On Monday (9/18), Jon Gutwillig and Aron Magner of the Disco Biscuits were four hours into a Zoom session with author Nicholas Schmidle, writing music for their new theater show, The Very Moon: A Steampunk Musical, when they asked for my advice about the show’s finale. “We need you to help us figure out the ending,” said Schmidle, from his home in London. Gutwillig and Magner were at their hotel in Austin, TX, preparing to resume the Biscuits’ fall tour.
The thing is, although they were joking, they described their creative process as remarkably open and collaborative, incorporating a range of suggestions from major Broadway producers to aspiring teenage playwrights who attended the May workshop. The trio has ust announced the return of their much-anticipated show to the FringeArts Theater in Philadelphia from January 17-20, 2024.
Adapted from Gutwillig’s seminal 1999 “Hot Air Balloon” rock opera, The Very Moon is an “epic tale about mastering flight, defying tyranny, and the transcendent power of love and creativity.” Following up an initial workshop earlier this year in Philadelphia, an admittedly barebones affair that wildly exceeded expectations and solidified the project’s potential of an extended future as a theatrical production, The Very Moon is back with multiple directors, a band, and even an Indiegogo campaign.
During our conversation, which has been edited for clarity and length, the trio discussed their hopes for the January showings and their overall goals, while Jon and Aron described the experience of watching others sing their own songs, and considered how creating The Very Moon has influenced them as performers.
How did the results of the last workshop in May compare to your overall vision going into the workshop?
Aron: Beyond what any of us kind of expected, anticipated, or imagined. Each of us had our own moments of introspection and, you know, kind of tears of happiness. The first time that we heard the cast sing the songs and it was no longer me, Jon, or Nick crooning around a small little piano. We were like, Oh, that’s powerful. That’s what motivated us to easily recommit to each other, to do another iteration of this show. It’s why Jon and I have been sitting here on our two days off in Austin with Nick on Zoom when it’s gorgeous outside in Austin and we’re totally cool sitting here throwing out ideas to each other for the last four fucking hours. We’re proud of it and still have that excitement despite the amount of time energy and money that’s required to make this bigger and better.
Nick: In terms of our own expectations of how good this show can be, that ceiling has been lifted. We’ve spent four hours reworking a song that was really good to begin with and didn’t really feel like it necessarily needed to be reworked. But once you start breaking it apart you’re like, Damn, this song can be extraordinarily good.
Are there any specific changes fans can expect?
Nick: We have two incredible directors this time, and that’s already brought a level of professionalism and discipline to the production. Also, we’ll have an extra ten days to rehearse, which will make a huge difference for the actors. We are hiring a lighting designer and there will be new songs and the story has been tweaked and improved. And there’s a band, so it’ll be at least a piano, drummer, and bassist. We’re working out the full instrumentation at the moment.
Are the co-directors in addition to (musical director) Alex Bechtel? Is he still involved?
Nick: Alex is still the music director. Our two co-directors, Eva Steinmetz and Rebecca Wright, will sort of sit atop the food chain and they’ve all worked together. Alex and Eva just finished putting on a play up in the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival.
Jon and Aron, at the end of the workshop you both appeared on stage to perform the instrumental coda (Flight) from “Hot Air Balloon”. Will you be performing again?
Jon: We’re not sure yet. It comes down to schedules. But we’re very open-minded to the idea.
Nick: The band will be –
Jon: The guys we’re getting are all monsters so, we’ll see if we can figure out a way to play with them because it’d be fun.
Are these musicians from the theater world? Or names jam-band fans would recognize?
Jon: I think jam-band fans would recognize them for sure.
Did you take any ideas or inspiration from the fans following the initial workshop?
Nick: (laughs) I got this extremely insightful email from a twelve-year-old girl who came with her parents to watch the show that I’ve read and reread to try and tap into that sense of childish wonderment.
Aron: The thing that stuck out the most to me during the Q and A was that fans were thinking kind of the same things that we had been thinking…but had been unable to verbalize. It was nice hearing it spoken aloud. Like, “Is the next iteration going to have a band?” And, “Are you guys going to take any of these songs and bring them over into the Disco Biscuit thing?” That was the motivation we needed to very quickly step “Falling” up, you know, which it did like two weeks later at its debut in Iceland.
