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.
Next: The Langs talk Kickstarter and casting…
Would you consider redoing one of your past shows – one of the non-copyrighted ones – with a different cast from the original production?
Nick: We’ve always wanted redo Me and My Dick. I think we’ve been talking about that for years. And we’re looking to do that soon as well.
Matt: Yeah, you can change the cast up, as long as it still works.
Nick: We’d be open to changing the cast.
Matt: I’d say that a show would have to be really, really good to be an avenue for an entirely new cast, given the situation we’re currently in. But it’s like, these particular StarKid actors — When our shows first came out, they were all new, unknown to the audience. I think that any actor can do a good job.
When did you realize that people were actually attached not just for the Harry Potter parody, but to your group as its own entity? When did you first notice that StarKid was the product gaining support from fans?
Nick: We just put the name StarKid on it because we needed a company name. It was easier to say StarKid than it was to say an entire list of people. But I don’t really know when we started to realize that people liked StarKid…
Matt: I don’t remember either.
Nick: Maybe there was fan-art, or maybe somebody drew Rumbleroar or something. We have a painting that someone gave us of the original StarKid logo that we sort of slapped together. So maybe that.
For Twisted you’ve done something that StarKid Productions has never done before, which is to put up a Kickstarter to raise money for putting on the show. What inspired you to make that choice?
Nick: Well, the other writer and collaborator on Twisted is Eric Kahn Gale, and the Kickstarter was his idea.
Matt: Me and Nick have been resistant to Kickstarter for a long time, because it’s tough… I kind of feel bad about pre-selling a show. I don’t know if I like that. But this time around, we were like “It’s a necessity.” Because we don’t have the money to do it. We could get away with it, if we spend all of our money.
Nick: Like, all of our life savings. If we spent all of our life savings right now we could probably pull off the show, in, like, a jankity way.
Matt: See, shows are so expensive.
Nick: Really expensive. I think the Kickstarter is set at $35,000 and that’s not even the full budget of the show.
Matt: We’re covering the rest of the budget because we don’t feel comfortable setting it any higher. [N.B.: The Twisted Kickstarter has now far surpassed this initial goal.]
Nick: Each of us – me, Matt, and Eric – are basically covering the rest of the budget with our own money. StarKid as a company, we’ve been gradually losing money, because the past two shows have been free shows, the Very Potter show and the B@man show. So I think that with this one, we needed – if we wanted it to be of a good enough calibre and to pay the actors a fair amount, we’re going to need some outside help.
Fans might not often think in the sense of StarKid being a company, and the money involved, because the YouTube content is free or because the tickets to past shows have been free. This is the first time that there’s been a lot of transparency on how much it will cost to put on the show.
One of the Kickstarter’s backer rewards is a ticket to the show, which is great. But will people be able to buy tickets to this publicly, as well as through Kickstarter?
Nick: Yeah, I sure hope so. I’m not entirely sure how Eric has the Kickstarter set up, but hopefully it’ll be something to where you can do it on Kickstarter – basically pre-buying your ticket before they actually go on sale – and then there will hopefully be tickets. I don’t think they’ll sell out on Kickstarter. [N.B.: The ticket option on Kickstarter has since been maxed out, leaving plenty for general sale.]
The budget mentions airfares for bringing in cast members from New York and LA. Can you reveal who any of those people might be?
Nick: Well, I guess we can say A.J.
He’s writing the music – is he going to spend the run of the show with you in Chicago?
Matt: Hopefully, yes. We’re still working with him on whether he’s going to be in the show or not, as an actor. We really, really, really, want him to be in the show. But he’s not quite 100% certain if he can do the songs and be in the show.
Nick: So, that’s one of the main casting issues that we’re having right now. And then we’re going to bring in some new people.
Matt: Really, just one new person.
Nick: Yeah, one person. For the StarKids, it would mean nothing to talk about the new person… Yet. But I think that when the people see this new person they’re really going to love ’em.
Basically, everyone in the StarKid shows are people that we worked with in college. This person is extremely talented and we have been trying to work with them for a long time, and we’ve got a role that this person is going to be really great at.
Have you ever considered producing theater that wasn’t something that you’ve written, an existing musical or play? Or would you only write from scratch?
Nick: Stuff that we would be involved in – we’re only going to do stuff that we would write.
Matt: Other people may some day want to do existing musicals, but as far as we’d be concerned? We’d probably just stick to stuff that we write, original stuff.
Nick: Original or parody things.
The StarKid shows always have a lot of heart, and as we discussed, AVPSY was pretty heavy, but would you ever write a show that wasn’t outright comedy, something more dramatic?
Matt: With the musicals and with StarKid, I don’t think we would. But as for other projects, we’d have no problem doing that. We’ve got a comic that’s going to come out in the summer which isn’t just a goofball comedy. It’s more mystery/adventure with comedic elements. That’s something we’ve written that is not just a comedy. But in terms of StarKid musicals? I think that they’ll always be comedies.
Nick: Yeah, I think that people want something when they go to the StarKid musicals, so I think we’re always going to try and deliver that.
Matt: If we ever did something else — who knows, if we have a genius idea for a play, which probably won’t happen – we would probably do it out side of the StarKid brand name. Just to avoid confusion with people.
