Well folks, a year later and I’m back. Last year I promised myself that I wouldn’t do another overly ambitious Werewolf House project once Halloween rolled around. As soon as that crisp LA fall air creeps in (nights go below 70 degrees! I love seasons) I am so entranced by the coming spooky season that completely forget what a draining ordeal these projects are. In an effort to stop my future self, I made it clear to the world that last year’s game was the final chapter in the Werewolf House saga (“the skullmination of the thrillogy”). It did not work.
Though, technically, I kept my promise.
Not heeding my own warning, I got the bright idea to look into the tools at my disposal if I were to try and make another Halloween game. After a couple days of poking around, trying out different game making programs, I realized that creating an even more interactive game for this year’s Werewolf House may not be possible in a month and a half. Even after a lot of research, there were still too many variables and unknowns (platformer? first person shooter? VR??) to know if I could even finish it by Halloween… or at least that’s what I told myself. But the truth probably is just that I didn’t yet have an idea that excited me enough to really dive in and put in the necessary effort to finish something. Given past Werewolf Houses and beyond, it’s become pretty clear that I will get something done, sleep and sanity be damned. It’ll be sloppy as hell, but it will get done. What I discovered though is that making a real, interactive game is shockingly doable, and all the resources to do so are shockingly free. And I will not-so-shockingly end up making one in the near future and hate myself for doing so.
So, no Werewolf House. Warning heeded, I was free to live my life. But I still had a sneaky little loophole up my sneaky little sleeve: I also had an unproduced Crypt Keeper musical just sitting there on my hard drive, beckoning… daring me to do something with it. Plus, since it was already written and rough demos were already recorded, how much more work could there be right? Ha ha ha yep only easy street from now on, welcome to hell.
September 16 at 12:41 PM I texted my girlfriend and now suddenly the lead of the production: “OK fuck it let’s do the crypt keeper musical for Halloween.” Oops.
So, through a technicality I was able to keep my promise to myself by instead making a musical. Simultaneously deviously clever and a huge dumbass, tricking myself into doing another exhausting project. But now, basking in the afterglow of the whole thing, I’m very glad I am so gullible and crafty all at once.
In a similar effort from last time to purge myself of this project once and for all and put a giant, sloppily written bow on the whole thing, let’s recap how this thing got made. And yep it will be hellishly long, enter at your own peril.
Getting the Show on the Road
Let’s go allll the way back to the simpler time of January, 2013. I posted on this very blog that I had begun work on my first musical: Podcast: The Musical.
Even before I started playing music I remember being enthralled by musicals. Though I’m positive that my only real exposure would have been some performances at Disneyland or Universal Studios on a family trip. There was a distinct lack of music in our household, and if we were going to do a rare family outing outing, it’d be a sporting game and definitely not any form of theater. I didn’t even see my first real concert until I became a musician and went on my own accord at 16. But even the small brushes I had with musicals via movies or theme park performances made it clear the power they had to elevate both story and music alike. I can’t place the details or locations, but I have early memories of those blissful moments where different ideas, themes (musical and textual), and characters all blended and fit together.
Eventually (skipping over many years of searching for my creative identity here for my own sanity thanks), it became clear that musicals combined my love of music and writing all in one nice little package.
But ever actually making one seemed so unattainable. I was never even able to complete my lofty teenage goal of creating some kind of concept album. My instrumental concept album fizzled in high school after only recording 5 songs… School had started after all, and I had to focus on more important things like which Tool lyric would be good for my AIM away message.
Plus, I had bought into the idea that I needed some kind of gatekeeper with authority to give me permission to somehow put this on a stage. I was right in a lot of ways, in that I had absolutely no connections to any kind of theater, actors, or really many performers of any kind. But the real breakthrough happened one day at work.
I was fresh out of college, working at a job in Long Beach that occasionally found me dressing up in my fancy $50 suit to help run an event for local mayors and councilmembers. Once I had done my duty of checking in the Covina mayor pro tem and Diamond Bar’s city clerk, I was left to my own devices for a couple hours as the event went on.
I got that jolt creative types crave—I figured out a way around those limitations, while also combining my recent love of podcasts. I’d create a podcast musical. It wouldn’t need to be on stage, hell, it wouldn’t even need a visual element at all if that was too tough to do. It could be all audio if it had to be.
