Fest Fast Facts

• Helsinki is a one-act, ninety-minute dark romantic comedy following two proletarian loners whose relationship is put through the ringer when a freed convict comes back into their lives to make trouble. This show has everything: love, loss, crime, punishment, factories, boats. Everything. It’s narrated by a trio of Helsinkian ruffians who double as every supporting character, a casting conceit we’ve long been obsessed with—and not just because you, Mister/Madame Producer, would have to pay fewer actors. It also means we would have to remember fewer people’s names.
• Helsinki is set during Finland’s depression of the early 1990s—which followed a banking credit crisis and the collapse of the Soviet Union as a trade partner. All in all an event so severe that the country’s economy has never fully recovered (raise your hand if this kind of thing sounds familiar). The style of the show is inspired by the bleak comic depictions of the national mood during this era in Finnish films like Ariel, Shadows in Paradise and The Match Factory Girl, as well as the regular pairing of romantic leads Kati Outinen and Matti Pellonpää, whose unique screen personas form the basis for our two main characters.
• This appealed to us as the basis for a musical for a couple different reasons. It struck us as a sneaky and surprising venue in which to explore the extreme isolation and pessimism of 2020s America from an abstract distance. It also drew us in as a sandbox that could combine our own respective sensibilities, creating a misfit love affair of another kind between quick, acidic comedy and lush, romantic personal songwriting. This world has given us the chance to work in an aesthetic mode we want to see new musicals embrace, with an attitude towards being human in inhumane times that perfectly expresses our own. It’s also given us a great excuse to hang out a lot—the only rock solid reason to write a musical with someone.
• We’re looking to connect with commercial producers and literary departments to explore opportunities for where the show might find a home and an audience—which we feel is the same one with an appetite for intimate, oddball musicals with playful exteriors and melancholic souls that strike tricky tonal balancing acts and call ambitious narrative shots—The Band’s Visit, Kimberly Akimbo, Dead Outlaw, Teeth to name a few.