Over in Australia, theatre is being made again, and the new musical that everyone seems obsessed with is one that seems like it’ll hit close to home: FANGIRLS.

Here at Hypable, we’ve been touting musicals that appeal to our inner geeks – a compliment we commonly bestow is that something was “written by fans, for fans.”  Now, it looks like that is being taken a step further by Yve Blake, who wrote a musical about fans.  Or more specifically, about fangirls.

FANGIRLS is a show about 14-year-old Edna, who is in love with Harry, from the boy band True Connection.  Through this lens, it explores the passion and creativity of fangirls.  And getting more and more meta, the musical already has its share of fangirls in Australia, where the musical is in the middle of touring.  Plans to come to the West End and to the United States are brewing, but in the meantime, the whole world is about to join the fangirling with the release of the cast album on April 30^th.

The album is being released digitally by Ghostlight Records, has plenty of songs that will soon be memorized by fangirls all over the world.  Here at Hypable, we’re presenting an exclusive debut of the song “Wait and See” – the first song in the show that protagonist Edna gets all to herself!

Since most of us haven’t been lucky enough to see the musical yet, we reached out to creator and star of FANGIRLS, Yve Blake, for some much-needed context about this song.  Here’s what she has to say.

Edna’s dream is to meet Harry, but not just because he’s famous. Edna’s got a theory that Harry secretly hates his pop star life and is desperate to escape, and that’s where …she’ll come in.

Edna sings ‘Wait and See’ directly after being effectively ditched by her two best friends in the world: Jules and Brianna. Like Edna, Jules and Brianna are two misfits who are obsessed with True Connection, but Jules is beginning to change. Overnight, she’s started panicking that she’ll be the last person in their grade to get a boyfriend, and so she’s effectively trying to re-engineer her image so that a boy will ask her out (ick).

In the scene immediately before ‘Wait and See’, Jules and Edna get into a big argument in which Jules calls Edna ‘Crazy’ for thinking she’ll ever meet Harry. The fight escalates, until Jules pulls out her phone to mockingly read aloud some of Edna’s Fan fiction about Harry (in which they go on the run together). It turns out, Edna’s Fan fiction is a dead secret that she’s only ever told Brianna about – but Brianna has betrayed her and secretly shared it with Jules. Mortified, Edna struggles to grab Jules’ phone away, and ends up accidentally throwing it on the ground and almost breaking it. Jules storms off in outrage, leaving Brianna to pick a side. Filled with guilt and shame for sharing Edna’s secret, Brianna leaves and follows Jules, leaving Edna all alone.”

’Wait and See’ is Edna’s battlecry. It’s her triumphantly saying to herself, ‘everyone’s wrong about me’. It’s also a song about how it feels when you’re 14 and you think that you’re waiting for your life to start. At one point, Edna sings “I’m not done becoming who I’m gunna be”, which pretty much sums up her outlook. It’s what I love about her, she’s insecure but she’s enterprising. That’s a huge theme in FANGIRLS, that teenage girls are so much more powerful, capable and intelligent than we give them credit for.“

FANGIRLS is a show about how we ask young women to see themselves. A huge theme in Fangirls is that you shouldn’t pin your whole worth on whether or not someone is ‘in love’ with you – but this song? is wayyyy before our protagonist learns that truth. So lyrically, I knew I had to make Wait and See about THE OPPOSITE of that idea. When people tell me that this is their favourite song, I often say ‘Really?! your favourite song in our feminist musical is the song she sings about the guy?!’ but I jest. I set out to write a song that felt like a first crush. It needed to soar, and it needed to be a bop.

The more we hear about FANGIRLS, the more excited we are to actually see the show one day!  It’s reminiscent of one of this writer’s favorite YA novels, Kill the Boy Band by Goldy Moldavsky – also about a hardcore fangirl of a boy band.  Hopefully as more fans create their own art, we’ll get more of these stories to enjoy.

In the meantime, what did you think of “Wait and See”? And of the rest of the cast recording, which you can listen to here?