Everything's Coming Up Madeline Myers and Samantha Massell!

Written By: Chelsea & Cynthia

Featuring: Madeline Myers and Samantha Massell

"Asking for what you want, is maybe one of the most important things you can do in this business, no matter what your role is."  - Madeline Myers

What does it take to get a new musical off the ground? And what is it like to originate a role that was written just for you?

These were exactly our questions when we sat down with Madeline Myers and actor Samantha Massell to learn about the development of their new musical (Double Helix), the magic of collaboration, and how to take charge of your career and make things happen!

We have a lot to cover, so let's dive right in!

Q: Madeline, as the composer and lyricist for the show, we would love to hear from your perspective about your background and how you started composing music.

A: I grew up in a really small town in the northwest corner of Georgia and I didn't have any kind of arts or cultural institutions in my community. But it did have a library, and my parents would take my sister and me there. From this, I fell in love with books, and I bring it up in the context of writing because I think what a love of reading did was I fell in love with stories and storytelling.

The other thing was, growing up I trained as a classical pianist. I took piano lessons and when I was in middle school I started writing these angsty middle-school girl pop songs and I realized that I liked how my brain felt when I was creating something. I enjoyed how my brain felt in those moments, more so than I did when I was interpreting something that someone else had written.

And then the third big thing was that my mom's aunt lived in New York City. And for every gift-giving occasion, she would send my sister and me a subscription to Highlights for Kids and these old MGM movie musicals. So I had never seen a Broadway show (I'd never seen live theater of any kind) but I grew up watching these old MGM movie musicals - Singing In The Rain, Easter Parade, Oklahoma, South Pacific, and My Fair Lady - and really every Golden Age musical that was recorded and made into a movie.

As I've gotten older, I've realized my love of all these things, of story, of music, kind of came together in musical theater. So I went to college for writing classical art music, but my love has always been for musicals and musical stories.

Q:  Was there ever a time when you thought 'women don't compose', or were women composers on your radar? Was that ever anything that inhibited you in any way? 

A: That's something I think about a lot because I certainly did not see a lot of female composers, but at the same time, I don't think it was ever something I thought was not available to me. And I really attribute that to my parents.

In a lot of ways, I feel like I take my own feminism for granted. I don't think I ever grew up thinking 'this is something that's not available or accessible to me'. I think certainly as I endeavored to do these things, I've experienced a lot of obstacles that are just inherent in this space because of culture and society and all of those, those deep-seated things that I couldn't even begin to unpack.

But I don't think I ever thought this was something I couldn't do. And now I look back and there aren't that many female composers who have had the kind of commercial success on Broadway that I would hope to have one day with my work.

And you know, I had this conservatory-like experience because I was in a music school at Vanderbilt and I was in the composition program and of course, there's this huge divide between classical music and musical theater. And the classical high art music people looked down on musical theater, and I always wanted to write musicals and all my professors knew that. Yet I was writing contemporary art music. I was writing crazy string quartets that were very avant-garde and High Art, very intellectual.

But my heart was always in musicals, and I think it's interesting because a lot of people hear my music and they think of it as very "art music" influence because it is chromatic. And at the same time, I don't think it even remotely resembles what I think of as contemporary art music. It feels to me very, very theatrical.

Q: Madeline, you made your way to New York City and you found yourself in the original music team of Hamilton. Tell us about that experience and some of those early experiences working in New York and dipping your toes into the professional musical theater scene.

A: I'm just the luckiest person on the planet that I somehow got to work in the music department of the original Broadway company of Hamilton, and I'm not kidding when I say it changed my life. To be in that room, to watch a musical that has had so much impact and has touched the lives of so many people, come to life. And to watch the minds who were behind the table making that show, specifically Lin-Manuel Miranda, Tommy Kail, Andy Blankenbuehler, and then my boss, Alex Lacamoire, who has been so generous to me in my career. He has given me so many notes on Double Helix and so much smart feedback. He has been a champion for my career.

I'm just really grateful that I got to be a fly on the wall, and I got to learn from people who I admire so much working at their craft and working to put this show on. Sometimes I have to pinch myself, I can't even believe that it really happened and that I got to be a part of it. I feel like I got a PhD in how to make a musical just by being the music assistant on this show.

And to be clear, I cannot stress enough how low on the ladder I was. But I was lucky to be there at all. I think after that experience, it was so impactful on me in so many ways. But one of them was that I made myself a promise that the next time my name would appear in a Broadway Playbill, it would be as a composer and lyricist.