With that, I was already off outlining, plotting all the songs, and just going wild with all the new possibilities. I was making a damn musical. And I was pumped, as evidenced by the announcement post on this very blog that just consisted of a creepy photo of a legal pad.
Until I wasn’t. After that initial burst of inspiration, my bad creative habits began to appear. Writing a whole bunch of songs proved to be difficult, and even after taking a lot of shortcuts—like not even writing melodies or figuring out chords for some of the later songs, just putting down lyrics with a vague meter and rhyme scheme—I would take weeks off when I hit a snag. At the end of the writing process, I ended up taking a year to come up with what amounted to roughly a 45 minute show with plenty of filler. It was more or less finished, but turns out the hard part was still in front of me.
It took me a long time to complete and I was pretty bad at it (a great combination), but at that point I at least knew at a basic level how to write songs and scripts. Now that it was time to create demos and try and get more people involved I was way out of my depth.
Like most creative endeavors, I started out with high hopes. I finally finished the script so I began recording demos. First I started putting together the music and I was elated… it was actually coming together! The instrumentals were all sounding pretty darn good! I was sure people were going to hear the demo and be so excited to help me make this, all the doors would open up to me, local theaters would lift me up on their shoulders and do all the hard work of actually putting on a production.
And then the fall… I had to start singing. What should have been obvious in hindsight suddenly became extremely clear: a musical is all about the vocal performance. So no matter how good the instrumentals were, my voice just was not up to the task to convey what I was hoping to do with these songs.
And then that final fall into the sewer: I also had to act and do some of the introductory dialogue at the beginning of the script. I was even less equipped to do this. Plus my script didn’t do me any favors: the whole thing was supposed to be about a guy making a terrible podcast, and I made it way too accurate. There were no real jokes, just a guy fumbling his way through acting like he was fumbling his way through a podcast. Leading into a guy fumbling his way through a couple songs. Which believe it or not isn’t super entertaining.
I did my absolute best to try and re-record portions dozens of times despite how annoyed my neighbors must have been, but polishing only could take it so far.
Having a strong demo was important to me not only because I was hoping it’d get people excited to help out with what I was doing (and you better believe I needed a lot of help), but the flip side was that I wanted something that gave me enough confidence to go way outside of my comfort zone to start asking strangers to join me in making this thing.
I still did go way outside of my comfort zone, posting this thing far and wide and asking for help from close friends, to acquaintances, to the only guy with theater connections I knew: someone I once met who hosted a standup show at a theater where I had one of the world’s most unsuccessful sets ever (one lady buried her head in her lap for a solid 5 minutes to avoid having to look at me say my horrible jokes).
People were extremely receptive and willing to help, but I immediately ran into a problem: I knew absolutely no performers or actors with any kind of musical theater background. My entire friend group consisted of people I had met through my college newspaper, meaning it was writers and illustrators as far as the eye could see.
And I didn’t really ever recover from that initial disappointment of that demo. It made it difficult to push ahead when the musical I heard in my head seemed to many steps away from what I could create. When none of these leads panned out, I put the musical on the shelf along with a number of other projects that never really became anything (RIP Rush Hour 4 gone but not forgotten).
Hollywood, The Town Where Dreams are Made of and Also Where My Musical Fizzles Out a Second Time
After moving to LA, my dormant musical dreams were reawakened. Yes something about that magical city of stars where it’s dry and dusty all the time and the roads are way too small for everyone to have a car but we all drive around like it’s not terrifying, it’s intoxicating.
Those performers with musical theater experience/willingness I couldn’t find anywhere? Well turns out I started dating one of them. And not long after, some friends and I began auditioning actors for a short film we were shooting. We met dozens and dozens of people who were incredibly talented and unbelievably enthusiastic about any crazy idea we threw at them.
Another lesson learned that should have been obvious in the first place, but it was evident that LA (and probably Long Beach somewhere beyond my friend circle) is stuffed silly with actors and performers looking to work on whatever material they can get their hands on.
