Fest Fast Facts

• We wrote Love Is Dead as a way of (lovingly) poking fun at all our eternally single friends who suffer through the modern dating scene. Because we’re terrible at confrontation, it felt easier to write a musical, get it produced, and then invite them all to it instead of gently shaking them and shouting, “Love is supposed to be fun! Stop taking everything so seriously!!” So, if our little date-night spooky rom-com can get everybody to chill out and bring some single people together, we can die happy.
• We created this show to be a fun, easily producible, epic night of theater with only 3-actors! (Think Murder for Two, or Gutenberg! The Musical! but with one more actor!) We’ve seen the show resonate with a broad range of ages and we want to bring it to as many audiences as we can. A major regional premiere or even a limited commercial off-Broadway run seem like great trajectories. But we’re open to everything! Come talk to us, we want to work with you.
• The music for Love Is Dead is a quirky, pop-forward, contemporary musical theater score. We blend the styles of ‘90s-era Ben Folds, Alanis Morrisette, and Third Eye Blind with classic musical theatre references like Ahrens & Flaherty, Alan Menken, and, heck, even the Sherman Brothers. All filtered through our warped sense of humor and joy in surprising the audience as much as we can.
• Like all the great musical theater collaborators, Jeff & Brett met at the New World Stages concession stand. Our first collaboration was a moody, folk-tinged musical podcast called In Strange Woods, which boasted a cast of Broadway & Television stars like Patrick Page, Beth Leavel, and Michaela Watkins, and which hit #1 on Apple iTunes during its initial airing. We then wrote a musical screenplay called This Used to Be a Disco about the 71-year-old owner of the (fictional) last remaining gay bar in Patterson, NJ. (Jeff is from New Jersey, and Brett has been known to frequent gay bars.) Love Is Dead is our third collaboration. In every project, we strive to push the limits of genre and form in an attempt to find new ways to invite–or even trick!–people into enjoying musical storytelling.
• Since the world is on fire and humanity won’t last, we all want theater that is surprising, invigorating, and celebratory. This show presents an opportunity for actors, designers, directors, and producers to create something truly unforgettable. An adorably-neurotic leading beltress; a drop-dead-gorgeous love interest (who actually dropped dead); a character-actor who will doubtless walk away with the show; a Sony discman puppet!; magical ghost-y illusions!!;supernatural sexual experimentation!!! We want audiences to run to tell their friends about the crazy, irreverent, painfully-relatable show they HAVE to go see.