From Manga to Musical: The Four Immigrants Reading at USC

Top L to R: Julia Weiner, Stella Kim, Kurt Kanazawa, Ewan Chung, Scott Keiji Takeda, Reuben Uy, Min Kahng, Frederik L. Schodt. Bottom L to R: Jully Lee, Yumi Iwama, Sophie Oda, Julia Cho, Leslie Martinson

Last week, Artists At Play and USC Visions & Voices presented the panel and concert presentation of The Four Immigrants at Cammilleri Hall on the USC campus. The evening was electric and everything went phenomenally well! The event was even covered in on-campus media with this lovely article by Yixin Zhou!

Zhou writes: “The performance and discussion drew a large crowd. Some audience members had to stand throughout the performance since the house was filled. But that didn’t stop audiences from fully engaging in the show, laughing and sighing along as they watched the story of these four friends unfold.”

Thank you to all who help bring this concert reading to life, and to all who attended!

Learning to Research Smarter

I have completionist tendencies. Rather than stop when the enjoyment or meaning stops, I will carry on with a book or a video game or a TV series, because I feel compelled to finish it. I’m learning, however, that life is too short to be focusing on things that aren’t bringing me enjoyment. And the completionist tendency is tied somehow to guilt. I’ve associated not finishing with being lazy or wasteful, especially if I’ve spent money or a considerable amount of time on a thing already. I’m learning, though, that sometimes it’s actually wise to know when to stop doing something, and I have been able to more frequently say “I’m done” in the middle of things.

This completionist tendency has translated into my research as well. For my writing projects, I will often build a long list of media to research, and internally declare that I will consume each piece of media in its entirety. More often than not, I don’t get through all the media. Or even worse, I get stuck. I might get to the relevant stuff in a research book, and then realize I still have 100 pages left. Cue the guilt. Even though I can make a good guess that the remainder of the book will not be relevant to my project, I still feel bad that I’m not finishing it. Or I might ask for recommendations from others on what I could read, and then feel overwhelmed at the volume of texts and films I “need” to go through.

But, as I said, I’ve been learning. For Untitled, I did do a crowdsourced recommendation on research books, but then sifted through each one to determine whether it was actually appropriate for my purposes. And yesterday, I started reading a book, then got to a section that I realized was not relevant to my project and decided I would skip it. There is still a lingering guilt in the back of my mind. But I believe that’s the rational brain acting up in the face of letting intuition take the lead. Besides, the rational brain should also realize that there’s no way, no time, for me to go through every possible research material in its entirety. It should be happy that I’m trying to figure out a smarter way to research.

A NAMT Writers Residency Grant!

TheatreWorks Silicon Valley and I have received a NAMT Writers Residency Grant for my Untitled Asian-American Senior Sex Scandal Murder Mystery Musical! This was a piece that I began writing at the TheatreWorks Writers Retreat earlier this year. The Writers Residency Grant will go toward a reading and other resources to assist me with getting to a full first draft. This is the second time I’ve received this honor - the first being for The Four Immigrants.

I'm so thankful for this amazing support for my quirky idea of a musical. And nervous too, because it's still very much in its early development stages, and I have no idea where this project is taking me creatively. But isn’t that what makes being a writer so thrilling?

Here's the thing about a template...

When you fit perfectly snug in a template, you don’t question it. You marvel at how amazingly appropriate and perfect it is for you. And you believe everyone would benefit from this template.

But when you don’t fit - or no longer fit. Even after you’ve stretched and warped yourself into so many shapes to keep trying to fit. And you’ve questioned your value if you can’t ever fit...

Eventually, if you’re one of the lucky ones, you start to wonder - maybe the template is the problem. Maybe it is the *template* that doesn’t fit *you.*

And then when you’re finally out of the template - in spite of those snug-as-a-bug Templaters who coax, plead, shout that you should get back in! get back in! When you’re finally out...

You realize how many templates there actually are. And you marvel at how amazingly illuminating this realization is. Even moreso the possibility that you might not need a template at all - or that you can learn from the existing templates to forge your own.

And you start to believe everyone would benefit from this awareness of the multiplicity of templates, and see the folly of asking all people to fit into just one.

Revisiting, revising, and reviving MOUNTAIN

There was a time when I believed the 2014 production of Where the Mountain Meets the Moon: A Musical Adaptation would be the only time the story would make it to the stage. Not for a lack of trying, mind you. After the world premiere closed, I met with director Mina Morita (currently Artistic Director of Crowded Fire Theatre) and BACT Executive Artistic Director Nina Meehan to talk about where the show could go next. We looked at festivals and other submission opportunities. And then, it all came to a halt. There was a potential movie deal in the works, so any adaptations of the book were not to be produced. This was very sad to hear (and wouldn’t be the last time this would happen), and I came to terms with the idea that the show would only live on in a much-cherished memory.

Then, in 2017, news came that further productions of the show would be allowed by the publisher. BACT wanted to do a remount. And South Coast Rep wanted to include it in their Theatre for Young Audiences programming! So we went from zero chance to getting two productions in the 2019-2020 season. One of the biggest changes this time around is that, due to budget constraints, there won’t be live instruments. I took this opportunity to completely revisit the show, tightening and shoring up the previous script, and even penning a new reprise that hadn’t existed before. The BACT remount is in previews right now, and it has been poignant seeing the show return to the Osher Studio - where the world premiere occurred. This show that I had thought would never see the light of day again is getting its second go starting this weekend, and its third in February in SoCal.

All this, I suppose, is a lesson in “You never know.” That doesn’t mean I should have held out hope against the odds. I believe it was right for me to make peace with the idea that the world premiere would be the only production of Mountain. But you just never know how events might turn and surprise you as you make your writer's way.

Chelsea Wellott as Minli in the 2019 BACT Production. Photo by Roger Jones.