I didn’t need to do a pitch-perfect demo (definitely not possible with my atonal warble) that matched exactly what I dreamed my musical could one day be. I only had to get people involved who wanted to help and had the skills to bring the songs to life. And I finally had a small amount of connections and experience that could help make that happen.
With all that in mind, and my confidence at an all-time high after somehow successfully completing my werewolf house game, I felt ready. Maybe it was time to revisit this damn musical…
So to truncate what happened next for comedic effect: I really dove in and polished my script to add jokes, and get it down to a more achievable 30 minutes and then immediately fell flat on my face once I hit the next step. Back on the shelf you go little podcast musical.
To expand slightly: I realized that the guitar-based rock music I had written for the show would require a full band, or at least guitar and percussion to really work if I wanted to perform the accompaniment live. But I really did not have the contacts to get a percussionist involved, and I certainly did not have the confidence to play solo.
Finders Keepers
Feeling extremely deflated after this musical falling apart a second time, I did what all good maladjusted men do and vented to my girlfriend.
As I was dumping all my insecurities on her and all the reasons why the podcast musical wouldn’t work, everything I had learned making Werewolf House kicked in. Write around your limitations. Make it simpler. Write stupider. Do it fast.
And it just sorta popped out “I should just make a dumb Crypt Keeper musical with you playing the Crypt Keeper.” Granted this was like 1 AM on a weeknight so she was probably mostly asleep by then, but she agreed.
Instead of sleeping, I accidentally spent most of the night figuring out the general story of the musical—it’s the Crypt Keeper trying to rent out a room in his crypt to unimpressed people… sure. Why not! It made sense to my brain at 3 AM, and I suppose it worked out in the end. In my slightly less sleep-deprived current state, I suppose the general concept works just fine. The Crypt Keeper is famous for his crypt after all (among other stuff I guess), so it’s easy for people to get on board with the concept right away. And it only required a couple performers, who would only have to participate for a few songs/scenes (trying to write around my previous issues of not being able to find people to participate).
Thinking back now, I also think I was tapping into my absolute favorite Crypt Keeper piece of media. Sure I love his persona as a whole, I cannot get enough of all the over-the-top puns and jokes as he introduces each story. But there is an episode where he introduces a story by performing stand up to a group of skeletons that is one of the funniest things in the world to me, because it shows him in a completely different light. Pretty much every other episode features him alone in his crypt, and though he leans heavily on the jokes, he seems completely confident in his scariness. But the skeletons are completely unresponsive to his stand up jokes, and he gets increasingly frustrated that his hacky (you bet your ass pun intended) bits aren’t landing. At first you figure it’s just because they’re skeletons, but they begin to cough and heckle him, so it really is the material after all. It’s a short clip, but long before I ever made a musical, I remember watching it over and over again, so it must have worked its way into my brain. The Crypt Keeper being frustrated that no one is amused by his horror-themed puns also taps into something I began to discover making Werewolf House. We all know the overly confident dumb guy is a well-worn comedy character (maybe one of the only comedy characters??) something that felt slightly more less well-worn was the overly confident not scary guy.
So yeah, I didn’t have the brain power to analyze it at the time, but it felt right. That night I even wrote the first spoken-word section of the musical that the Crypt Keeper does throughout to introduce stories. Not a thing he actually does in the show or comics, but it felt appropriate and seemed to be a good way to lead into the songs. Plus I was still on a Hamilton kick at the time and wanted to do a sort of Crypt Keeper version of rapping about congress or whatever.
So after I had all the pieces in place, the first draft came together alarmingly fast. Within 2 weeks I had completed a draft that was probably about 90% what ended up in the final show.
After truly years and years working on that damn podcast musical, having this new horror musical come together so quick was truly one of the high points of any creative thing I’d worked on. It truly felt like I had a superpower, I could make dozens of silly musicals in a year if I wanted! I could do a full-length one if I was feeling particularly masochistic! It felt like there was no limit.
And again for comedic effect, this one fizzled out too. At least for a bit.
A Gift Horse
To expand a bit, I had solved the previous casting roadblock with the Crypt Keeper musical—just get my girlfriend to do it all! donezo—but the performance aspect still eluded me. I had seen a previous musical that featured the cast singing along with live acoustic guitar accompaniment, which I knew I could pull off. But my newly appointed star of the show mentioned that she was much more comfortable singing along with piano accompaniment… which unfortunately is an instrument I suck at.
