Fans of Team StarKid know Corey Lubowich as the backbone of the company – in every aspect, from producing t-shirts to designing sets to managing a tour bus, Corey’s there, keeping the wild ride that is StarKid Productions firmly on the tracks. Amidst all this, somehow he found the time to create his own original web-series, starring many of his StarKid buds, and in this exclusive interview we talk about his new show as well as his history with StarKid and his experiences on the road.
Natalie Fisher: Let’s talk a bit about what you actually do. You wear a lot of hats in your creative life – it seems to be fairly extensive. First of all, you were at the University of Michigan.
Corey Lubowich: Yep. My degree is in theatre design and production.
NF: From that you’ve ended up doing set design, costume design, what else has come from that?
CL: Basically, while I was as U of M I did a little bit of everything. Part of that is just the way our program is designed – you kind of have to take classes in everything and I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I worked in stage management, I did lighting design, set design and costume design before I focused down a little bit. I was also really involved with Basement Arts [U of M’s extra-curricular student-run theatre production group] so I was, on the side, doing a lot of graphic design for Basement Arts as well. I found things that I wasn’t as interested in but that I think were very useful. I did a little bit of lighting design and obviously lighting is incredibly important in theatrical story telling but I quickly realised it was not for me. However, it wasn’t wasted time because I’ve also done some directing and I’m interested in doing some more directing. As a directer, all of that information is incredibly useful. I think all of my experience as a stage manager and in lighting design informs me as a directer.
NF: To have knowledge of all the parts and how it all adds in…
CL: Exactly.
Corey
NF: Was your involvement in Basement Arts how you got involved with what ended up becoming Team StarKid?
CL: Yes, sort of. I was on the Basement board, essentially, so for two years – I was the graphic designer – but as part of the Basement board we take proposals and have people interview for slots that we have available in the season, so I remember Matt Lang coming in and proposing what would become A Very Potter Musical. I was part of that organisation in terms of making that happen or not. I went to see the show and thought it was great. I remember sitting there and being like, “Oh, I want to work with these people, it looks like fun!” I was only tangentially involved in the first Potter show but in the fall when they were looking to do Me and My Dick, they needed a designer. Comparatively to the acting program, the design program isn’t that large. My graduating class was, like, eight. And the reality was that there were a lot of people who were busy and couldn’t do the show. So they called me up when they were going to propose it and said, “hey, is this something you’d be interested in working on?” and I said yes. I did the scenic design and sort of ended up – this is a recurring thing with me – I ended up just doing other things as well, making sure things happened. We had music for the band and lights and that sort of stuff.
NF: It seems whenever a StarKid production is going on you’re heavily involved in the production side – from the perspective of live production, literally the running of the event, not just sitting down in advance and and doing the design, doing the merch. Is that behind the scenes management role something you were planning to be involved in?
CL: I think it mostly just sort of happened. It was a combination of, well, this needed to get done and I could do it so let’s get it done.
NF: On the SPACE Tour, obviously you have your involvement with the merchandise side of things and the Ann Arbor T-Shirt Company [who do Team StarKid’s merchandising,] but it really seemed more like you were co-tour managing. Is that ever something that you expected to be doing with your life?
CL: Pretty early on Julia [Albain, StarKid’s tour director] and I had talked about how that was pretty much the way things would go down while we were on tour but, no, that happened a couple of times on tour where I was like, ‘how did I end up here…?’
NF: With everything that you have been doing in the past couple of years, the different roles, did the merchandise design come out of just being skilled at graphic design, when they first decided to put up some t-shirts? Or have you designed that kind of thing before?
CL: I’ve actually done a lot of t-shirt designs over the years, for events and clubs and organisations and that sort of stuff. StarKid had already set up a CafePress site, but it was during A Very Potter Sequel – the costume changed a couple of times, but what we finally ended up deciding on for the Quidditch costumes –
NF: Which are amazing. You did the costume design for that show, right?
CL: Yep.
NF: I loved that show. I know a lot of people do, but I was blown away. I liked Me and My Dick and I liked the original Potter show but when they came out with the Sequel I said, “Oh my god, I can’t believe how much they’ve stepped everything up,” and the costumes were a big part of it. So, well done, I loved the quality of that show, for what it was.
CL: Thank you. That was part of our goal, we were like, “this material is so fantastic, let’s do everything we can to tell this story.” So, I was looking for a local printer to work with. I first worked with Ann Arbor T-shirt Company for a separate project, so I was like, “hey, would you guys be interested in working with us to do the shirts for this show?” They said yes, and that they could bring a t-shirt press and we could sell shirts at the show, and I was like, “perfect.” So we started talking about it and thought that maybe afterwards we could put it up online and get a better deal that through CafePress. That went well, I think initially we had two StarKid designs and they brought three generic Harry Potter designs that they already sold. The StarKid ones sold out instantly, they completely didn’t anticipate the demand, so they were like, “oh!”
