Now that the dust has settled on Team StarKid’s A Very Potter Senior Year and you’ve (hopefully) stopped sobbing into your handkerchief, we sat down with the show’s creators, and masterminds of all things StarKid, Nick and Matt Lang.
The Lang brothers are truly the lynchpin on which Team StarKid turns. Each of the musicals created by StarKid has been written and directed by the pair – some of the shows involve other co-writers, but the Langs are the creative mainstays for each and every production. It is their humor, vision, attention to detail and their deep love and understanding of pop culture that has made Team StarKid what it is today, and they’ve penned quotes, in both their original and parody works, that have been so endlessly repeated that they’ve entered meme territory.
A Very Potter Musical was the brainchild of Matt Lang, a University of Michigan student more interested in his extra-curricular drama club than in his undergraduate General Studies degree. In early 2009, he started putting together a Harry Potter parody musical, and his brother Nick returned to Michigan, his own alma mater, to help Matt run the show. The pair had created parody plays of their favorite fiction before, including a couple about Lord of the Rings, but Harry Potter: The Musical, as the show was called before it gained wider notice and had to be re-named for copyright reasons, changed their world.
After uploading the production to YouTube to provide the cast and their families with a copy of the show to watch – the Langs got frustrated after burning about seven DVD copies – Harry Potter: The Musical went viral online, among the Harry Potter community and the wider internet, even picking up coverage from Entertainment Weekly. The group of people who had previously been that weird group of drama kids putting on the nerdy plays quickly obtained a name, an agent, a warning from Warner Bros. and an instant fanbase. Four years, five musicals, two live tours and 100,000,000 views later, Team StarKid put on a one-off staged reading of A Very Potter Senior Year, the third and final chapter in StarKid’s version of the Potter story.
We spoke to Nick and Matt about the creation and execution of A Very Potter Senior Year, which took place at the LeakyCon convention last August and premiered on YouTube on March 15.
Listen below to hear about the hectic rehearsals and performance, technical difficulties, favorite moments, the scene that they thought had tanked the show, the themes and message of the final Very Potter story, and how Darren Criss came up with the idea for “I Was” prior to even AVPM:
Here’s some teaser quotes, just to pique your curiosity:
Matt: “I guess we don’t keep people up to speed. Like, we’ll make decisions and not tell anybody. I guess there were people that showed up who were surprised by costumes and stuff.”
Nick: “Eventually, people started to notice that we had been working for many weeks. And they said ‘oh, can we help you guys?’ I think we had asked some people to help and they said no. But then eventually they said yes.”
Matt: “Our idea was to make a third show, where, when you heard ‘Going Back to Hogwarts’ again you went ‘Oh cool!! I remember liking this song!! Even though I’ve been hearing it for four years.'”
Nick: “Darren is basically harder and harder to get as time goes by. He’s just so busy. He doesn’t have time for us – we’re nobodies […] We wouldn’t have done it without Darren. We even tried to get Bonnie back, but she didn’t want to do it.”
Matt: “It was just an absurd absurd amount of work without enough time.”
Nick: “We were just baffled when people weren’t laughing at that scene. And we were like, wow. This really is not playing well. Me and Matt actually went backstage and we said this is the biggest disaster of our lives.”
Nick: “We got the sound recorded and just by freak accident Darren’s microphone did not record. Only his.”
Matt: “Projects aren’t fun to do, they’re fun to have done […] Leaving the hotel once everything was packed up was a nice feeling.”
Nick: “When I meet people who like the shows, I’m just glad that they like the show. And we’ll continue to try our best to make shows that people like.”
Keep an eye on Hypable for part two of our interview with Nick and Matt Lang, in which they discuss their upcoming StarKid projects – the new parody musical Twisted, and their original graphic novel Quicksand Jack.
Photo credits: LeakyCon, Team StarKid, and Jeff Cagle
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