I put together some rough demos that I thought I might be able to pull off on keyboard after some intense practice, but that seemed daunting on top of all the other unknowns when it came to putting on a show.
So back on that cozy old shelf the musical went while I worked on other stuff.
In the meantime, a bunch of my friends had created a improv troupe called Horse Cop. They were very kind to include me in their group chat despite me being afraid and bad at pretty much all forms of live performance.
As their group chats continued to ping my phone, I was increasingly impressed with how organized they were. They were able to wrangle 8 people almost every week for improv practice, coordinate coach payments, rehearsal spaces, all things that I was terrible at doing that had stopped me from staging a musical before. I deviously thought of a way I could finally get a damn musical made and harness this power: I’d write a horse cop musical for all these jokers.
I’m realizing more and more that my default state is extreme, sinful sloth. I will do absolutely nothing if given the chance. The only way to combat that is by working on something more exciting than watching youtube drum covers while eating peanut butter pretzels (the most exciting thing I can think of). The idea of writing a horse cop musical was so exciting I still was able to write it during possibly the most hectic time in my life, when I was juggling a move, sickness, and a week long trip to damn Florida for work. I was that jackass writing a musical on a plane I was so excited to get it done.
Anyway, you know the drill at this point. I was again elated to have this seemingly perfect way to finally make a musical. But it fizzled again. Who could have seen that coming? Believe it or not, not me!!
I finished some instrumental demos and we even had a table read where the members of the group all picked parts and read. Things were going along swimmingly until a member of the group announced she would be moving to Europe for an extended amount of time and had no set date for her return. And isn’t it just my dang luck that she was one of the few members with a background in theater who was comfortable singing on stage.
Her departure was a small setback that we could have overcome, but I was quickly finding out that my genius plan of “get my friends to do all the work” wasn’t really panning out. Sure, they were organized and motivated, and happy to participate in my musical, but it was my musical. If it was going to happen, I was going to have to take the lead and frankly it was a bit selfish to think they’d pick up the slack and do all the not-fun coordinating shit while I sat back and enjoy all the sweet sweet horse cop song kudos.
So yes, the larger takeaway here was that there wasn’t really a workaround for the coordination and leadership energy I’d have to put into something if I wanted my musical to get made. Despite my best efforts I realized it wasn’t really possible to pawn it off on someone else, and plus it wasn’t very nice either, and I like to be nice to my friends if I can.
Though all that shit about respecting your friends is cool, I’d be lying if an equally big takeaway wasn’t something my Horse Cop sketch troupe friend mentioned in passing. I brought up the previous issue that had stopped the Crypt Keeper musical in its tracks: I’m not super confident in my ability to perform on piano, but my girlfriend (and I’m sure plenty others) have trouble singing over the guitar’s limited range.
“Why not just use playback?” she said. And the pattern of me not realizing a very obvious thing continues! Luckily I’m smart now and this will never happen to me again.
That simple question and realization of a new self-evident thing made a musical infinitely more attainable, even if the new Horse Cop one never came to be. I wouldn’t have to perform it live, I wouldn’t have to hire some sort of accompaniment and reveal my staggering lack of musical knowledge. I could hold onto that exciting feeling I got way back when I was recording decent demos for Podcast: The Musical without the follow-up disappointment of realizing it wasn’t possible to achieve with live instruments. Just hit play on the tracks!
So yeah, one large step back (my 3rd musical not moving forward) but also one forward with the playback thing? I guess it’s not really a thing that can be summed up with the old stepping forward and back adage? But that won’t stop me for trying. It’s like… I took one step large step back but the step back landed me right on a sick ass razor scooter that prepared me to move forward even more efficiently next time… and with style baby! Yep that makes perfect sense moving on. Good.
Crypt My Heart Out
OK wow and we’re back where we started! This is some Tarantino shit, just some fantastic, webby-worthy online writing here.
It was mid-September and once it became clear a Halloween game was out of the question, it was time to dust off the Crypt Keeper musical. We were officially doing it. While we ended up putting it on a stage and actually performing it live to friends and well-wishers, one of the appealing things about this musical was the amount of forms it could potentially take.
