By
Molly Morrow
Class of 2024, Student Managing Editor, College Editorial Team
Scott Elmegreen calls himself a storyteller. He credits his successful musical theater writing career to a simple continuation of childhood interests: when he was five years old, he loved to write stories, and though his methods have evolved substantially, that basic desire motivates his career thirty years later.
A writer and composer, Elmegreen has achieved notable success in projects like “Straight,” a play about individuals grappling with modern relationships, sexuality and acceptance. “Straight” premiered Off-Broadway in 2016, has played around the world, and is currently in filming for a movie.
He began lecturing at UChicago in Winter 2020, teaching three musical theater courses in the Theater and Performance Studies (TAPS) department: Introduction to Musical Theater Writing, Songwriting for Musical Theater, and Advanced Musical Theater Writing. He also leads a musical theater cohort that meets weekly for students who want to pursue individual projects year-round and runs UCVision, an annual songwriting contest for students.
In between his course instruction, weekly cohort meetings, and work for his many productions premiering in 2023, Elmegreen sat down with the College to discuss his work at UChicago and his musical theater career. This interview transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
What does your day-to-day schedule look like at UChicago, and what do you enjoy most about teaching at the College?
In terms of my day-to-day, I teach classes twice a week, hold office hours, and run the weekly musical theater cohort. I greatly enjoy the puzzle of figuring out new plots and stories and unraveling characters [in student work]. It’s entirely similar to the professional process, and it’s exciting to be able to do so as often as these courses allow. I also enjoy supporting what students are doing through the various TAPS-related RSOs, so when students are in shows I try to see them.
The TAPS department gives its lecturers a high degree of freedom in terms of creativity to explore the topics they are interested in, which is something I value. When I arrived at UChicago, the university was looking to expand its musical theater offerings, and it has been exciting to see that embraced in initiatives such as the musical theater cohort and the UCVision Song Contest.
The success of TAPS courses is often reliant on inspiring confidence in students who may not have much experience in theater writing, or who may not have shared their writing before. How do you create a welcoming and collaborative environment for students to share work that may be quite private or personal?
I have thought a lot about this because it’s critical to the success of these courses. I’m certainly mindful of the fact that musical theater writing is a niche career, and I’m always looking to help students develop a transferable skill set. There is not a more universally important skill to hone as an undergraduate than the ability to earnestly solicit honest feedback and eagerly approach the process of creation iteratively as opposed to waiting for lightning to strike. I think individuals’ careers are determined by these skills.
Especially with the UChicago community, which is so polymathic and inspiring, everyone here is used to being given a concrete set of things to tackle, and the creative process is not like that. The first part of the approach is to emphasize that we are all on the same team. Honest feedback – even critical feedback – is more useful than anything else. It’s also about taking our approach to writing outside of the subjective and distilling a career’s worth of intuition into navigable principles. That’s why I focus so much on the structure of storytelling in my courses.
Do you think the notion that art has no concrete structure or guidelines is a common misconception about musical theater writing?
Yes, I think it’s a misconception that art is entirely ineffable and that it is impossible to put your finger on what works and what doesn’t. I think it’s entirely possible; the challenge is being able to articulate it.
In the advanced course, the goal is for each student to write a full-length musical over the course of the quarter. It’s a thrillingly impossible task, and I acknowledge at the beginning of the course that we are going to fail at it. To demystify the process, I break [the musical structure] down into its component parts and focus on storytelling structure and irony, which generally creates an exciting culture of creativity.
It’s a vulnerable process, exploring parts of yourself you may not have explored otherwise. Then, you add music on top of it, which is about the most vulnerable art imaginable, but that’s the superpower of using music to tell stories. I think through these courses, students come to trust each other quite powerfully, and that turns a vulnerable process into an empowering one.
One of your first major projects was “COLLEGE The Musical,” a show you wrote about the college experience in 2005. Could you speak about your inspiration for that and how you got it produced as a college student?
From my coursework and co-curricular involvements, I learned a lot about the importance of high stakes in writing. I think the college experience feels like incredibly high stakes, even though nothing about it is actually life-or-death. That concept of characters breaking into song for what they feel is a good reason but actually isn’t felt very promising.
I had initially planned to be a political science major in college, but I found myself putting all of my energy into extracurricular theater instead of my political science and economics courses, and I came to the conclusion that with my skill set, my path to creating meaningful change in the world must be through musical theater writing.
Drew Fornarola and I wrote this show as undergraduates and decided to try taking the show to New York. We literally cold-called every casting director in New York. We ended up getting in contact with Mark Simon, a casting director for Hal Prince, who directed Broadway shows like “Phantom of the Opera.” He was able to get a cast of Broadway stars to do a reading of it.
Then, similarly, we waited by the stage doors of Broadway shows until the music directors came out and asked them to direct our reading. We ended up getting the music director of “Avenue Q” to work with us. We put it up at the Princeton Club of New York. It was this weird attention-grabbing idea, and I think producers came because they had never seen anything like it before. We got a commission from Robyn Goodman, the producer of “Avenue Q,” and that was what jump-started our career.
It’s very intimidating that there’s not a clear path [in musical theater], but everyone in the industry is eager to find new talent. The people that are in the position to do so are so busy that they can’t go out and look for it, so it’s up to the new talent to get into the room with these people. People will give you the benefit of the doubt until you prove them wrong.
What upcoming projects are you involved in?
During COVID, everything was put on ice, so there’s a lot opening all at once. I have a musical opening in October at the Phoenix Theatre Company called “Tiananmen,” a sung-through epic musical about the Tiananmen Square protests written with my longtime collaborator Drew Fornarola as well as Wu’er Kaixi, one of the major leaders of the protest. My play “Straight” is gearing up for a West End production, along with my new play called “Expecting." My musical “Hip Hop Cinderella,” which I co-wrote with “A Strange Loop” music director Rona Siddiqui, is also opening Off-Broadway in February. Additionally, students from my songwriting class and across campus will be performing in UChicago’s third annual UCVision song contest coming up in March.