Are there any ideas already in the works for what’s next after Twisted?
Matt: No. There’s some comic book ideas, but not musical ideas.
Nick: Yeah, we’re hoping that people like Quicksand Jack, because we’ve got more ideas for comics. We do have a bunch of original ideas that just do not work for a musical, ’cause usually the musicals have to be funnier, they have to be a parody in some way. I guess Starship is an original work, but really it’s a parody of a bunch of different things.
Matt: So – plans for after Twisted – we may redo Me and My Dick. Just because I think the show would benefit from being cut down, and being more of an opera.
Nick: Or just more like a real musical. We don’t write real musicals. We write more like Disney movies, where it’s mainly talking and they sing every once and a while.
Matt: We have very vague notions of redoing Me and My Dick. We’ve got very vague, vague, vague, notions of one day redoing Starship, but rewriting it to be better.
Nick: But usually for the musicals, we always scramble for a couple months after we finish one to try and come up with an idea.
Matt: We’ve got a couple of ideas that we keep going back to. Before we had Twisted set in stone, we had go-to musical ideas that we’ve been kicking around for four years that we just can’t get to work.
Nick: We had a caveman show that we’ve been trying to figure out for a long time, but now there’s a movie called The Croods…
Matt: Yeah, I’m glad we’re not doing that caveman thing. You know what?! This also makes me mad. We had an idea about the Founding Fathers but again, presidents became so big! With all that Abraham Lincoln stuff… And we’ve got some other ones, but again we never really got those working. So who knows, maybe it’ll work, or maybe we’ll think of something entirely different.
Me and My Dick seems very adaptable, and the most like a proper Broadway musical. If you put that show on again, would it be in the same way you’re hoping to run Twisted, for a normal theatrical run?
Nick: Yeah. Especially because we already have a version on YouTube. Like, why put another version of it up? We really like that show. And I think that now, after Book of Mormon came out, people are more open to do a show that might have dirtier themes in it. So I’m hoping that Me and My Dick…
Matt: Will get a second chance. Yeah, I’d love for Me and My Dick to run for a longer time. I think that’s a step that StarKid is going to need to make if it wants to survive. It just can’t be – the thing about these musicals is that they cost so much money, and they’re so intensive – it just can’t keep going where they just come out on YouTube, and are over like that.
I think that StarKid has to get shows up and running for a long period of time. It has to have people coming and seeing the shows, just like any other musical. So I think that next step will need to be taken, and hopefully it’ll end up good enough to where it can branch out.
And will Twisted go up on YouTube as well as being done live?
Nick: We’re not entirely sure. Just because we would like it to be a show that runs, so we’ll see how that goes.
Matt: And we’re conceiving the show in a way of – in these other shows, they’re shot like a sitcom, where there are cameras around it, but in Twisted we’re going to stage it differently.
Nick: To where people will be entering from the audience and things like that, to where it just makes it harder to film.
Matt: We’re definitely going to film it, it’s just the question of, will we want – let’s say we finish the first run, and we say, “This worked. I would like it to run again, but here are the re-writes that I’d like to make to it.” We probably wouldn’t put that filmed version on YouTube, because we’d say, “The show’s not done yet, that was a preview.” Musicals have these, they have previews.
We made this mistake with Starship, to where we did Starship, we recorded it, and then we just put it up on the internet. If we didn’t put it on the internet, we probably would have done it again and it probably would have been better, cause we would have been able to say, “here are the changes we’d like to make.” But now, since we’ve put it up once, it’s kind of stuck – set in stone, and you can’t go into it working on it any more. You could, and we plan on it – we feel like now that we’ve got a couple of years distance away from it, it would be fine to go in and change it, but it is going to be a weird thing, if people go into seeing Starship and, for example, let’s say you decided it would be a good idea to cut the bugs entirely. That would be a story change that I think we’ve talked about.
Nick: Yeah, we talked about cutting the bugs entirely, which could work, just because the show is about twice as long as it should be, and we like the Tootsie/MegaGirl story, and the bugs story, we feel, is a little bit less inspired, and doesn’t play as well. You really should only have one main romance, in something that’s as short-form as a two hour musical. So I think that we were like, “Man, Tootsie/MegaGirl is unanimously our favorite part,” so to say that it’s not even the main romance story is sort of strange.
Matt: So we’ve talked about cuts you could make, but the point is, if you ever release another version of Starship that didn’t have the bugs or something, people would watch and go “What is this?” They’d be so confused. So, with Twisted we would like it to have a longer life, and because it’s not just something like B@man that’s just a one-time thing… We feel like it has the potential to be really good, and at this point, I don’t know if I can confirm it going on YouTube because I would like it to be the kind of show that runs for longer and that everyone gets a chance to see live. [N.B.: The Twisted creative team have since confirmed that, eventually, the show will be released digitally.]
How do you feel about making the show more accessible to the public audience? Say, to theatergoers in Chicago who may not know what a StarKid is. Do you think that parodies or original content are the way to go when appealing to the public?
Nick: I think either one could work. It depends on the idea. I think Twisted is an idea that is strong enough. Everyone in the world likes Aladdin.
Matt: Or has some interaction with the Disney franchise. Everyone thinks something about Disney.
Nick: Yeah, like whether you love it or hate it, a parody of Disney is going to be great for either of those people, because I know that some people are like, “Oh, Disney is a stupid corporation that takes all the stories and turns them for babies.”
Matt: “And there’s this problem, and then there’s this problem,” and we sort of address all of those things in Twisted. But then there’s people that love Disney.
Nick: We’re definitely Disney lovers, and I think that this show has a pretty big appeal. Hopefully it’ll say something about Disney, to where people will find it interesting and funny. And it will be accessible to large groups of people. I don’t want to give away the message of it, but I hope the message has some sort of impact. So I hope that it works and is good.
In the final part of our interview with Nick and Matt, the boys answer your questions from Twitter and discuss their relationship with the StarKid fandom!
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