kerrigan-lowdermilk.com / press

Fusion: Kait Kerrigan and Brian Lowdermilk
by Matthew Murray

May, 2006 – Can you revolutionize musical theater and bridge the gap between theater music and pop music before your thirtieth birthday? Kait Kerrigan and Brian Lowdermilk, currently 25 and 23 respectively, are determined to try.

The two first met in their home state of Pennsylvania, while doing shows at Young People's Theatre Workshop (YPTW) in Glen Mills. (Among other things, Kerrigan played Audrey to Lowdermilk's Seymour in Little Shop of Horrors.) They connected again in 2002 when Kerrigan, then studying English literature at Barnard College and just starting writing plays, received an e-mail from Lowdermilk, who had taught himself piano by tackling Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods, and was moving to New York to attend NYU, after unsuccessful stints at Harvard and the Berklee College of Music.

Kerrigan recalls, "He e-mailed me and was like, 'Hey, I write music and I hear you're writing plays. Would you send me some? Can I send you some music?' And I was like, 'All right:" They were each impressed with the other's work, and Lowdermilk urged her to contact him if she had any ideas for a musical.

"I didn't understand how someone goes about getting to the point where they sing:' Kerrigan says, "so I went to the logical place: the NYU library." She ended up in the acoustics section, reading up on sound and music and becoming interested in one acoustician's complaints that musicians "have no idea what they're producing, and are these reckless, hapless mechanics, basically:' she says. "Over the course of the next day or two, I came up with this idea of this woman who is outside the rest of the city and not engaging in the music that is New York City."

That idea eventually became The Woman Upstairs, which had its premiere at the inaugural New York Musical Theatre Festival in 2004. With a cast of 16 (including former Miss America Kate Shindle), a rock-heavy score and its story about a blind violinist who pursues a music-hating physicist in NYC's aural battleground, it was one of the Festival's more unconventional entries. But it attracted notice, got encouraging reviews and opened lots of doors.

TheatreworksUSA Artistic Director Barbara Pasternack saw the show and engaged Kerrigan and Lowdermilk to do a musical adaptation of Cynthia Rylant and SUyie Stevenson's Henry and Mudge children's books. Momentum picked up on The Unauthorized Autobiography of Samantha Brown, Lowdermilk's musical (written with Zach Altman) about a high-school girl pondering life, love and college; with revisions by Kerrigan, it had a reading at Makor in April 2005 starring Celia Keenan-Bolger and Michael Arden. NYMF approached them in 2005 about writing a new show for that year's festival, which ended up as Wrong Number, a choose-your-own adventure musical produced with the Upright Citizens Brigade comedy troupe.

Their shows' variety is mirrored in the myriad sources that inspire their work. "I'm the love child of Meat Loaf and the Indigo Girls," Lowdermilk says of his musical proclivities, though he doesn't discount the influences of folksingers Dar Williams and Joni Mitchell, rap artist Eminem, or musical writers Sondheim, Richard Rodgers and Michael John LaChiusa. Kerrigan's favorite playwrights include Tom Stoppard, Tony Kushner, Anna Deveare Smith and musical librettist Hugh Wheeler.

But as she's musical (she studied violin for 15 years) and he's dramatic (he's written plays), classifying them is difficult. They consider themselves dramatists, "event planners" who create the moments in theater that can't be replicated anywhere else, and they don't want to tread familiar ground.

"Guys and Dolls has been written-we can't write it again," Kerrigan says. "We have to do something else. Someone who Brian knew walked out of The Woman Upstairs because he was so angry that the main character didn't sing. But your general audience actually doesn't care about the form-they care about what you're saying, the emotional thing that happens onstage. There was this one moment in the show where every night-" "Where this woman trapped inside herself begins to dance," Lowdermilk interjects. "[The audience] clapped, they hollered and they screamed," Kerrigan says. "All of the sudden, we were at a rock concert for 30 seconds, because this nerdy scientist had started to dance. It was so cool."

To enhance that rock-theater connection, and to tap into new audiences, they've begun writing pop songs. And they're equally determined to push marketing boundaries-Lowdermilk has capitalized on the popularity of Myspace.com to spread Samantha Brown's best-known song, "Run Away With Me," to high schools and colleges. Free MP3 downloads of that song and others, and sheet music purchases, are available on their website. Quips Lowdermilk, "We're making dozens and dozens of dollars off that!"

While some honors have followed (together they received a 2006 Jonathan Larson Award and a Dramatists Guild fellowship; with Marcus Stevens, Lowdermilk won the Richard Rodgers Award for their Julius and Ethel Rosenberg musical. Red), finances are always a concern. "We're not living very well, but we're living off of writing," Lowdermilk says. And they're slowly learning to cope with being paid infrequently, which they admit will likely be the case for the rest of their lives.

But for the moment their plates are full. Henry & Mudge recently began a tour of New York City and the outer boroughs; a national tour will follow and conclude with an off-Broadway engagement next season. Samantha Brown is scheduled for an out-of-town tryout later this year, with an off-Broadway run to follow. Kerrigan and Lowdermilk are also teaching musical-writing classes for children at YPTW, where they first met nearly 10 years ago.

It's a lot to juggle, and it can be daunting. "There's nothing safe about [doing this]," Lowdermilk says. 'There's nothing that's ever gonna be safe about it."

But they ultimately feel it's vital to keep focused, keep motivated and keep moving. "Everything we've done has been so directed and so determined," Kerrigan says. "Whether it's the correct path or not, we're moving in a direction always, and it's just not true for so many people. You have to just say, 'This is what I'm doing: and you have to do it wholeheartedly. It's really hard. You have to want to do something impossible."