and it got waitlisted and wrote an impassioned plea and sent a copy of my one-man musical to say, you know, I'm an artist in all kinds of ways, and I want to make work and I'm not just here to, you know, take the Broadway pill and stand in line.

I want to do something different. And I urge anybody who's listening to take those kinds of steps because it does end up differentiating you in a way. And I ended up getting off the waitlist and going to Michigan kind of before it had exploded in the way it has now. It's now you say Michigan and people almost roll their eyes because of shows like Mean Girls, where like every single actor in it went to Michigan. But it was a beautiful place to be, and it was there that I met Benj Pasek. And Benj behind me in school, and we started having deep convos about the nature of theater and what kind of stuff we thought was possible. And he wrote a song cycle my junior year called Edges, that was like something of a little success.

And we did a little tour of it, and we ended up doing it at Joe's Pub right before I graduated. And I had met everyone at that first reading, including my now wife, Anna Nogeda, who was Benj's best friend from childhood. And so I really owe Benj very small world, and it was then that I sort of felt like, oh, this is approachable. Like I see these people, and I saw their faces on Playbill.com and in programs, and now they're around and they're just people and they're just trying to figure it out too. And suddenly I felt like I kind of not that I knew how to navigate because it's a moving target and a rolling ball, but I knew that I wanted to make new work in the way that I had just made new work with Benj, and so I did a concert of Glory Days at Joe's Pub and started auditioning and got very lucky and got the tour of Altar Boys out of school and was able to go play the Jewish member of that Christian boy band on the road.

And then while I was on the road, I did a reading of Crybaby, and then, you know, got lucky enough that that reading turned into a production and moved out to La Jolla. And while we were in La Jolla, Glory Days got announced at Signature Theater. And so suddenly there were all of these dreams coming true at once, and they really collided because while Crybaby was in previews, Glory Days got announced for Broadway. And so I had to ask Rob Ashford and Mark Brokaw, the director and choreographer, if I could have some time off to go write my Broadway show. And they were so gracious to do that. And it, you know, it was a real trial by fire. And I think even though Crybaby wasn't a successful Broadway show and Glory Days wasn't either, I had made the leap.

And it suddenly felt like, you know, this thing of risking pain for the transcendence on the other side of the fear of pain, you know, it became clearly worth it to me. And I just have never stopped. And you know, in some ways I've had to pull myself back a little bit because I think in my 20s I was a bit of a workaholic, and I remember I wrote a show called A Little More Alive that we I was in California doing a reading of that right around my 28th birthday, and it was kind of that Saturn returns tick tick boom, what's gonna happen when I turn 30 thing that everybody has, but mine was centered around this show A Little More Alive, and I remember when we got the investment, we got $500,000 in one day, and I had heart palpitations, and I was lying down on the bed in the hotel where I was staying with Anna, who is not my wife yet at that point, and I could just feel that my sense of self had gotten really wrapped up in my employment and my art making in a way that wasn't quite healthy.

And so I really had to kind of actively pull myself back and think about, okay, you know, I want to do this forever. But I also want to be able to do this forever and sustain myself and not live and die by every, you know, yes or no. And it was a good lesson because that show didn't come to New York, but it was a great experience, and we got to do it a bunch of other places, Williamstown and Barrington Stage, and that's where I met Van. And Van and I became buddies, and it's a circuitous line, but there's a straight line in there somewhere.

[34:20] Jeryl Brunner: That's incredible. I just think about your route to the University of Michigan and you're writing that show. When did you know that you could write, that you had those skills? What was one of the first things you wrote?

[34:35] Nick Blaemire: Oh man, that's a great question. I wrote a song about my high school crush. And it was the first line was save me the time, please. Just answer your phone. Can you read my mind, please? And the hook was like, because I'm back in fifth grade with this song in my heart, and a girl stuck to my name, to my brain, stuck to my brain. And I just remember writing that song and being like, oh, this is kind of interesting. Like I'm coming in in the middle of a situation, and I'm in the point of view of a character, and I'm not, again, I'm not trying to be good. I'm just being sort of, I'm just following the instinct and laying it down. And my friends reacted, you know, in a way that was like, oh, this is well, if you say this is a song, then this is a song.

