July 4 marked the opening night of Team StarKid’s new musical Twisted, appearing at Chicago’s Greenhouse Theater in a sold-out run until July 28. The Twisted StarKids will feature as guest columnists for Playbill throughout the month of July.
Twisted – The Untold Story of a Royal Vizier is a parody melding the story of Aladdin with the concept of the Broadway musical Wicked – a legendary tale told from the point of view of the story’s traditional villian. Twisted focuses on the figure of Jafar as the sympathetic hero.
Twisted is scored by A.J. Holmes, with lyrics by Kaley McMahon and a book by Nick Lang, Matt Lang and Eric Kahn Gale. StarKid veteran actor Brian Holden makes his directorial debut on this production, with James Tolbert as choreograper and Joe Moses as fight choreographer.
The musical features orchestrations by Andrew Fox and musical directon by Justin Fischer.
The cast of Twisted includes eight well-known StarKid company members – Joe Walker, Dylan Saunders, Jim Povolo, Jeff Blim, Lauren Lopez, Meredith Stepien, Denise Donovan and Jaime Lyn Beatty, as well as Nick Gage, previously the composer for Holy Musical B@man, and three new faces — Rachael Soglin, Alex Grace Paul and Robert Manion.
Twisted is Team StarKid’s seventh musical and their biggest and most professional theater production to date. The musical was announced during the online premiere of their last musical, A Very Potter Senior Year, and was funded by a hugely successful Kickstarter project.
To celebrate the opening of Twisted, Playbill, the major publication for the theatergoing world, has invited Team StarKid to blog about the production. The Playbill.com website will feature one guest writer from StarKid each week during July, discussing the creation and execution of Twisted.
The first post comes from lyricist Kaley McMahon. To start with, she discusses her working relationship with composer A.J. Holmes:
He wrote piano arrangements for musicals I wrote in college, and in the last seven years, we haven’t had a single conversation that didn’t end with our enthusiastic reaffirmation that someday we’d love to work together as a real composer-lyricist team. With Twisted, it seems the stars have finally aligned, and this project feels like the very satisfying end (or rather, beginning) of a story long in the making.
You can read McMahon’s entire column here, as she describes the process of creating Twisted in a digital space and transferring it into the physical world with the rest of the production team. For more details about Twisted, check out our exclusive interview with Nick and Matt Lang following the musical’s announcement.
Tickets for Twisted are no longer available online, but spaces for certain performances may be available by contacting the Greenhouse Theater directly.
Are any of our readers seeing Twisted this month in Chicago?
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