It's been the easiest promise I've ever made and kept, which is why I didn't want to work on other people's shows anymore.

Q: Tell us how you came to this idea, you're writing a completely new musical based on a real-life story, but it's not based on previous source material. What kind of challenges are you facing writing the lyrics, the music, and the book? How are you doing this and how did this come to be?

A [Madeline]: Double Helix is the story of scientist Rosalind Franklin, who was a British Jewish scientist working at King's College in London in the early 1950s, and as soon as I read her story, the hair on my neck stood up - I feel like my heart stopped. Everything in me responded to this woman and who she was, and I felt that her story was uniquely mine to tell and that it had to be musicalized. It felt so emotional, rich, explosive and daring, and it just had to be a musical story. 

There have been so many challenges along the way, one of them being that it is a real-life story. But my job is not to be a biographer or a historian - my job is to be a musical dramatist. So the grounding thing in the actual creation of the story itself is, maybe this is what actually happened in history, but what's the most emotionally compelling way to represent this in a musical?

I think one of the things that has made the process easier is knowing who you're writing for. So in this case, I've known Sam for many years and had gotten to know her work and just really admired what she was doing. I thought she just had this instrument that was completely unmatched by anyone I had ever heard.

She has just the most extraordinary voice and craft as a storyteller, and she also seemed to possess these qualities that felt very Rosalind-like to me. She had a chutzpah to her, real grit. Also, this steel and elegance that felt aligned with Rosalind's world.

As I started to think about who Rosalind was and who was the person to embody her, I began writing it for Samantha. She's been the most generous collaborator, workshopping material really from day one.

I'm eager to hear Sam's perspective and take on all this, but as many challenges as the process has contained, I will say collaborating with Sam and writing this role for her has been just the most incredible gift. I am walking on air when I think about the people that are going to get to see this performance. I am not kidding when I say there will only be your life before and your life after seeing Sam in this role. 

Sam: That's very generous Madeline and I feel the same about people getting to see this show and hear this score. Just to piggyback off that,  Madeline and I were friends - we'd collaborated on some demos together for other shows that she was working on. We were connected through another Michigan grad who's writing musicals, Danny Abosch. Madeline and I were both in Europe in the summer of 2018 and we met up to take a road trip. I remember just being in the car with her driving around the Faroe Islands and I asked what she was working on and she shared she was working on this new show. Madeline then starts telling me the story of Rosalind Franklin, which I'd never heard of this woman before, and I also immediately felt like there were so many qualities about this woman that I personally identify with myself. 

As we're driving and she looks at me and she goes, "It's you". And I remember being like, "Oh my God, how cool" and at the same time being like, "Yeah. Right". Because in this business we hear so much and it doesn't come through. So I just took it as a grain of salt, but I remember during dinners or whatever, we would be dreaming, scheming and imagining what we wished for the show.

And then it actually started to come true, which is so rare for a dream in this business to come true the way that this has. The loyalty we feel for each other because of this show has transcended into a best friendship, we are literally family at this point.

Q: Sam, you are no stranger to new works. Tell us about what has been your experience with new shows, developing new works, what inspires you about these projects, what's challenging about them and how might this be different?

A: It's so funny because I think in many ways, Madeline and I are so similar, but we had very opposite experiences. I grew up in New York City and was a child actor. When I was eight years old, I asked my mom for an agent and she was like, "You want a what?"

But I did a Broadway show when I was a kid and I was auditioning before I went to college. I sort of always had one toe in either world. I grew up as a very musical theater-certified freak. I've always had a big passion and interest in the actual work and the history as opposed to just my job as an actor in executing someone else's vision. I was absolutely that kid who was at the Lincoln Center Library once a week putting cast recordings in iTunes, just so I could listen to and memorize them all. 

Something that I feel clearer about in terms of what attracts me to something as an artist now, is collaboration. Getting to have that seat at the table as a participant in the creation of a story, and I'm not saying I'm writing it, but just being able to be a part of those conversations and have an active voice in the room is what feels the most special about all of those new works. And getting to experience that in different ways with new teams and all of it.

I mean, when I was doing Rags Out Of Town at Goodspeed, that was a really interesting experience because we had a new book writer who had completely reshaped it, and Stephen Schwartz is out there rewriting songs and trying to completely reframe the story.