And I really caught the bug and felt more than anything. I mean, I would say I haven't, I'm still on the search for like, am I really a songwriter? Am I really an actor? Like, I don't know what the line is that you cross that where that becomes true or not. But I know that the exploration of it is too interesting not to try. And I've written so many bad songs, and I've written a bunch of songs that I really feel like encapsulate my perspective. And with Space Dogs, it's been even more interesting because that's obviously not a story that is my own experience. But I've been able to find my own personal sort of fingerprint within it. And as you say, so kindly, sort of chart our creative journey in writing the show through the plot of this scientist and this dog, which is, you know, is an homage to Sunday and Tick, Tick... Boom and anything that is sort of trying to shine light on what it means to create something, the value and the fear and the wonder attached.

[37:01] Jeryl Brunner: And I was so fascinated. Here you were as a kid listening to Rent, be enchanted by it, and then you get to play Jonathan Larson. What was that like when you got cast?

[37:14] Nick Blaemire: I saw it. It was a beautiful production. Yeah, I remember it so, uh, how poignant it was and heartbreaking and rich and devastating and also funny. And, um, what was that like when you got the call or the email that you were cast?

[37:37] Nick Blaemire: Oh man. I mean, you know, I'm not a good auditioner. I have a lot of trouble not wanting things, you know, and thinking about wanting it when I'm going through it. And so that's kept me from getting certain parts that, you know, other people or like even the creative team thought I was right for, because I can get my own way as any actor can, and it's been a challenge that I've, you know, hopefully gotten better at over the years. But because I had been toiling away for a while, and this is something that I just I would again like offer to your listeners and anybody who's trying to figure out, you know, where's the rhythm or rhyme or reason to any of, you know, which jobs you get and which jobs you don't, I think staying and lasting is a huge thing because when I got Tick, Tick... Boom, I was 31, and I had been in the business for eight years and had been doing, you know, small new musicals that whole time.

And I'd been doing any concert anyone asked me to do, and I'd been a fan of the Keen Company and had seen their shows and would go to anything that I could that felt like it fit this kind of theater making that I was interested in. And so I actually got, I was in North Carolina teaching at a wonderful program called the Performing Arts Project. Yes, do you know that program?

[39:13] Jeryl Brunner: I've been there. I went to visit.

[39:15] Nick Blaemire: Yes. Oh my god, it's the best, best, best, best. I love Juliet.

[39:24] Jeryl Brunner: Juliet's great, yes, yes, absolutely. Oh, slight digression. I've known Juliet since I was 15, 14.

[39:34] Nick Blaemire: Oh.

[39:34] Nick Blaemire: She used to run a program called the Broadway Theater Project with Anne Ranking, rest in peace.

[39:39] Nick Blaemire: Um, and that was down in Tampa, Florida.

[39:42] Nick Blaemire: And when Ann decided she wasn't gonna run the program anymore, it changed into the Performing Arts Project and moved to Winston-Salem, where Jonathan Bernstein now runs it.

[39:53] Nick Blaemire: And so I've just continued to stay totally in love with those people and their education system.

[39:59] Nick Blaemire: And so I was down there teaching, and I got a call from my agent at the time, who was just like, I think you just got an offer to play Jonathan in the Tick, Tick… Boom! revival. Um, and I'd never met Jonathan Silverstein, a different Jonathan who runs the King Company, but I knew who he was because he had directed the Marry Me a Little revival. Um with uh Jason Tam and Laura Molina. And I remember loving that and thinking, God, he does a lot with a little. And he, man, he did that production of Tick, Tick… Boom! had like three props. And we were in, you know, 20 rooms in that show, but there was no set. It was a piano and a couch and some lights above. And you know, I had done Godspell with George Salazar, who is just one of my great friends to this day.

