INTERVIEW: A new web musical knows ‘How to Survive the End of the World’
Photo: Brandon James Gwinn and EllaRose Chary are the creators of the new web musical How to Survive the End of the World. Photo courtesy of the creators / Provided by Matt Ross PR with permission.
Winner for most apropos title for an artistic project during the COVID-19 pandemic has to go to the new web musical, How to Survive the End of the World, from the minds of EllaRose Chary and Brandon James Gwinn. The show, starring Hannah Cruz, Dylan Hartwell, Greg Sullivan and Ellen Winter, premiered last month, and now the creators have teamed with the off-Broadway company The Tank to throw a watch party in honor of PrideFest. Audience members can tune in Friday, June 26 at 8 p.m. on The Tank’s YouTube channel; an audience Q&A will follow the playing of the web musical.
How to Survive… was created during over the last few months when residents have been asked to stay at home. What started as a simple idea began to gain steam, and eventually virtual rehearsals were held and a distribution platform was settled on. The musical tells the story of a woman who has preserved years of video messages from her older brother who died prior to the COVID-19 lockdown, according to press notes.
The cast rehearsed via Zoom and recorded their parts from the relative safety of their homes. Chary took care of the script and lyrics. Gwinn handled the music, lyrics and audio/video production. Recently the two creators exchanged emails with Hollywood Soapbox. Questions and answers have been slightly edited for style. The two answered together, except where noted.
Life during quarantine has been extremely difficult, but you two stayed busy with this project. How did the idea come about?
When the quarantine happened and all of our projects and rehearsals were postponed or canceled we knew we wanted to keep making musicals in whatever form was available to us. We had started an Instagram project to use our work to keep building queer community in a time of distance, and Hannah and Dylan made an amazing video of a song they had performed in a show of ours a few years ago. Watching that, we thought we could write something for them to do now, in this format.
Ella was also thinking a lot about her brother who had died in 2017 and how the feelings of grief and loss of the moment were intermixing with past moments of grief and loss. Also, as live theater makers and as humans we were struggling with the disconnect of everyone around us suddenly existing on screens. All of these things were in the soup, and we thought carefully about what was technically achievable for us and our cast/collaborators. We wanted to use the technology as a guide rather than view it as an obstacle. So, the idea was born to make them brother and sister, and we were lucky to have Greg available so we could create a contrast between the past and present. This was definitely a project that started with a feeling, and then form dictated content in a cool way.
How did you logistically write and develop the musical, and then go through rehearsals, while everyone was separated in their own homes?
We have written work for the stage, TV and web together for a few years now, and that has definitely led to us basically talking every day. Brandon has always said, ‘Writing musicals together is like raising kids together.’ So we worked the idea into our daily writer/friend chats (we’re also curating an Instagram song cycle and writing a TV pilot currently), and as usual some parts were created separately and some were created together ‘in the room,’ in this case over Facetime/Zoom.
Once we had a draft of the script and parts of the songs, we brought that material to our friends, the actors, via Zoom, and it continued to be crafted from there. There were detailed conversations about how to realize some of the material, so that we were all on the same page. Then the actors would take the time they needed to shoot things the way we had discussed, putting the content in a Google Drive — sort of like dailies for a film. That ended up being really effective, and we really only reshot one or two things. The footage was pretty spot on the first time due to us all discussing the vision clearly in the meetings before shooting.
How would you describe the story and characters of the web musical for someone looking to catch it online?
The piece tells the story of Al, a woman who has preserved years of video messages from her older brother who passed away prior to the quarantine lockdown. She now lives in a world where all of her human interactions happen on screens, which blurs the line between alive and dead, what is real and what is only in the cloud. The characters are contemporary, they’re real and lovable, going through what we were going through in the moment we wrote it — spring 2020.
We pride ourselves on writing shows with complex subject matter that are entertaining, funny and tuneful. The piece is a celebration of a loving relationship, a cathartic expression for a difficult moment and above all the thing we love making — a musical.
Speaking of Pride — this is a queer piece that doesn’t center queerness. That was very important to us — not everything in queer people’s lives is about being queer. We are three-dimensional humans, and things happen in our lives that have nothing to do with being queer. But our queerness is ever-present. We strove to capture that in this piece.
What was it like working with this cast of actors? Did changes come about after they started working on the piece?
The cast we chose are from a ‘company’ of artists/good friends we love and trust. Dylan and Greg are both staples off-Broadway and happen to be fiancés, and Dylan and Hannah played opposite each other in a workshop of another show of ours a few years ago. They’re the kind of actors who can direct themselves and invest in the storytelling, which since they essentially had to direct themselves proved to be the biggest asset for the piece.
They’re also brilliant musicians and frequent interpreters of our songs, so music rehearsals were basically discussions about the vision and then Brandon emailing tracks to learn the songs. The amount of work we had to do to get what Brandon really wanted was actually surprisingly small, and that is probably due to their musicianship and our working relationship.
There were (and always are) changes at every part of the process. We had an initial table read, after which came changes. We actually cut a song idea and started a new song (‘Better Half’). We asked for multiple versions of things and then chose the best footage, and we actually reshot/changed the finale song pretty late in the game. It was sort of like writing a new musical for the stage, then writing its film adaptation, and then editing the film adaptation all in same project. It was very creative, and there is no one director credited to the piece because we couldn’t have pulled it off without everyone’s creative leadership at some point
Have you been despondent, hopeful, scared, bored during your quarantine? Do you think New York theater will ever go back to “normal”?
CHARY : My mood has not been constant. As the moment has evolved, my feelings have changed — but I have never been bored. I have been using my time not doing theater to plug into activism and the activist communities I am a part of. I feel a lot of rage at the human and governmental negligence that exacerbated the crisis, but I also feel a lot gratitude for the people who are always fighting the good fight towards justice for all — healthcare for all, housing for all, freedom from state violence for all. This is a powerful moment, and I feel hopeful by the solidarity that is being built here in NYC and nationally around budget justice and reimagining our social priorities to center care and human life. I think this is a big fight and a long one and had everything to do with the idea of going back to normal in theater. I hope we don’t go back to normal. Normal in the American theatre had fundamental inequalities that hurt the form and prevented artists from doing their best work. I hope we can use this moment to transform normal into a world that is racially and economically just, and by extension theatre will be a part of that world and reflect those values.
GWINN : Oh, I have been all of the above. I think the theatre sort of exists to spotlight all of those extremes in human life, and quarantine has really made that spotlight brighter. If we weren’t in lockdown this piece wouldn’t exist. In March, we looked at the news and predictions of what everyday life may resemble, and we decided that as dramatists we couldn’t wait around for theatre to reemerge if it was going to be dependent on folx gathering. There’s still no way to tell if and when that might be possible. We always say that the act of gathering for the theatre is inherently an act of resistance, and it is imperative that it always exists, particularly in New York where it has always thrived in America. I think the industry won’t resemble the New York theatre of pre-COVID for some time, and maybe (and definitely hopefully) that will change it for the better.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The watch party of How to Survive the End of the World, created by EllaRose Chary and Brandon James Gwinn, is available via The Tank’s YouTube page. The off-Broadway company will host the party Friday, June26 at 8 p.m. in celebration of PrideFest. Click here for more information.