I remember there was one moment where a scene wasn't working and myself and another actress piped up and suggested we reversed two lines. And that's in the book now. That is how the show is licensed out, and it feels very exciting to get to be a part of the creation of that story in that small way.

Madeline: There's this adage about musicals, which is "You don't write a musical, you rewrite a musical and you're never finished writing your musical. They just take it away from you on opening night." I think so much about how new works behave, and just how inherently collaborative they have to be.

I hope we're at the very beginning of this process. I really think that Bay Street and this world-premier production that Double Helix is about to have is just the beginning and that we're really just getting started.

Sam: I teach a lot on the side, and I pass along to my students this great Philip Seymour Hoffman quote where somebody asked him, what is acting to you? And he's responded, "I like to find the chaos within the structure."

This is how I think about acting all the time, what is the structure of this scene? What is the structure of this song? Where do I start? Where do I end? What are the events that are happening along the way? How is the relationship changing?

And now we're about to walk into a room of other voices, actors, and collaborators, which will be so exciting, and all of a sudden we'll be slapped in the face in the best possible way with chaos. Everything that we've figured out or thought we figured out during our four years of dreaming, imagining, and workshopping this show, now I'm going meet an actor who's going to deliver a line to me a different way. That's my chaos. And that's so exciting to me.

Madeline: And along those lines,  a value of mine is it's important for every person in the process to feel some sort of ownership and to see their fingerprints on it. I've certainly been in processes where there's a lot of clinging to the material, not a lot of generosity and there's not a lot of opening the door for people to come in and put their own stamp on it.

But I actually think that's a totally backward way of making theater. I think the more you let people in, the more you get out of the material and I think that's really important.

Q: You're both about to walk into the rehearsal process starting on Monday for the first-ever production of Double Helix running this May and June at Bay Street Theater in Long Island. How do you get to this point? How do you get something from off the page to finding collaborators? 

A [Madeline]: It's so interesting because, at the end of the day, this is a business - a musical is a product and I'm an entrepreneur. That's the reality of it. And the other side is that there is no clear path for getting your show produced. You could ask 10 writers how their show got produced, you would get 10 different answers.

And so one side of that coin is how liberating and exciting that there's no clear-cut path - that means anything can lead to your production. The other side is how incredibly daunting, intimidating and overwhelming it all is because there is no clear journey to take in order to get your show produced.

I've experienced both of those things. I think a lot of ways that the show has moved forward have been through unorthodox channels and thinking outside the box.

To come back to the business side of things, something that I think about a lot is if you were an entrepreneur of any other thing, if you were developing a technology, product, or a service, you would have to make sure that the thing is exceptional, that people want to buy it and that it works in the way that you intend for it to. And a musical is exactly the same way.

What's different, is that it takes a lot of time to develop it and the only way to really see if it works is to stage it in front of people, and there's an inordinate amount of resources that go into that. It's absolutely wild when I think about the inordinate amount of steps that it has taken to get it just to a place where the product itself feels like something that makes sense as a piece of theater, is compelling and emotional and works musically, dramatically, and theatrically.

The other piece of that is, if you do have something that works, how do you actually get it produced? Because the production is the goal, to get it in front of people and the most people possible. In the case of Double Helix specifically, the director of the show, Scott Schwartz, who has kind of been involved pretty much since day one and who has been kind of my collaborative partner in bringing this show to life, is the artistic director of a theater. So, he believes in this show and he wanted to program it at his theater. So we are very excited that this will be the first production.

Q: Can either of you speak to the importance of building a network and reaching out in ways that are helpful for your show?

A [Sam]: As Madeline puts it, we always feel like we're just in the middle of our Opening Doors montage in Merrily We Roll Along. 

Many moons ago I was on a trip with my mom where we met this other mother-daughter couple, and the mom had been a former agent at William Morris and the daughter was a television writer. We ended up spending three days with them and they actually schooled me in how to career. This was just after I'd finished Rags and some great advice that I've taken with me everywhere and it's: email one person a day on behalf of your career. The worst thing that you're gonna get back is no.

There are so many jobs I've gotten or been in consideration for or rooms that I've been in because I just sent out an email. When we were doing Rags, I remember David Loud was our music supervisor who is just the most sensational person. I was looking to get into more concert and symphony work, so I sent him a message and I was like, "I hear you're doing Lyrics and Lyricists. I'm sure you already have a group, but if not, I just want to throw my hat in the ring."

