Weeks away from their World Premiere at A.C.T. in San Francisco, and five years after the world shifted beneath their feet, the creative trio behind CO-FOUNDERS The Musical is still breaking rules, pushing boundaries and remixing the theatrical form. Beau Lewis, Adesha Adefela and Ryan Nicole Austin— the Bay Area-based team known as “BAR” — are living proof that misfits with a mission can change the game.
Pop in your headphones! Join us for a jam session and a journey through the heart of storytelling. Find out how CO-FOUNDERS became a love letter to the Bay, a triumph of collaboration during chaos and a new kind of musical built for the world we live in now.
Let’s listen to:
CO-FOUNDERS The Musical
by Ryan Nicole Austin, Beau Lewis & Adesha Adefela
In 2020 the world changed. We were four years into writing CO-FOUNDERS The Musical, and we had our big break. Our show got accepted into NAMT’s Annual Festival of New Musicals. This was a catalyst for our show, an original story from and about the Bay Area, to be on a new trajectory to reach the rest of the country.
Three California dreamers known as “BAR” (Beau Lewis, Adesha Adefela and Ryan Nicole Austin) now had an opportunity to take the show we had written — a love-letter to the Bay and its misfit culture of creativity born from the fertile grounds of Oakland and Silicon Valley — and bring it a step closer to the world’s biggest and brightest stages in New York.
Then the pandemic happened. We wouldn’t be going anywhere — the Festival of New Musicals would take place in our bedrooms. Virtually. No flight across the country, no performance in person, and no shaking hands or getting drinks with Broadway producers. CO-FOUNDERS and the 7 other fledgling shows in the Festival would all be experienced by an audience through a window on their computer.
Our hearts broke a little bit. The world was falling apart. And as a writing team split across California, we had already been collaborating remotely on Zoom between LA and Oakland. It was hard. But we circled up, licked our wounds and looked for the opportunity in the constraints. It was time to pivot.
Our visual designer, David Richardson, is one of the most imaginative and talented people with a video camera you’ll ever meet — he can transform a small space into a new world, through the use of miniatures, projection and visual effects — like he did with his show Cages that reimagined the potential of holograms with live theatrical performances in an LA warehouse. We hatched a plan. We would do the same thing to the tiny New York living rooms, bedrooms and kitchens of the cast. They would each receive kits of cameras, greenscreen backdrops and sound recording devices. And we would build a replica studio of their set-up in our warehouse in California and make a film together, across the country, with strangers.
Pulling this off would require an amazing director to pull performances out of actors through video calls, while they are also acting as their own grips, gaffers and DP’s on a movie set in their living room. As the universe would have it, we now had that person. One of the greatest gifts NAMT gave us was an introduction to our soulmate director, Jamil Jude. He was immediately all-in with us, flying our duct-taped rocket-ship, with the steadiest hand and softest touch. We had an insane timeline, but as nerds in the shadow of Silicon Valley, we are used to hatching impossibly ambitious plans combining human ingenuity and technology. We would accelerate.
The NAMT staff, our cast and creative team embraced our creative vision and the results were remarkable. The 20-minute segment we presented at the Festival of New Musicals was a transformative moment in the trajectory of our show. Our virtual presentation stood out. In a strange way it further validated us as misfits, while ushering in a sense of belonging in the theater community that we had been trying so hard to be part of.
And while the Festival didn’t take us to New York in person right then, it did take us there the next year when our NAMT producer, Carlos Armesto took our show to Joe’s Pub, where we tasted what it felt like out there — it was amazing. The process also galvanized our team around our unique approach of blending visual projection with live actors. We went into a residency in an Oakland warehouse and continued our experiments around how to pair the mediums. The next year, our work was commissioned by the American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) in San Francisco, with Jamil Jude attached as director.
And now, 5 years after the world changed in 2020, CO-FOUNDERS sits on the eve of our World Premiere at A.C.T. in San Francisco. We are students of the pivot, ready for the world to change again, and even to help it do so. And we invite you to join us.
Click here for
TICKETS TO WORLD PREMIERE
MAY 29–JULY 6, 2025
STRAND THEATER
Use discount code: NAMT20
Special Industry Weekend in San Francisco June 19-21, 2025
CO-FOUNDERS The Musical
was presented at the National Alliance for Musical Theatre’s Festival of New Musicals in 2020 – www.namt.org
CO-FOUNDERS The Musical
by Ryan Nicole Austin, Beau Lewis & Adesha Adefela
A World Premiere Hip-Hop Musical
at A.C.T. Amercian Conservatory Theater
San Fancisco, CA
www.act-sf.org/whats-on/2024-25-season/co-founders/