NF: “On to something here…”
CL: Yeah, that’s how we started working with them.
NF: I feel like that’s been a very common theme with many people when learning about the StarKid phenomenon. They’re very confused at first and then they realise very quickly that something very big is going on. In the past few years, what – obviously you’ve got many different aspects, creative and production – what has been the most unexpected thing you’ve found yourself doing? Something that you just thought, “I did not see my career bringing me to this point.’
CL: Definitely a lot of what happened on tour. Just the strange things we had to deal with. As one of the tour managers and managing my bus, I was the main liaison with our bus driver, Don. I was terrified at first. He’s the nicest man, but he was very scary. So, yeah, I had to deal with him and he had to teach me, as we went, how to be a tour manager. He had to pay tolls and I had to manage the cash and passing out the per diems and dealing with all sorts of strange things like venues and things.
NF: I talked to Clark Baxtresser for Hypable and I asked him, “did you talk to anyone before you went on the tour, did you get any advice about living on tour or what it’s like,” and he said “no, not really, I don’t know anyone who has toured before.” I thought “oh, okay, it can’t have been that bad.” Then I saw the SPACE Tour DVD. Wow. Literally no one on the tour had toured before at all.
CL: Trust me, I’m a big proponent of asking questions, finding out the information and making an informed decision, but we couldn’t get ahold of anyone who had that sort of experience. We were in such a strange middle ground between, like – we are not a band, but we have a lot of people on a large act considering how new we are. A lot of the bands we know do van tours.
NF: For sure, absolutely. Were you offered a professional tour manager or anything by the tour promotion company? I know that is something that happens on some tours.
CL: No. Live Nation helped us book all the stuff, they were a sounding board for a lot of things but at the end of the day everything besides booking the shows was up to us.
NF: You pulled it off pretty nicely for a bunch of people who had not done it before!
CL: Exactly, all things considered, it’s like, “this went pretty well considering we don’t know anything.”
NF: So a couple more general StarKid questions – what was your favourite production to work on, or the work that you did on any particular production?
CL: There is something about everything. I find, especially with theatre, that the hours are long and the pay is not great so you really have to like it or it’s not worth doing. So I think there was something on everything that I really loved. The Sequel was this sort of crazy ten day process that we just did. I still can’t believe how much work we did in a very short amount of time. So, that was a very special time because, as I designed both the set and the costumes, I could not have done it without help and I had a really great support staff, a team of people working with me, including June Saito. I was so proud of that when it came about because it was like, for me, for those two shows, Me and My Dick and A Very Potter Sequel, those were both in Basement Arts’ studio space, Studio One, and it’s a really hard space to design for because it’s actually pretty wide and it’s hard to fill. For both of those I was really proud that we were able to make it feel like something different, like a complete show, if that makes sense.
NF: So, Me and My Dick was in the same studio as the Potter shows?
CL: Yes.
NF: In that case, you did an incredible job because it doesn’t feel like the same space at all. I knew both Potter shows were but I thought that one was in a different, much bigger studio. It looks very different on film.
CL: Cool! No, it’s the same space. Then with Starship, a lot of that for me actually was the biggest – that was the first time I had stuff built by a professional shop.
NF: That’s the most high-tech set, the most elaborate set you’ve had, isn’t it?
CL: Yeah, so I was really proud of us for pulling that off because it’s a different experience producing at school to in is in the quote-unquote real world. So, I was really proud of that and it was cool working with a professional – I was designing in a shop at school for show at school as well – but it’s a little different working with these staff members that I know already and trying to do it with a new shop. Then B@man was just such a cool project. I feel like, at this point, with my fellow designers Sarah Petty [lighting] and June Saito [costume] I’ve worked with them on a lot of shows. With Sarah, in the last year and a half, we’ve done five shows or something like that. So, I feel like we work together really well so I was really proud of the visual impact we were able to make on this show, the cohesiveness of it.
NF: It definitely was very adaptable and told a lot without having to be super over-dramatic or complex.
CL: Exactly. It’s something where this time, my budget was lower but theirs were both higher. There are different ways of telling stories and I left opportunities for Sarah to have some fun lighting moments with colour changing portals and the whole set was a little muted so the really fun costumes would really pop on it.
NF: That brings up another question in relation to the tour as well, actually. This is a very technical question – I’m assuming that Sarah did the lighting design for the tour, is that right?
CL: Yes.
NF: When that happens is it just that she sets up a design system that then gets given to the house or did she go on the tour and do lights at each show?