Even after learning lots of lessons from my many previous failures (see: all the bullshit above), staging the musical had a lot of unknowns. But I realized there were multiple backup plans if the plan to do it live fell through. We could also film it. After completing a handful of short films with friends, I knew that was a lot more doable, with a bit of help. And if things got particularly rocky and help was in short supply, I could always turn the musical into a radio play type podcast thing—complete with sound effects and ambient effects much like old-time radio shows that honestly still slap bigtime.
Pardon the tangent, but for fans of things like the Twilight Zone, Black Mirror, or any number of anthology or storytelling podcasts: right now on the internet, there are thousands and thousands of hours of high quality, well-written old-time radio shows out there completely free and ready for your consumption. Before TV was so ubiquitous (and even for a while after), radio anthology and serial shows were still huge draws for talents of the time, and most of them still hold up beautifully. The amount of wild places they can take science fiction and horror without any need for budgetary considerations (no sets! no costumes! no special effects aside from like a foley guy rattling chains or something) means that there are lots and lots of bizarre and wonderful genre stories all tucked away for you to discover. And due to the whole thing with radio being like the theater of the mind and your imagination filling a lot of this stuff in, many of them to this day, like 70+ years on, are still pretty chilling. I love imagining some boy in the 50s staying up late with a portable radio and getting that thrill of listening to something forbidden and legitimately scary. Plus the crackle of the old recording and the old-time advertisements—this episode brought to you by iron pills! Are you feeling fatigued? Put a pep in your step with pure grade American iron, in pill form!—only add to the charm and time-capsule feeling. And they are all so woefully under-appreciated even when the current culture loves anthology shows and podcasts, I think they are poised to be rediscovered, and those involved will hopefully get the modern day appreciation they deserve.
OK tangent over my apologies but let’s not pretend like this isn’t all super self indulgent anyway!
The point being, my main goal was to account for the big lesson I learned: no matter how conservative you think you’re being coordinating and collaborating with many other people to do a creative project will always take longer and be more complicated than you think. So yeah I made sure that even though we were ~*shooting for the moon (staging the play live), if things didn’t go as planned we could still be among the stars (like make a fuckin movie or musical podcast I guess).*~
Part of me was probably hoping we would end up falling back on a simpler, more familiar format. But turns out my friends have to go ahead and be mega helpful. Within the first week, my friend who works in the theater world had put me in contact with a place that had a small theater I could rent out. And they had availability Friday, November 1st, the day after Halloween.
It was too good to pass up. It was as scary and exciting as the spooking day Halloween itself, but I paid the deposit and we were locked in not only for November 1st, but a second show the Saturday after that as well.
After all that leadup, it felt odd to have the show booked. Years and years of lessons learned and shelved projects, and it was locked in with an email and a payment to the theater. It’s one of those weird moments of being an adult like… isn’t there someone out there that should be stopping me? Or telling me this is OK? Is this even allowed?
But the main takeaway from this whole thing, if there is one (yes there is I just decided) is that no such person exists. Like, that’s the platitude you hear all the time and intellectually it makes sense. Yeah sure, DIY or die, get friends together and make that thing! But that skips over the part where I actually want that person to give me permission. Gatekeepers are bad in theory, absolutely (give back the gate asshole! we want to go through it), but they are the people that give you validation. Yes, you are one of the few allowed to do this thing. Yes, you have the ability to get it done. We, the keepers of the gate, need you to make your thing.
My frequent tactic with anything like this outside of my comfort zone is to say yes when it’s less overwhelming, weeks before I actually have to do the thing, then as it rolls around be mad at myself for getting my damn self into the situation in the first place. Then once it’s all finished and done I can look back at it mostly proud but also still slightly annoyed at myself because I am a little annoying. You’d think I’d be a grown-ass man and wouldn’t have to treat my reasonable-ass goals and obligations as things I have to trick myself into doing, but here we are. Whatever I can do to get around my natural state of a truly shameful amount of laziness.
Making the Grave
We were locked in with the location, which meant that everything else needed to follow.
