In part two of our interview with Matt and Nick Lang, the StarKid creators talk about their new musical Twisted and and their graphic novel Quicksand Jack.
Last week, we brought you Matt and Nick’s thoughts on producing A Very Potter Senior Year, and now we talk to the Langs about what comes next.
During the YouTube release of AVPSY, Team StarKid shared video trailers for two new projects – Twisted, their new parody musical, and Quicksand Jack, an original graphic novel. The imagery in the trailer for Twisted, subtitled “The Untold Story of a Royal Vizier,” shows it to be an obvious parody melding of Disney’s Aladdin and the Tony-Award winning musical Wicked, based on the novel by Gregory Maguire.
Matt, at LeakyCon, you said you’d been telling the guys this story about how Jafar is really the victim in Aladdin, that Aladdin is this lazy, able-bodied man who won’t bother working for a living. Is that what inspired Twisted?
Matt: It was this old joke – when I was a kid, I loved the movie but I just hated the character Aladdin. And when it got near the end of the movie, like once Jafar sent Aladdin to the ends of the earth, I’d turn the movie off and say “Over! Done. Great movie!” So yeah, it’s this big giant long story joke. I was telling it to Darren after AVPSY – that night I sat him down and told it for, like, an hour, and we went “Ahahaha!” and laughed about it.
And then it was just on my mind after the third play. In the months or weeks to follow, we were trying to decide what the next show was going to be, so we said, “Why don’t we do that? Why don’t we make that Jafar joke into a musical?” Because I was sitting around thinking “Man, I like Harry Potter” – and all these other musical ideas weren’t working, because they weren’t musicals about stuff we liked at all.
And I’m just like, “Huh. Do we have jokes? Yeah, we have that Jafar joke – and I love Disney… Duh. Why don’t we just make a musical about Disney?” Kind of poking fun at Disney. And yeah, it’s from the point of view of Jafar, and it’s a little bit making fun of Wicked as well. It’s like Wicked, only it’s a way less elegant version of the Wicked idea.
Nick: And it’s like, ten years too late.
Matt: It’s making fun of a twenty year old movie and a ten year old musical. So we think that’s kind of fun, how not topical it is.
It’s kind of topical. They’re going to make a film of Wicked soon, and Aladdin’s going to Broadway next year.
Matt: That was actually a coincidence. We didn’t know about the Aladdin musical until after we started writing Twisted. And we went “Crap!” But whatever. We can’t do anything about it.
Twisted seems like it’s going to be the first of your musicals that runs for an extended period of time, in a bigger theater where fans can easily purchase tickets, in contrast to the limited performances of the past StarKid musicals.
Matt: Yes. That’s what I’m hoping. I’m really hoping that we can run it – because we only have maybe less than a month’s run right now, that’s what we can afford. But if it does well in this month, it would be great to have it be the kind of show that can just go up somewhere and run, to be a real musical and have an actual life, as opposed to our other musicals that go up for a couple days and then are done.
Nick: It would be cool to have a musical that people can come to see live. That where it’ll run long enough to where people have a chance to come see it.
So there’s no drama with this one about copyright and having to allocate free tickets via ballot…
Nick: Yeah, exactly. Aladdin is a public domain story. With this, we changed some character names…
Matt: Because we’re just not taking any chances. We’ve changed names where it’s necessary to change names. Or just being tricky about the name, if it’s too close to Disney. But a lot of it, Aladdin and the 1,001 Arabian Nights are public domain. So, as long as it’s clear that it’s a parody, that we’re just making Disney jokes, that it’s a parody of some Disney stuff and a parody of Aladdin, I think that we’re okay. I think it’ll be just fine.
Nick: Yeah, I think we’ve changed enough to where we’re safe. But it’ll be recognizable as a parody.
Matt: I’d say that Twisted is more different from the movie Aladdin than the movie Spaceballs is from Star Wars.
Nick: We’re sort of exploring different themes and stuff like that. We’ve changed events around. The story of Aladdin existed before the Disney movies. So it’s a retelling of the story in general.
Before Senior Year and Holy Musical B@man, you didn’t release the casting prior to the performance. We knew the actors involved, but not their roles. Will you repeat this process with Twisted?
Nick: I think we will release the cast list. We just don’t have a cast list yet. We’re still finalizing the casting.
Matt: In terms of a list of characters, I don’t know if we will.
Nick: I don’t think it’s that big of a deal, because in the B@man show we just didn’t want people to guess the plot. You know? We didn’t want people to know that Superman was in it, or Robin…
Matt: All the bad guys. Because it would be a list that would just be insane. Because it would be every single bad guy. There would be a character named Sweet Tooth – and no one would know who he was. So with B@man and with the Harry Potters we never released the character list, just because it would spoil the show.
Theater in general doesn’t usually have those concerns, does it? Often you go into a show and you look at the programme and the actors and the characters listed mean very little until you see the performance.
But with StarKid, since it’s the same company over and over again, it’s gotten to the point where some fans might prioritize the actors over their roles. People who might not otherwise see the appeal in watching one of shows, like Me and My Dick or B@man – they watch because they’re attached to Team StarKid, because they want to see Joe or Joey or Brian or Jamie.
Do you consider this a good thing – that people will watch if it’s you guys, no matter what you put out? Or is it a bad thing that it isn’t being looked at objectively?
Nick: I think it’s a little bit of both. I think that of course whatever is going to get people to watch your work is a good thing.
Matt: I don’t see too much negative for it. The only negatives I see are when you want to work with someone new, and you cast a new person in a big role. Because that new person is under a lot of pressure to win over the audience. Because an audience would go in going “Ugh, I don’t care about you.” For example Jeff…
Nick: Jeff Blim.
Matt: Yeah, he had to win people over. And I know there will be at least one new person in Twisted. And it’s tough when people don’t give them, the new people, a fair chance.
Nick: Or when we have fans immediately going into a show and expecting a certain cast. I’ve felt this in the past where people will have a cast in their mind, and then when you don’t have that cast, they will be disappointed with what you do, no matter what. Like how, in Holy Musical B@man, just personally, I played Robin, but I know that other people had ideas in their mind who they wanted Robin to be. So it was sort of like – they see the show and they just immediately go “oh, that person would have been better.”
So I think that it does hurt in a way, because it doesn’t let you just watch the show and enjoy it for what it is. If you have these expectations of “oh, I really hope that Joey is Aladdin…” – I think that this isn’t too much of a spoiler – like, Joey’s not going to be in the show, because he’s got a really busy schedule these days as well. And he just couldn’t make the time commitment to do it. I just hope that people will be open to new people, open to different casting than what they’re expecting, I hope that is the case.
Also, just in terms of being a writer, there is a little bit of us thinking… We’d like to think that we have a big hand in how the shows are. Just the idea that: please trust us, that we’re the same writers as the past shows, so hopefully we’re going to carry the same level of quality from one show to the next. It doesn’t always have to be the same actors.
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