UVa students launch first online, interactive musical

A cast and technical crew of 48 University of Virginia students will premiere at 8 tonight the first episode of “Musical: The Online Musical” — a project being billed as the first ever interactive online musical production.

The students will write, rehearse, film and edit a five- to 10-minute episode of the musical each week and post it to YouTube, where viewers will be able to offer feedback and suggest new directions for the plot and characters.

“We’ll post that week’s episode online then we’ll ask the audience what they want to see happen next,” said the musical’s co-author, Jeffrey Luppino-Esposito, a fourth-year English and American studies major. “Should someone die off? Should someone fall in love?”

Luppino-Esposito thought up the idea of the interactive musical with Matthew Savarese, a third-year media studies major, along with New York University student Stelios Phili.

“It’s been sort of crazy, but it’s pretty exciting trying to pull something like this off,” Savarese said.

The creators have sketched out a general direction for the musical’s plot.

The main character, Henry, becomes aware that he is living in a musical, where everyone periodically breaks into song and dance. No one but Henry realizes this and no one listens to Henry when he tries to talk to them about it.

Henry is viewed by the rest of his town as something of an outcast, mainly because he doesn’t know the script or the choreography.

Charlottesville native Sam Reeder, a fourth-year theater and history major at UVa, is playing the role of Henry. As an actor, Reeder said, he is most looking forward to getting immediate feedback from the audience.

“Someone might say, I want to see a rap song and then a couple weeks later, we could show that,” he said. “The audience can really have a huge hand in how this turns out.”

The students announced their project two weeks ago by posting a teaser video on their YouTube channel, located at youtube.com/theonlinemusical.

In the promo, the cast sings and dances about being in an online musical: “On this road that we’re walking/ You can call the shots/ Fall or not/ All we really want is a ------- plot!”

The project will be a success, Luppino-Esposito said, if the musical finds an audience and the viewers participate.

“We’re ready to be inspired and ready to have our minds changed,” he said. “We want to be shaken out of the sureness of what we have now. We hope to be responsive and make changes by the second episode.”

The series was supposed to start last week, but the crew ran into some technical difficulties and chose to delay its start until tonight in order to get all the kinks out.

Instead of posting the first episode last week, the students posted a video of frolicking puppies (to “satiate your animal-like appetite for musical theater”), along with a short preview of an exasperated Henry surrounded by others dancing and singing.

The project is being funded by a $4,000 award Luppino-Esposito and Savarese won in a one-act musical theater competition at UVa last year. The duo’s entry was called “Sorting Through” and was about a 26-year-old who sorts through his recently deceased mother’s belongings, triggering memories about her.

Luppino-Esposito and Savarese tapped into their winnings to pay for recording equipment, a camera, lights, sets and costumes. UVa has agreed to allow them to film the musical at various locations around Grounds.

Luppino-Esposito is handling writing chores for much of the project’s script, while Savarese is composing the music. Erin McDonald, a fourth-year accounting major, is responsible for choreography.

One major challenge for the students will be the project’s ambitious schedule, which requires the week’s script to be written by Thursday or Friday, film just about all day on Saturday and edit on Sunday and Monday.

“It’s going to be on the fly,” Savarese said.

The musical’s co-creators say the project is garnering a lot of buzz around UVa. They’re hoping that excitement turns into viewership in the weeks ahead, ideally to reach an audience beyond UVa, they said.

The co-creators believe their project is the first interactive musical ever attempted. There have been similar projects, however. Yale University students made a four-episode “College Musical,” though it wasn’t interactive. Students at the University of Michigan produced “Harry Potter: The Musical,” which burned up YouTube in 2009, but it was a filmed performance and was neither episodic nor interactive.