After alllll the nonsense (see above) I went through previous times trying to put together a cast and wrangle performers and coming up short, my girlfriend AKA the star of the show The Crypt Keeper sent out one email to some performers she had a good time with in a show she did once, and they said yes. Just like that, they were in. And it was the perfect choice—they were extremely game for anything, learned their lines super fast, and played their parts perfectly. Looking back now, I realize how badly things could have gone awry if we had brought people onboard that weren’t as up for it as our leads were. Not that anyone is obligated to put all their effort into my musical about an undead horror host from HBO in the 90s, but I felt extremely grateful that they did. I ended up feeling a little guilty that their characters were written with my previous experiences in mind, meaning that they only appeared on stage briefly because I figured it’d be hard to find people as dedicated as they were. I gave pretty much all the lines and songs to my girlfriend because she was trapped in a relationship and had no choice but to do it (but also she wanted to ok).
AAaaalmost made me want to expand the musical to give them more to do since they were so fantastic, and I know now that they’d be way onboard to do it. Almost! I’ll think about it. I probably will. And then months later I’ll be back here griping about it… sunrise, sunset… the wheels of time keep turning… wow I’m crying at how poignant my horrible blog is.
In the weeks leading up to the show, a brand new lesson became apparent: The amount of work to make something will somehow magically transform itself to fit the time frame you have to make it.
I shamefully must admit I was a damn fool, a god damned fool, but I really did go into the month of October thinking I’d be able to finish everything I needed to do for the show early and then have all the time in the world to work on extra promotional stuff for the show. Luckily I’m smart now and will never make another mistake again.
Before you lose the massive amount of respect you once had for me, I beg of you to please see it from my point of view. I was in that pre-creative endeavor honeymoon period and I couldn’t wait to get working on everything. I could be a little sneaky devil and use some time at work to organize the venue and the cast, and then in my free time at home I could work on finalizing the backing tracks.
By the beginning of October I was already finishing up the 5 backing tracks needed for the performance, riding that high that had once appeared waayyy back in the process when I was making the podcast musical. The songs were coming together! I was having a blast trying to mix together musical theater instrumentation with spooky shit. That meant that I had roughly 3 weeks to do whatever additional work I needed to do to get the musical ready! Hell, I could probably even take a few days to work on making an audio-only radio play version of the musical I had so much free time! Hell indeed…….
OK maybe not hell, things didn’t end up being as much of a crunch as all my other crazy bullshit, but as I discovered, the work to just get the musical off the ground easily filled up those 3 weeks.
The main time-sink ended up being the video accompaniment I decided to make. Partially for the audience’s sake, partially for the actors in case they forgot the lyrics, but chiefly for my own ego so no one missed all of my puns, I decided to make basic lyric videos for each of the songs in the musical. Each of the puns in the lyrics were of course highlighted in slime green and in a huge horror font. Would be a crime if anyone missed a single one! Not on my watch!!
I had made a couple very shoddy lyric videos before with Final Cut so I knew that it would be fairly tedious, but I could get it done in a few days. But then the performers brought up a good point—if a whole line of lyrics were projected up behind them, people would read ahead and ruin the timing of the jokes. Especially since I wanted to make them big and colorful and extremely noticeable. This is called hubris and it is humankind’s fatal flaw, since the beginning of time.
So, no big deal, instead I’d just have the words appear as they were sung. Normally in this process, this is when I’d stumble across some resource online that showed me exactly how to do something like this efficiently. But I looked and looked, and the only way I could figure out how make those damn words appear was by just placing them one by one in my editing timeline. I painstakingly lined up every every stanza all up with spacing that was totally eyeballed and all over the place (looking back, I’m sure at the very least there’s a better way to do this! But I certainly didn’t figure it out). And then I painstakingly and pain-enducingly timed them all out to appear in the correct rhythm of the song.
Making those videos and creating all the promotional material you see above (no graphic design experience, can you imagine?) had filled up the rest of the remaining time. Once I had finished all the required visual aides, we were only one week away from our first show, and as you can imagine, that entailed an entire week of remembering a whole lot of shit we still need to do. The right cable to connect to the projector? Order it. More skeleton bones for ambiance? Got it. Running out and buying makeup at the store to do a scary Crypt Keeper skeleton face? On it. Oh shit should be have booked an opening act? Yep they’re booked.