CL: She went on tour. Basically, a lot of these venues have systems in place so it wasn’t like a typical theatrical show where there are super-specific cues. She basically had a list of moments and different feelings for songs. She would sit with someone from the venue who knew their system and the capabilities and basically be like, ‘this is a slow ballad, it’s a really blue number,’ if they had the capability to change colours and stuff, or the strobing at the beginning. She would work with the lighting person at each venue to on-the-fly tailor whatever their capabilities are to the needs of our show.
NF: So, how many crew were on the SPACE tour, how many non-performers?
CL: Me, Julia, Sarah and the two merch people.
NF: Is that the same for this upcoming tour, Apocalyptour, or do you have more crew?
CL: June is coming along to do costumes and wardrobe, and we have three merch people.
NF: Wow, that’s big. It’s crazy to see you going to these huge tours in bigger venues with two buses –
CL: And two trailers this time! Go big or go home!
NF: That’s so cool, though. I’m assuming you’re looking forward to the tour?
CL: Yeah, I’m excited. It’s a little crazy right now but at least this time we know what the end product is going to be like. I know it’s going to be crazy and that there’s going to be weird problems that pop up but at least I know what that’s probably going to feel like.
NF: When you’re on the road, your role has mainly been of co-tour manager because you’re not working in a design capacity, is that right?
CL: Sort of. We’ve been meeting about this tour since around January about the sort of creative aspect because obviously it’s still a concert tour but there is more of a vision or artistic, creative backbone to this tour and there is a small story.
NF: It’s a bit more of a theatrical production than SPACE?
CL: A little bit. So, on the SPACE Tour I did the production design which ended up being the backdrop, the special effect things and that sort of stuff. That’s what I’ve been doing in pre-production for the show in addition to working with people about the concept of it.
NF: Have you had a moment since the Starkid thing has been happening where you hadn’t processed how big it was or weird it was and something that really was a turnaround moment?
CL: It sort of creeps up on you, actually. Everything seems normal for a while. Infinitus [2010 Harry Potter convention] was the first taste I got of just large amounts of people because Studio One in Ann Arbor is just not very big, it only seats 120. We saw large crowds but not that many so Infinitus was the first time that was like, wow, seeing all these people from the internet in real life. It was something. It was the first realisation. I probably had a little – a couple of weeks ago I had a friend who had a going away party because she was moving to New York. I was talking to a mutual friend of ours who I hadn’t really talked to for a few years, I knew her in high school, and it was this weird thing of actually saying, boiling down what I’m doing and saying it in a sentence…it was absurd.
NF: What was the sentence?
CL: It’s hard to describe StarKid succinctly. But just describing what I was doing, like, “I went on tour, I’m going on tour again, we just did this show and it’s going up on YouTube…” just strange stuff, especially since I wasn’t planning on it. I was going to keep working with StarKid in a show capacity after I graduated, but I wasn’t expecting to be this involved. It didn’t start off right away, it just crept up on us.
NF: You are also, at the same time as the tour pre-production, trying to create and film this new web-series, World’s Worst Musical. Is that going to be finished before the tour or is it more of an ongoing thing?
CL: We will have filmed seven and a half episodes, of ten, before we go.
NF: I wanted to ask what the creative team behind that was like, because World’s Worst Musical is not a StarKid-branded show.
CL: My co-creators with this are Marty Scanlon and Molly Scanlon. I went to high school with Marty and Molly is his older sister. We have worked together since high school on some theatre projects in Chicago. We’ve worked together in different capacities but never like this. It started off as a joke idea we had as we were sitting around after a tech rehearsal like, “oh, wouldn’t it be funny if…” and we thought that was the end of it, but the joke kept coming up and three years later it was still funny. We had talked about doing something with it someday then we thought, why someday? Why not just do it now?
The World’s Worst team: Marty Scanlon, Molly Scanlon, Corey Lubowich
NF: Had you ever made anything for film before?
CL: I go way back with film. When I was elementary school and junior high I did a lot of video stuff. So, I’ve been doing a bunch of video things for a while and Marty has as well, he does these video songs on his YouTube channel and I’ve worked with him a little on some short videos he has done. But this is by far the biggest undertaking we’ve tackled.
NF: What is the basic rundown of the show? What we know so far from Kickstarter is that it’s about a guy who tries to write a musical and goes through these various ideas. Can you go on from that?
CL: The original idea was about all the terrible ideas for musicals – people are making these musicals right now based on terrible ideas and so it’s like, “oh, what are the most absurd ideas we could think of?” So, that’s how it all started and we kept developing this story about this guy who is writing it, who experiences all these things. It really became a story about the creative process and our creative process specifically. But I think it applies to most peoples’ creative process in the struggle and the bad ideas you have to… sometimes you have to throw out the good ideas and work with the bad ideas until they become good. There’s never a clear path. The overall story has taken shape in that. On an episode-by-episode basis, it’s basically structured about this guy, he’s living his life, he’s sort of frustrated trying to write this musical and something in his everyday life triggers: ‘oh, what if that was a musical?” and he sees them come to life in front of him.
