Fest Fast Facts

1. Who are Dmitry and David? Dmitry Koltunov (Music & Lyrics) is a Ukrainian born singer-songwriter living in New York City. His family immigrated from Kyiv to America in 1989 as Jewish refugees. Dmitry grew up in the Soviet Union where his parents were a big part of a songwriter community named The Bards, so he was exposed at an early age to a culture of songwriters and songwriting as a particular kind of craft. Dmitry spent a decade playing with a band in the NY indie music scene and fell in love with musical theater along the way. He’s a lyricist and composer by night, and a tech startup founder by day; all these experiences and influences have informed the story of Fallout. David Goldsmith (Book) has worked as a music theatre and film bookwriter and songwriter for over 40 years, from Motown the Musical on Broadway to “Descendants 3” for Disney.
2. How did they meet? Dmitry and David were set up on a creative blind date by a producer who liked David’s bookwriting and Dmitry’s songwriting. Over coffee and bagels, Dmitry talked to David about his life as a Ukrainian immigrant and his journey to become a tech entrepreneur, and David said, “now THAT’S a musical! Let’s write that.”
3. What’s the story about? Fallout is a story about a family of Ukrainian Jews. A family that flees the anti-Semitism of the Soviet Union in the aftermath of Chernobyl to settle in Brighton Beach, New York in the early 90s. We follow Yasha, the younger son, as he struggles to rescue his family from financial ruin during the tech boom of the early 2000s into the financial collapse of Lehman Bros in 2007. The story spans 30 years and has a musical language of everything from Rock, to Hip-Hop, to Soviet Bard, to traditional American musical theater.
4. What’s David’s connection to the story? David grew up culturally Jewish in the American Midwest, only vaguely aware of his Russian-Jewish roots on both sides. While he was completing the book and lyrics to Masada 1942, another musical about a family of Russian Jewish actors (this time in the Warsaw ghetto) for the National Theatre of Israel in Tel Aviv, he met Dmitry. Their creating of the story of Fallout, which traced a different, later chapter in the Russian Jewish story (through the 80s and beyond), further deepened his connection to his own ancestral history.
5. What is the Soviet Jewry Movement? The story, inspired by the Koltunov family’s experience of coming to America in the late 80s as a part of the Soviet Jewry movement. It is not a well known event, but this was the largest peacetime displacement of people in the last hundred years. 2 million Jews fled the Soviet Union because of anti-Semitism and came to the US and Israel; there, they started companies such as Google and WhatsApp. Fallout covers a history of a people that hasn’t yet been told.