Last time I talked about doing Werewolf House and just a general approach to creative stuff, and one of my lessons learned was: do things fast. Maybe this experience has given me a slightly more nuanced view of trying to put a creative thing out there in the world. I still agree with the general idea of doing something fast. If you are anything like me (god I hope not) you ARE going to hit that wall in the middle of a project where it stops being exciting and starts being a slog. It’s so incredibly tempting to jump to the new, hot and fresh idea, but the cycle is bound to repeat. Doing something fast means powering through that moment as fast as you can and onto the other side which is inevitably: “Ok it’s not great, but at least it’s done. And I can see what needs to be fixed.”
I’ve learned that speedy tactic works because of whatever crazy ass string theory time dilation happens with deadlines. You may slip a bit if there’s nothing actually keeping you accountable, but the faster you go, the more you get to experience that exciting phenomenon where things creatively come together out of pure desperation. At least, it’s worked for me, I don’t know, give it a try. See you on the other side (hell).
Staging This Thing
I’m absolutely positive there’s something up there in the process that I forgot or skimmed over that actually was a whole fuckin ordeal that took days and days of my life to figure out. But either way, it was November 1st, the day after Halloween, and it was time for our first show.
After taking care of all our last minute issues (chiefly, a trip to the store for some makeup to make the Crypt Keeper face look scary), and already my first fear was assuaged. People showed up. The theater was tiny, with maybe 25 seats total, and even on this first night, a Friday night at like 8, the place was full with our friends. We lined up a fun, quick opening act of a dance troupe doing some Halloween moves, plus a short introductory video by me.
Yes, I went and gone and done even more nonsense for the show. Realizing like 2 days before the show that someone was going to have to introduce the damn thing, and that was going to be me. Hoping that I could avoid having to go up in front of a bunch of people, I made a small video intro to hopefully warm up the crowd and give them a decent idea of what kind of silly horror nonsense they were in for by creating a short montage of some of my favorite Halloween-themed music videos. This was all done in a 2 day frenzy right before we were set to go on, of course.
Using the video as an intro didn’t really work, it was instantly apparent that someone (me) had to go up in front of people and be all like “OK we are excited and now it is time for the show”, except even worse than that and coming from my mouth instead of these words online. Making it even more awkward, the tech booth for the theater was in a tiny little makeshift box at the top of a ladder at the back of the room.
I definitely didn’t make it clear in my speech but it wasn’t really practical to come up and down between each segment, so I very unprofessionally just shouted at the back of peoples’ heads what was going on from the rafters.
Finally, the show was underway and it was going swimmingly. But I must admit to you, reader, as shocking as it may sound: I fucked up. I jumped the gun on a music cue and I skipped right over a spoken-word verse. And I even got a little too excited and blacked out the lights just a few seconds too early at the end of the show. But the actors took it so in stride and were so damn professional that no one even noticed it had happened.
And just like that it was done. We went to the adjacent bar at the theater and I got to bask in the glow of remembering how everything I was hoping for got a laugh—realizing that this was really the first time I can remember that I’ve put anything I’ve written in front of a live audience. And everyone afterward really laid on the praise heavy and seemed to legitimately enjoy themselves, even the people who we didn’t personally know and came with a friend. Which really is a true test because if someone dragged me along to some amateur musical about the Crypt Keeper in a 25 seat theater you better believe it’d have to really win me over. No one has enough benefit of the doubt to spare to go into something like that optimistic! Not even Mrs Doubtfire that doesn’t make sense.
It really was such a touching moment to see all our friends gathered together, out on a weekend night, supporting this thing we made.
The best part? A week later, we got to do it alllll again. Some lessons learned (I didn’t fuck up any cues), and somehow I still did not learn that people don’t enjoy someone way up in the rafters saying things to the back of their heads to tell them that the show was about to start. It didn’t get any more charming the second time unfortunately! But it was perilous to navigate, I’m telling you. I couldn’t just go up and down at will. Why won’t you believe me. The second show really did not require anywhere near the level of scrambling of the first one. It really gave me a rare chance to go into something confidently, knowing we were practiced and prepared, and knowing that even if something went wrong, it wouldn’t be the end of the world and people still would like it.