He responded that they were about to cast and he'd keep me in mind. Two weeks later, I got the job.

I'm not saying this is always the route to success. Many times it is not. But you just never really know.
It's just earnestly asking how can I participate - how can I throw my hat in the ring? It's a philosophy I abide by, and it's not something I'm doing like every hour of every day. But when something comes along, I generally don't hesitate. 

But for this show and this type of role, in so many ways it feels like once in a lifetime for me as an actor and as my own businessperson. But also in terms of the field and the art that I love at large, Madeline's work feels like once in a lifetime.

Immediately I was ready to help, asking how many more hands she needed on deck. I'm not producing the show by any means, but I've reached out to my contacts who I have relationships with because why not?  And we've gotten a lot from it. Madeline has been clear about wanting to keep a warm and positive room and for me, that has been really informative and a helpful guiding light.  I think we've really applied it to the show and it has paid us back tenfold.

[Madeline]: I really believe in the power of asking for what you want and I believe that the worst thing you can do is not ask. I would encourage anyone in this industry, to ask for what you want is just maybe one of the most important things you can do in this business, no matter what your role is.

When we're talking about how the sausage gets made, I always looked to shows that were happening and just assumed that the magical pixie dust of Broadway got sprinkled on them in some way to bring it to the stage. 

But really, it's been a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. I'm not interested in presenting this facade of how easy this experience has been. I just think it's important to be honest about our process and our experience because I want other people to know that this is one way of making it happen. 

This is part of our story. This is part of Rosalind's story. She was a woman in a man's world. \

Q: Sam, you've done so many new works, I'm curious if you have advice for other folks who are trying to get into that space.  And do you show up differently in a room of a new work versus a room of a show that is already in existence?

A: Honestly, when I first graduated from college, I was immediately thinking of how to connect with young writers because I knew one day they'd be old writers. So I just tried to immerse myself as much as I could in that world. 

But my advice would be to network and just be out there. Sing at 54 Below, if somebody wants you to do their thing, say yes.

But in regards to how I enter a room, well to be fair, I haven't entered a room of a show that's already written in quite some time. I have done a bunch of on-screen work recently, which is not quite the same thing, but in many ways, you're walking into a well-oiled machine and you're just a cog in the wheel.

I did six episodes on the CW reboot of Dynasty last year, and just like finding your place in how they tell their story and how they work their thing, it's not dissimilar to mounting a summer stock production where you got the structure. There's not as much room for the chaos either.

But that said, when I am auditioning for theater that is not a new piece, I definitely try to bring my own self to it. I think as I've gotten older, I've begun to trust myself and believe that I am enough. I think my interpretation of your Marian Paroo, is something that I feel really empowered by, as opposed to scared of. It's something that I feel like I want to bring into the room and share with people as opposed to assuming what they want it to look like.

I think that's also an industry trend, but it's also something I feel personally trending within me, I'm proud of who I am. I like what I bring to the table.

That's your currency. That's the only thing you have in this business is who you are and the things that make you different, and what makes you special. 

Q: To close, what about Rosalind's story specifically resonates with you, inspires you, and feels like it's important to tell right now?

A [Madeline]: There are a lot of things about Rosalind's story that as soon as I read them just deeply moved me and kind of shook me to my core. One is that we're both women, we're both Jewish, and we're both about the same age at this time in Rosalind's story that we're sharing.

But there was more than just those surface things that really spoke to me. She was really ambitious and daring. And for me, the biggest connection that I felt to this woman was the way she felt about her work as a scientist is how I feel about my own work as a musical dramatist. Something that I say a lot about this show is that it's a love story about a woman and her work. And that's how I feel about my work too.

Sam: The facts that she's Jewish, a woman, and our age are things I connect with too. But I also her tenacity, and desire for the truth. There are so many things about this story to me that feel so contemporary to me, despite being a period piece. A woman not getting any credit, anti-Semitism is on the rise - it's this thing that's like only half talked about.

Something that Rosalind says a lot is that science tells the truth. And that feels relevant right now. But I think above all she's so tenacious. She doesn't take no, she fights for what she knows is right and she fights for her place. I feel connected to that in my personal life, in my life as a solo business person/artist. 

I think we feel so tethered to fighting for our place, we both believe that this show has a place in New York.

If you're interested in diving deeper into this interview or exploring other interesting musical theatre conversations - check out the Broadway Vocal Coach podcast! Or check us out on Instagram, and get involved in the conversation! 

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