Nick: For example, The Bully Book wasn’t even really a StarKid thing. It was just a book that we were publicizing because Eric had done it. And I know people got confused when they read that book – they were like, “This isn’t funny!” So we always try to not have it be confusing, especially since we’re such a small company – we just want a real clear image of what we’re trying to put out there.
Next: ‘Quicksand Jack’ and ‘our biggest idea that we can’t talk about’…
Let’s talk about that comic, Quicksand Jack. How are you planning to release it? As an e-book, or is it getting printed? Will it be in bookstores?
Nick: As of right now, we’re probably just going to release it as an e-book – a digital download. I don’t really think we have the capacity to release a graphic novel in a mass amount.
Matt: We may find some way to print them – it may be possible, but I don’t see them being in bookstores, because you’d have to have a real publisher to do that. Unless some publisher gets in contact with us and says, “Hey, I’d like to publish this,” it won’t be in bookstores.
You mentioned The Bully Book, which had a DIY e-book publication that received enough support and feedback to get noticed by a publisher.
Nick: Yeah, and if there’s success with Quicksand Jack, then maybe we’ll get picked up by a comic publisher and distributor.
When are you hoping to release it?
Nick: We’re hoping sometime this summer. It’s sort of tough, because we keep on pushing the comic back because of various other projects, like AVPSY and Twisted. The graphic novel is something that we really have been wanting to do for a long time, and we sort of just keep pushing it back because of our obligations to the StarKid projects. But hopefully it’ll come out this summer. Ideally we’d like to get the first couple of issues out before the movie The Lone Ranger comes out.
Matt: This always happens to us! Whenever we decide to do a story, something else pops up that’s just like it.
Nick: Yeah!
Matt: Although Quicksand Jack isn’t anything like The Lone Ranger, or Django for that matter, it just so happens that there’s a cowboy in it. In the trailer for Quicksand Jack, you don’t see the tiniest glimpse of really what the comic is about, basically because only the first issue is drawn. So we could only show a few pictures in the trailer. But it’s going to be very different, and hopefully very cool.
Nick: Yeah, we just for sure wanted to get at least the first issue out before that movie comes out – just so people don’t go, “Oh, they were just copying off of this cowboy thing!” Quicksand Jack is an idea that we made up when we were 13 years old. And we’ve been working on it for about 14 years.
Is there anything you can tell us about the concept?
Nick: The concept is that there is a cowboy type character named Quicksand Jack and he’s sort of mysterious. He has some sort of strange powers and you don’t know exactly why.
Matt: Or where he got them. That’s one of the big mysteries of the comic. Finding out what is and who is Quicksand Jack. And then basically, Quicksand travels to this town called Brimstone that has this mine – it’s a mining town – and there’s a constant string of deaths. Miners dying down in the mines. And people say that they’re haunted.
Nick: People are seeing things down in the mines and they’re dying. And the story picks up following a girl that lives in the town named Maud – everybody messes up her name and calls her Mud. So Mud starts on this adventure where she’s trying to figure out what’s going on in the mines.
Matt: She meets Quicksand Jack and the comic is then uncovering this mystery of what’s going on.
Nick: And she has to also uncover this mystery of who is this guy, who is Quicksand Jack?
Matt: So it’s got a lot of supernatural and mystery elements.
Nick: And hopefully a little bit of romance. We’ll see.
Matt: We tried to make all the bad guys as funny as possible.
Nick: There will be some violence though, which I’m hoping won’t throw people off too much.
Matt: It’s not too violent!
Nick: It’s not too violent. We’re not trying to be very violent. But there are gun fights – there’s some shooting – like “Draw!” People will like it, I hope.
Matt: Yeah. I like it. It’s my favorite part.
Who are the artists? Is it your sister?
Nick: Yeah, it’s our sisters – Jen Lang, and her wife is Teia Smith. we call them our sisters but it’s really our sister and our sister’s wife and they are doing the art.
Did you guys all collaborate as kids? How long have you been working as a family?
Nick: Yeah, this’ll be the first thing that we actually finish together. But we have worked on things in the past. When we were small kids, it was either I was working on something with Matt or I was working on something with Jen, but very rarely did we all three work together.
Is it just three of you? Any other brothers and sisters?
Nick: No, just the three of us.
Have you always written for a lot of different mediums? Did you always intend to write for theater? Was that your original plan?
Nick: No! No, originally we wanted to make movies. When we were kids, we were like, “We for sure are going to grow up and make the Dragon Ball Z movie. For sure.”
Matt: But it didn’t work out that way. So yeah, we never thought we’d write for theater. But that’s sort of mainly what we do now, so getting different kinds of stories in different mediums out there will be good I think.
Nick: Yeah. We’ve got ideas for different things. Like, a cartoon show, movie stuff… Our biggest idea that we can’t talk about is an idea for a cartoon show.
Matt: That may never happen. But we’ll see.
Nick: It might happen – probably not. But maybe. We took it to the Disney Channel and they said no.
Matt: Yeah, they didn’t want it. It was too violent.
Nick: They said, “Our channel is for much smaller children.”
Next: After ‘Twisted’ comes… ?
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!