Plus, the second time around we completely packed the place to its limit, people were standing in the back, one random guy who none of us knew showed up and paid me 3 dollars for the ticket in cash. They again laughed loud and really showered us all with praise afterward. It immediately showed me the appeal of doing a live performance—something I had never even considered. You can do live shows over and over again and continue to enjoy all that praise and acceptance you were looking for all along.
Before, whenever I released a Werewolf House, I’d have that moment of praise once. One big release day where I’d get the likes and kudos and RTs and all that nonsense I crave. Then there’s the weird post-release haze: what do I do now? What’s next? But with the musical, I got all that, but face-to-face, and twice in a row. With no limit to how many more we could do anytime we wanted that fix! It could really be infinite if we really wanted. In our small search for a theater we already came across multiple other places we could stage the thing. And all the hard stuff is wayyy behind us. Feels nice!
The Raftermath
Once I came down from the rafters, and once I came down from that sweet sweet high of successfully making a thing and putting it in front of people, I somehow decided I wasn’t done. The radio play! I couldn’t squander my opportunity to make some of my beloved old time radio. I got the actors together for a couple recording sessions, which in my mind was going to be the hardest part. Until I got to work after those recording sessions and looked at my giant pile of audio—music backing track files staged version over here, tons of different takes and alternate dialogue ideas scattered all around a number of files. As I started editing I realized this wasn’t just an extra fun thing I was doing to share with folks, nope this was a brand new project! Oops hehe! Fuck!
Plus, I immediately fucked up and forgot that whole lesson of deadlines and getting things done fast and reverted to my natural state of chipping away tiny little bits of progress over like a month and a half. Oops hehe fuck. Plus I was already pretty burnt out with all things editing and audio after all the videos and backing tracks I had been cranking out the past few months. It was extremely slow going and that is why I am typing this in god damn February after a November show.
After months of slogging through, recently I got another boost once the podcast started coming together. It all felt very rough and wasn’t exciting until all the editing had been done and sound effects were in place. Then I could put a nice mixing/mastering sheen over everything and it finally felt like a real thing that eventually go up in front of people. One final boost to get me through the final tedious portion of doing one more sound design pass. Adding some fancy panning, maybe a little reverb here and there to make things feel far away aaaand here we are. After all that. We made it.
In the meantime, my friends Connor and Molly were absolute gems and took it upon themselves to edit together the footage they shot at our second live show into an absolutely beautiful video. They even fixed the formatting on my terrible lyrics videos and put them as sing-along subtitles at the bottom. And I KNOW that’s not easy to do! Or maybe it is for them because they’re smart. Either way my heart is full.
And I think that may bring us to today. You made it to the end of this thing what the fuck?? If you are really out there and truly exist, then I have a treat for you. We may not be releasing it far and wide, but I will graciously give you the hot hot link to see the video of the performance I have told you so much about. Enjoy.
And the thing that we definitely ARE sharing wide is the podcast. You can find it on all your favorite platforms including Spotify and Apple Podcasts. I’m a little bit scared to bust out of that nice little bubble I was living in for a long time where the musical was a huge success—we performed it in front of friends and it did as well as it possibly could have. Now it’s going out there into the world. But if we’ve learned one thing from the Crypt Keeper himself it’s that being scared is fun and funny, which means I’m the funniest fuckin guy in town.
Anyway, I am extremely looking forward to doing something totally different and not at all related to the Crypt Keeper musical next. The only problem is, this musical utilized pretty much all my skills and burned me out on pretty much anything I know how do to… music, scriptwriting, shitty video editing… Now I just have to figure out what the hell I’m doing next. Maybe I’ll try to make a game after all.
So OK how to wrap this up what did we learn? Work always fits itself to the time frame you give it. People are surprisingly game to support your creative endeavors. Gatekeepers bad, doing your own thing good.
Looks like… in the game Gatekeepers vs Crypt Keepers, I guess this time… the crypt keepers won. Wrapping up this fucking thing quickly so people don’t take the time to think about how this doesn’t make sense. Talk to you next time one of these dumbass things! So long chumps, love ya
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