And Lily Cooper, I love so much, and Sierra Renee, so talented and incredible. And it was just like, is this really happening? Am I really getting to do this? And you know, Jonathan, to his great credit, was really hard on me because I came in, and I think partially because I was a nerdy kid. I can sometimes put up a wall between myself and the vulnerability of a character. It's sort of a tricky navigation for all artists, you know, not to want to look like it's all easy. Um and to really expose the work that a character is doing, not an actor, but the character is doing and the anxieties that a character is going through, especially someone like Jonathan, who is like a live wire and holding on by a thread to this kind of self-perception of where he's supposed to be by 30.

You know, I didn't quite want to go there. Um, and I think part of it was because I had been burned by Broadway with Glory Days, and I had some stuff to work through. And Jonathan just kept asking me, he's like, you know, you just said this line in David Auburn's script that just feels far more intense than you seem to feel about it. And why is that? You know, and are you gonna dig into what that line would mean if you were saying it? Because there's so many life experience parallels that I share with Jonathan in being somebody who wanted to do this early and wanted to do this on a big scale. And obviously Jonathan is one of the great heroes of our art. So I'm not comparing us in terms of ability, and he also tragically passed away way before his time and didn't even get to see what he did to all of us, and you know, who knows what he would have continued to do to all of us.

And I'm thrilled that Andrew Garfield has made such a splash with the Netflix movie, so more people are getting that story. But for me, it was a real sea change moment where I realized, okay, I can't play it safe, you know, this is why acting is hard, is that you it does have to cost you something, and you have to go out there and connect your darkest fears to, you know, lines that you didn't write for a bunch of people that you don't know. Um, and in doing that, it was just completely cathartic. It was therapy and it was also right in the middle of Trump getting elected. And so the context for the show and singing lines like, What does it take to wake up a generation, you know, on the night that Trump got elected to an audience that was crying with us, you know, it was like this is what I moved to New York to do is to speak truth to power and to galvanize support, you know, in our culture to withstand the tremors that come with change and it just was a totally magical experience from start to finish, and I will be forever grateful for it.

[44:29] Jeryl Brunner: How extraordinary. And another kind of surreal kind of kismet moment. I love that your wife is also part of the MCC season, right?

[44:42] Nick Blaemire: Her play is openly next month, right? Across the hall in the theater next door to yours.

[44:48] Jeryl Brunner: Yes, it is.

[44:49] Nick Blaemire: She's rehearsal on Monday. And uh her play is called Which Way to the Stage. They actually just changed the title, and it's I love it. Um, and it's about two people standing outside the stage door waiting to get Idina Menzel's autograph in 2015 when she's doing If/Then on Broadway. And I remember reading the first scene from the show from her play, and just thinking it was so funny, but that like could are plays allowed to do this, you know? She just is it's I've read nothing like it in my life, and it starts out so light and bantery, and then becomes this deep examination of gender and the roles we play in society and success and failure, and what you owe a friend, and I just kind of can't believe the play exists.

I'm a deep admirer of Anna's work aside from loving her as a person. I mean, I guess those are connected, but there is just so much going on in that play that I think is valuable and for this moment especially. And her play actually got booked at MCC first. And when I was trying to find a place to get Space Dogs, you know, I didn't want to horn in on her experience. And she was really magnanimous when we found out that MCC was looking for a small musical. I was like, are you okay with me, you know, kind of throwing my hat into the ring for this? And you know, very thankfully she was like, you know, this is if that happened, that would be the craziest to use your word, kismet. And what ended up happening was March 9th, 2020, we did a reading of Space Dogs that Anna was at with me.

And when we got home, like three hours later, my agent called and said that they wanted to do the show. It was the first time that that's ever happened, like the day of the reading. And we celebrated in the street, danced, danced down Court Street in Brooklyn, and then you know, three days later the whole world shut down. And so I have been in this relationship with MCC for three-ish years now, and alongside my wife, you know, dealing with the ins and outs of trying to get a play up, you know, when everyone's wearing masks and taking tests three times a week. And the fact that we'll be running while she's in rehearsal, it's just like it's like a dream that I, you know, would feel crazy to actually have dreamt before it happened.