NF: Does it have fantasy elements, unrealistic elements in that he imagines things and we see them happen, he’s not trying to stage these musicals from week to week?
CL: Exactly. He’s still trying to write stuff so he’s always playing the piano, singing, writing things, trying to come up with ideas. It’s not full out crazy fantasy but it is not real life. He envisions what it could be. A lot of times he gets in to it and that sort of stuff then after he steps back and is like, “wait a second, that’s terrible.”
NF: Who’s playing that lead character?
CL: Marty Scanlon.
NF: Are you acting in the show?
CL: I’m not, I’ll be mostly doing a lot of the filming and director of photography work and directing the choreography and stuff. You’ll probably hear me in the background vocals on a couple of tracks.
NF: Is Marty writing all the songs for the show?
CL: We actually wrote mostly together. He went off a did a lot of the orchestrations and filling in a lot of the melody stuff but a lot of that we did together, collaboratively.
NF: How long are the episodes going to be?
CL: They’re five to seven minutes.
NF: And it’s going to be released in June, is that right?
CL: That’s the plan. It won’t quite be one a week, there will be some weeks where we do two. The first episode is more like a pilot episode, it doesn’t have a full musical number in it, so we’ll release one and two together.
NF: What inspired you to get on Kickstarter to make this happen?
CL: I’ve had friends who’ve funded projects on Kickstarter and obviously Charlene [Kaye, musician currently touring with Team StarKid] was incredibly successful with her Kickstarter. We were just talking and we got to a point where we had enough of the creative material realised that we had to start planning on doing it. It was something that all three of us felt very passionate about, that we would fund it on our own if we had to – and we probably will end up still funding part of it – but we thought there would be other people who would be interested in this, including friends and family who aren’t local. It was also a thing that we hadn’t told that many people about the project before that. There’s always that sort of thing with creative projects that you talk about it and it never happens so there was a little bit of that fear, that we might not end up making this.
NF: It’s interesting with Kickstarter, the idea of fans paying for something before they get it instead of afterwards. I think it’s such a good thing for artists of any kind because if they have fans that say “I want you to put this out, I’d pay for your stuff,” but they don’t have the start-up funds. It’s like just like pre-ordering an album but that money is used to make the product. I’m glad it’s been successful for you.
CL: It’s a great model because it allows you to connect with people who connect with your work, basically, and it gets them in on the ground floor and you can share stuff and get them more excited about your project. Those are going to be your biggest cheerleaders and supporters through that so it creates a structure where you can let them in more to the process.
NF: Do you think Kickstarter would have made a difference to what StarKid did with their shows, for the second, third shows, if fans could have been contributing to the project in advance of it happening?
CL: I think that definitely would have been a possibility. I think for Starship we discussed it, even. It is a really cool embodiment of this do-it-yourself culture that the technology we have available to us and the internet has allowed us to exist. We live in a world where the traditional models don’t necessarily work anymore. A record label or a theatre company or a film studio, Kickstarter is such a cool business model for trying to do the work and support it.
NF: Team StarKid aren’t just Team StarKid, they’re also your friends and they’re also trained actors, so you have some of those people involved in World’s Worst Musical as actors. Who from StarKid is going to be involved in the series?
CL: Jeff Blim is in it and Brian Holden, Joe Walker, Dylan Saunders, Clark Baxtresser is going to be in it. Lauren Lopez, Jaime Lyn Beatty, June our costume designer, she designed a couple of episodes and she is actually in one of them as well. The cool part about how the series is structured is that there’s a different musical every episode so there are a couple of recurring roles but there a lot that are just for one episode so we were able to bring in a lot of friends from both StarKid and that I know from Chicago, that Marty knows from Chicago, actors from there, to creative this melting pot of Chicago talent, which was really cool.
Watch the trailers for World’s Worst Musical:
Follow Corey: @coreylubo
Follow Team StarKid: @teamstarkid
Follow World’s Worst Musical: @worstmusical
You can hang out with Corey at Apocalyptour for the next few weeks: tickets here.
You can check out more updates about World’s Worst Musical on their website or their Kickstarter. If you donate to the project, they’re still honoring the Kickstarter rewards. The web-series premiers on YouTube on June 1.
Click on for the second part of our interview with Corey, where we’ll have pics of Team StarKid filming World’s Worst Musical, we get more details on some of the episodes, and we talk with Corey about the benefits of Kickstarter and how the internet has equalised the playing field for artists. Plus, he shares some amusing anecdotes about the surreality of visiting Darren Criss on Broadway and about Team StarKid being recognised by Sean Astin of Lord of The Rings.