Brad Willcuts is an award-winning Michigan State University Theater and dance teacher and the Program Director of ĭmáGen – a collaboration between Wharton Center Institute for Arts & Creativity and MSU College of Arts and Letters.
Following a rehearsal for Particle, a coming-of-age esports musical chosen by ĭmáGen, we sat down with Willcuts for a quiet conversation in a corner of Wharton Center for Performing Arts in East Lansing, MI.
During THIS INTERVIEW he told us what community is the most important to ĭmáGen, the most ambitious production he’s been a part of, and how he and his team selects the musicals they produce.
THIS is for YOU!
We enjoyed Particle a lot! How does ĭmáGen decide what they’re going to produce?
Every October-ish we send out the blast to New York and L.A. and writing schools like NYU’s musical writing program. We spend the rest of the year picking a show and getting it ready, then we just go crazy for 3 weeks.
Whoa, that creative pressure… It’s very cool from our point of view but for you all behind the scenes we’re sure it can be quite stressful. What aspects of the program do you enjoy the most when it’s not stressful?
That’s a great question! And I love that question because it’s only stressful for a super finite amount of time. But the rest of it is dreaming! My favorite part is gathering the scripts and hearing the people’s stories. We got 85 new musical submissions this last year!
These are people who want to be doing this right now. You have all this dreaming and wondering what could it be? You slowly start to get development writers and tell them about the program. That’s really, really fun for me.
We’re sure you read some wildly creative and unexpected stuff!
You wouldn’t believe the types of shows people write musicals about! We’ve got, like, hockey musicals, we’ve got things like … It’s everything you could possibly imagine. Some of them are just gorgeous and beautiful, and some of them just need some time.
That brings to mind the trailer for the Disney+ series Hawkeye. In it you see clips of Steve Rogers: The Musical!
Back in the late 70s there was a Superman musical! I wish that I had more of them off the top of my head! I should keep a list of ones where I’m like, dude, what are you thinking?
What’s the most ambitious ĭmáGen project you’ve been a part of?
Last year we did a show called Medusa and we were completely online. It was a retelling of Medusa, as Medusa was a woman of color and she was assaulted by Poseidon. When she tried to tell everyone her truth no one believed her because Poseidon was a god. At one point she asked, “Why aren’t people listening to me? Do I have snakes in my hair?” And it turns into this whole thing.
We spent a month on it because we weren’t going to produce anything. We were just going to dig into the story. So, every night we were zooming with these creatives from New York and L.A., and digging into some really, really needed but incredibly complicated material for 18 to 21-year-olds. That was probably the most amazing work we’ve ever done.
That sounds super intriguing.
We just invested in the story. We didn’t put the lights and the camera on, we didn’t put the makeup on or anything, we just invested in the story. Some Broadway people were like, you know what, I’m glad we did that instead of anything else. For me, that was the one. I’ll never forget that one.
For these productions do you have a universal feeling about how you want them to turn out? Or are your feelings individualized?
It’s completely subjective for each one. But I do want the audience to feel that they are a part of the process. I want it to feel like while they’re sitting here, their investment and the way they react and, especially, commentary – we always do a talkback at the end – helps shape the future of the show. The students and the community who sit in those seats for 2 days do influence that show. And maybe one day we will see this at the whatever theater in New York. We’ll know that our community had a part to play.
So which community is most important to what you’re doing? Is it the theater community or is it the communities outside these whatever theaters that come in to watch these productions?
For me, it’s the latter. I’ve been born and raised in a theater community my whole life. It’s a small step to engage with that community because we’re always constantly innovating and discussing and digging deep into the marrow of life and its problems and the social ramifications of things that are occurring.
It’s the ones who haven’t stepped in a theater. It’s the students and kids out there who’ve never been into a theater before. Maybe they’ve seen the movie of it, but they’ve never watched it happen live in front of them. That’s the community that I would be most passionate about connecting with! |THIS.
[By Mr. Joe Walker]