Um because I just I don't I know how hard it is to get anything produced. I mean between Glory Days and Space Dogs, I tried to get all my other shows to New York, but it just there was a wall up, you know, and so the fact that we both have had this happen, it's just um it's not something that either of us are taking for granted that's for sure.

[48:06] Jeryl Brunner: What's so wonderful is that you both have taken agency over your work. I mean you're both actors, performers, you sing. You're also writing your own material, which is really extraordinary.

[48:19] Nick Blaemire: Thank you.

[48:20] Jeryl Brunner: You're welcome. I do think it's I do think it's important actually and I hope more artists allow themselves to broaden their scope of artistry because it's not to say that being an interpreter and just being an actor isn't valid because of course it is but as a business practice it's it's passive slightly it's you have to wait for the door to be opened for you. And there's so much psychologically that is painful about the amount of rejection that comes up that it starts to equate you know, I'm only being creative when I go into an audition to ask somebody for a job. And that's what always tripped me up when, you know, whenever I've gone into an audition and self-tapes, you know, don't help any more than that.

So for me, it and for Anna, I think writing has been a coping mechanism. It's been a way to borrow Joan Didion's phrase, acting and writing is the same muscle. Writing you just get to do alone. And I just think that's so true. And it has been the saving grace of my, it's it's allowed me to be an actor because I can practice my creativity whenever I want. And, you know, whether that means being a painter or a teacher or a dancer or a, you know, just like a bird watcher, but you pick a hobby and you give it weight and focus in your life to become, you know, better at it. I think that that acts as a balancing of the scales a little bit. And it takes away this feeling of, you know, when is it gonna happen for me?

Because, you know, whether or not Space Dogs got produced in New York City, we were gonna do it somewhere, even if it was in a 90 seat theater for, you know, whatever advertising we could scrounge. And it's the same for Which Way to the Stage. I think that there is just a different kind of drive when what you're well, actually, to use another quote that I love, John Malkovich has this beautiful solo that he gave about the difference between ambition and drive. And that ambition is all about outward success and external, you know, the way that you seem to other people and the things that you get that everyone knows about. And drive is about going down and digging in and exploring. And I was really embarrassed when I read that because I think a lot of my 20s were wrapped up in ambition.

And that what, you know, as I think we all know, life throws curveballs and yet somehow they feel like just what you needed on some level and they can unwrap their meaning to you later when it doesn't feel good in the moment but then you know you end up learning something from it. And that speaks to the resilience of humanity and our ability to, you know, make meaning out of anything, I guess. But there is a sense of, you know, I needed to fail the way that I did in order to become an artist that I could actually be proud of and to trade my ambition for drive and that in so many ways that's why Space Dogs got produced because I wasn't thinking about producing it I was thinking about exploring and then my voice came out truthfully and I wasn't marketing myself, you know, in my creative work. Um and obviously we have to be our own producers as artists and that's just totally part of the game especially in New York but the balance and the ratio is really important.

[52:33] Jeryl Brunner: And to me, being a writer consistently keeps me in my creative head as opposed to my, you know, what have you done for me lately, Ed.

[52:45] Nick Blaemire: Yes.

[52:46] Jeryl Brunner: Well, here's to more drive.

[52:49] Nick Blaemire: Thank you.

[52:50] Jeryl Brunner: Such a treat to have you on.

[52:52] Nick Blaemire: Thank you so much.

[52:53] Jeryl Brunner: My pleasure.

[52:54] Nick Blaemire: Still happens every day.

[52:56] ♪ Musical number: "When Lightning Strikes" — performed by Tom McGovern ♪

[53:00] Jeryl Brunner: The theme song was written by Tom McGovern. This episode was edited by Kyle Moore, and the talent was booked by Anna Strout.