Little Did I Know: how a Broadway-aiming musical became a hit podcast
“Nothing can replace the thrill of a great musical live on stage,” the Broadway producer Mitchell Maxwell said. “Nothing.”
But stage doors are forbidden now and liveness unavailable, so Mitchell has provided an alternative: Little Did I Know, a four-hour book musical podcast. The first three episodes were released on Apple at the end of March. The following six are appearing on subsequent Tuesday evenings.
Little Did I Know didn’t aim for the ears, not at first. Six years ago, Maxwell contacted the three-time Tony award-winning composer Doug Besterman with the idea that he should adapt Maxwell’s novel, also called Little Did I Know. Set in 1976, it tells the semi-autobiographical story of Sam August, a recent college graduate who ropes his friends into reopening a dilapidated summer stock theater in Massachusetts. Sam’s idea of a breezy season: Hair, Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Me Nobody Knows. “Go ahead and say I’m crazy,” Sam sings in his I Want song, “Go ahead and say I’m dumb.”
Besterman teamed with lyricists: Oscar and Grammy winner Dean Pitchford and Marcy Heisler. They developed the show, first at Tufts University, Maxwell’s alma mater, then at a regional theater. But like many Broadway-aimed musicals, it fell short of its target. Commercial producers couldn’t see a path forward. About a year ago, Mitchell suggested a new route. A podcast could bring the musical to the public and maybe generate enough interest to make a stage production possible.
At first, Besterman flinched. “I thought, oh, we’re talking about doing a radio play of the musical. And that didn’t interest me,” he said, speaking from the 500 sq ft Manhattan studio that he shares with his fiancee. “I felt like minus the live experience, it just wouldn’t be fun.” But Maxwell and Lou Aronica, who co-wrote the musical’s book, sold him on the podcast form and the freedoms it allowed and he agreed.
The musical that arrives in your earbuds has undergone some alterations. It doubled in length, now running more than four hours. There are twice as many songs and the songs do different work. “The arc is much longer,” Lesli Margherita, one of the cast members explained. “An 11 o’clock number is maybe the 3 o’clock number.”
Scenes changed and characters changed, and Besterman and his colleagues learned to let the book drive narrative and convey setting, with songs supplying emotional accents. Besterman hesitated to describe those songs as “70s pastiche”.
“But it definitely has the feel of 70s music,” he said.
Marlo Hunter signed on as director last May. She has a background developing new musicals, but preparing a podcast involved what she described as a lengthy learning curve. “It’s really a very different rhythm and different structure than a musical would be,” she said. She was speaking from her in-laws’ house, where she had fled with her husband, a five-year-old and a seven-weekold. (“I’m so tired right now,” she said.)
The producers stacked the cast with Broadway veterans such as Margherita and Patrick Page, who live in New York, and YouTube stars like Kurt
Hugo Schneider and Sam Tsui, who don’t. Coordinating everyone’s availability became a barely solvable geometry problem. The cast finally met in October, at Threshold Recording Studios, and while a musical might rehearse for weeks, this one rehearsed for half a day.
Besterman and the orchestrator, Mike Morrison, brought in temporary tracks, flexible enough that tempos could be changed in the room, which they were. The cast recorded 23 songs (OK, a bunch of them were reprises) in four days. “It was a marathon,” Margherita said. She was sheltering in her New York apartment, a country away from her husband in LA.
Hunter kept the schedule tight. “We knew that if we didn’t get the background harmony for this song by 4.30, we were not getting it,” Besterman said. And she spent much of the recording sessions with her eyes closed. “I didn’t look at an actor in four days, because I knew I couldn’t rely on watching their performance,” Hunter said. “I had to just trust my ear.”
A long postproduction process began, stretching late into Hunter’s pregnancy – “I kept saying to her, don’t you need to be having the baby right now?” Besterman said – and continuing postpartum. Vocals were mastered, a 10-piece band recorded, dialogue refined. “I was almost afraid to listen to it,” Margherita said. “But it was really fascinating.” Besterman said he hoped that the musical theater community embraced the show, or at least the form it takes.
Several of the creators described Little Did I Know to me as the first podcast musical, which it isn’t. The show follows earlier entrants like 36 Questions and Loveville High and John Cameron Mitchell’s Homunculus, which take a more experimental approach to medium and structure. But Little Did I Know does benefit, however unfortunately, from good, virusassisted timing. “We’re now living in a time when Broadway and all live theater has been put on a hiatus. Little Did I Know fills a need,” Maxwell said.
“It’s horrible to think it, but yes, the thought has crossed our minds for sure,” Margherita said. “It breaks my heart that theater will probably be the last to come back because it’s just groups of people together in one place. I think this may have to be a new way to go. And I’m thrilled to be able to offer it at all.”