Talk about the process of adapting “Falling” into a Biscuits song.
Jon: “Falling” was very Biscuit-y to begin with. The three of us wrote it in a Very Moon session. So it was a Very Moon song. But in the back of my mind, I was like, “Well, if the Very Moon doesn’t want this song, it’s a Biscuits song.” Getting it from the musical to being a Biscuits song is all about reps. If we’re playing the song frequently enough, everybody in the band gets very comfortable with what they’re supposed to do, they start to relax and then we can get inspired in different sections. We really got that with “Falling” – I mean, the vocal harmonies are great, the way that the bassline mixes in with the changes is really good, and the beat’s nice. It’s because the Biscuits are playing all the time and that song has been getting reps. That’s the real key.
Do you guys envision any other songs from The Very Moon making its way over to the Biscuits catalog?
Jon: It’s going to happen naturally but we haven’t decided which ones yet. We’ve messed around with a couple. But we have a lot of new just straight-up Biscuit songs too. We have so much new music right now we can’t rotate it all.
You made some big changes from the original Hot Air Balloon. Arguably the biggest was the reimagining of Morris Mulberry as a young female character, Mabel Mulberry. What was the impetus for that decision?
Jon: We were trying to decide how this can be a fun piece of visual art as well as audio art, and it seemed like it would be cool to have a child’s perspective. So we just decided to go for it. In the original “Hot Air Balloon”, Mulberry is kind of like a mentor, an enabling character. And Mabel Mulberry is ironically a mentor and enabling character still. So we could keep the thematic part of the character, but get, visually and sonically, a very different voice.
You’re running an Indiegogo campaign and you’re a little more than halfway to the goal of $50,000. What’s that been like, crowd-sourced funding, and what do you guys specifically hope to achieve with those funds?
Nick: We’ve scaled up our ambitions – from a five-day workshop with two showings at the end to a two-week workshop with four performances at the end. Add in the cost for our directors, lighting designer, and the venue. All of a sudden, the whole package became significantly more expensive and we knew we couldn’t cover it all with ticket sales. Personally, I was a little uneasy about asking people for money but that unease was actually tempered by the fact that I believe in this, so it was far less awkward to ask people than I thought it would have been. It’s less of a pitch for money and more of us asking for collaborators if that makes sense.
Aron: We had a meeting with a philanthropist a few months ago. We went in hoping he would be a producer. That didn’t pan out, which is fine, because he’s still a supporter, a believer, and a cheerleader, but he was the one who suggested taking it to the people, if you will. His reasoning was like, You guys are so passionate about what you’re doing and people want to latch on to that. People want to be part of something honest and see the artists they like being real. So this is us pretty fully exposed, right? We’ve never written a musical before. We’re not even playing our instruments. We’re taking this chance for no reason other than the purity of the act, you know?
Jon, before the first workshop, you mentioned looking forward to experiencing your music as an audience member for the first time. How was it?
Jon: Very powerful and unyielding.
Has the experience influenced you as a performer?
Jon: I see the music a little bit better from the perspective of the fan.
What is the ultimate goal for The Very Moon as a theatrical production?
Nick: Broadway. But we don’t have total control of that. All we can do is to write the best musical we can. That said, we’re confident in the story, and feel like we have something special. Now we’re trying to find the right producing partner to help us get there.
Nick, you’ve been a fan of the Biscuits for over twenty years at this point. What has the experience of working and co-writing material with Jon and Aron been like?
Nick: I took this very influential musical theory class in college and I feel like I’m taking that class all over again – I’m learning how music works with people whom I admire and have the highest amount of respect for as creators of music. So it’s been humbling, but also sort of buoying, as a creator, to be making something with them.
What have you heard from people in the theater world?
Jon: We’ve had quite a few conversations with people who’ve seen the videos and are taking the project seriously. People seem to be accepting that there is something worth discussing with this play. We’re almost at the point where we could partner up with one of them and do something really big. But the whole point of this second workshop is to really flesh things out and take this intimate moment with the music and the crowd and the performers, where everything is really still clay, and get a chance to work everything over a little bit. That’s kind of what we’re going to do in January. The question is, can we get the show to a point where it’s just undeniable that whoever’s on the other side of the call would want to produce this show.
Photos by Mike Prince
