Cryns #3

I went fishing over the summer on one of the most boring fishing excursions that humankind has ever produced. It wasn’t the lack of fish – they were plentiful – it was the manner in which the fishing took place. We hired a fishing guide on a lake in Wisconsin. The guide had a fancy boat and does this sort of thing for a living. There were 10 baited poles going at all times, all managed by the guide. I never baited a single line, never dropped the line in the water, never removed the hook from the fish, and never threw back a fish (they were all thrown back…the guide threw them back). When it was all said and done, I was boiling from too much sunshine, I had to use the bathroom baaaad, and I was hrrrngry! Next time, I think we’ll just rent a canoe.

But enough about fishing – on to the fishing analogy! We’ve got a bite…on our Happy Endings Church musical/rock opera! It’s too early to share specifics, but if all goes to plan, we’ll be staging the full thing on a professional stage in Minneapolis in summer 2023! There’s still a long time between now and then, and, as my TMM customers say, “What if you get hit by a bus?”

Still, I am so darn thrilled to be here! We’re 7 years in now since we started writing this musical, and it’s my best work to date. In fact, it blows everything I’ve ever produced out of the water. It’s a giant tuna fish in the ocean on the end of my metal line to the bluegill on the end of my nylon string that is hooked into my Mickey Mouse fishing rod on S Lake in Richmond. (Now that I think of it, I had much more fun fishing for bluegill and sunfish in S Lake than I had catching lord knows what with the pro in Wisconsin.) And here we are in January 2022, and an actual professional producer wants to produce Happy Endings Church! I’m trying to keep my expectations low, because I’ve been burned by so many high expectations on so many occasions in my life, and yet why not get excited? It’s more real than ever!

One more note about the Rock Opera vs Musical definition – Jon calls it a Rock Opera, and I call it a Musical. It turns out that we’re both wrong, Happy Endings Church is a Rock Musical.