Het verhaal achter Panic! The Musical

Onlangs werd er bekend gemaakt dat er gewerkt wordt aan PANIC! The Musical, een musical die gebaseerd is op de muziek van Panic! At The Disco. Deze onafhankelijke productie wordt ontwikkeld door een klein creatief team in New York City. De musical bevat nummers van alle studioalbums die de band heeft uitgebracht.

Inmiddels zijn de makers, Alexis Acar en Christina Rose Sabia, dieper ingegaan op het verhaal van de musical in een interview met PropertyOfZack. Check hieronder wat de dames vertelden.

In some regards, Panic! The Musical has existed in some way, shape or form since Alexis Acar first clicked play on a rough early demo of “Lying Is the Most Fun a Girl Can Have” on Panic! At the Disco’s MySpace page. She was 13; Panic! At the Disco was a newly no-longer blink-182 cover band out of Las Vegas. But it really wasn’t until last summer, when Acar joked around about how the always-changing stylings of Panic! (for those keeping score at home: vaudevillian antics on A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out, Beatles worship on Pretty. Odd., artful pop since then) would make for a bona fide musical that the joke seemed less like a funny passing thought than a straight-faced good idea. And thus Panic! The Musical (henceforth referred to as P!TM for my own sanity and the sake of Word not going berserk on my errant punctuation) started becoming a thing.

Even as a longtime Panic! fan, Acar’s background skews less alternative and more theatrical. She started on a professional opera track, and always boasted a passion for theater. That’s the intersection where her love for Panic! crosses her love for Broadway; Panic! too refuse point-blank to relinquish their own bombastic theatrical leanings.

“Their music is theatrical, especially on Fever, and they incorporate musical theater into alternative music,” Acar explains, “And to capture that, we have to be as creative and as passionate as the band is about their own music. Every single line of their lyrics is intentional, and we want to portray the same eccentricity and uniqueness. We want fans to leave inspired.”

It’s funny, because at first glance, Acar and P!TM’s book writer, Christina Rose Sabia, don’t exactly look like Rodgers and Hammerstein — Christina Rose Sabia draws from a musician’s perspective instead of a traditionalist theater one, saying that she brought “a more rock-inspired” vision to P!TM. “I’m hoping we open up the demographic,” she says, “I want to see a hard rocker sitting in the front row and feeling the same magic as they would at a concert.”

And, honestly? Alexis Acar and Christina Rose Sabia are not Rodgers and Hammerstein, and for P!TM’s prospective success, that’s a good thing. The duo say they try to stay away from Broadway clichés, making P!TM “something raw.” Acar is also the first to admit that Panic! isn’t about to be the first musical to draw directly from a band’s work: for the less theatrically knowledgeable, Broadway sports a storied history of the jukebox musical. But the self-professed dynamic duo planned to keep P!TM authentic.

Of course, one of the biggest obstacles that comes with writing a musical with someone else’s songs is, well, getting to use that someone else’s songs legally. While Acar isn’t at liberty to say much about securing rights to use Panic’s back catalog (for obvious reasons), she says that while it’s been a long road, it’s something they’ve been working diligently on. “We’ve made major steps,” she promises.

Much like the rights, funding for the musical (always pricy ventures) isn’t a huge concern for the brain trust behind P!TM. Despite an Indiegogo campaign that struggled to get off the ground, Acar says that crowdfunding was never meant as P!TM’s major source of funding. And, again like the rights, there’s not much she could disclose about funding just yet. “The Indiegogo is something we did before the exposure,” she explains. “We can’t discuss now, but we have avenues, and it’s not a big concern.”

That unexpected exposure thrust P!TM into the spotlight (pun fully and wholeheartedly intended) before the duo expected the musical to gain much buzz, especially for a project that’s still in its infancy phase. “I actually remember it happening,” Acar recalls, “It was just sort of everywhere, and we were out of our minds, jumping up and down. It definitely encouraged us.”

As with any story that picks up traction on the Web, the media buzz came with its fair share of naysayers who scoffed at the idea or predicted an imminent slap from a cease and desist letter from the Panic! camp. But Acar says the creative team behind P!TM stays motivated in the face of negative energy.

“If something is worth doing, there are going to be haters,” Acar says. “We’re getting a lot of reactions that are good, and some that aren’t.”

Whatever backlash P!TM has met hasn’t deterred the project in the slightest. The musical is fully cast, and Acar says they have an industry workshop in June. The goal — as has been the standard for every playwright since roughly the beginning of time — is getting P!TM to Broadway, but that’s not where the dream stops in the slightest.

“I don’t want to limit it,” Acar says. “I could see it going to film, or maybe a tour. Broadway is definitely our goal, but we think it can do so much more, too.”