The adage of “write everything you understand” has proven fruitful for real-life creative couple Ben Bennett and Ashleigh Taylor.
The theatre that is musical came across whenever 25-year-old Bennett and 29-year-old Taylor both starred in the 2017 manufacturing of American Idiot and their love blossomed whenever Bennett relocated from Townsville to Sydney.
Co-creators for the life that is new of musical Ashleigh Taylor and Ben Bennett. Credit: Rhett Wyman
But simple months within their relationship that is two-and-a-half-year Taylor to New Zealand for five months to surface in Pleasuredome The Musical. It had been in this separation which they composed the majority of this new Australian musical, The lifetime of Us, which makes its globe premiere at Hayes Theatre recon online Co this thirty days.
The show follows the relationship that is long-distance of college sweethearts Charlie and Ellie, additionally played by Bennett and Taylor. The few are forced aside whenever Charlie, a musician, would go to great britain to follow their profession, while Ellie continues to be behind within their hometown to look after her mother, who may have early-onset Alzheimer’s.
“We explore exactly what it indicates to get in touch to a different individual, whether or otherwise not we must actually see a individual to be able to keep almost any relationship and just what that absence of real connection does,” claims Taylor. “We were really drawing that is much individual experience.”
The musical does not flinch through the problems of long-distance love. “What the entire show is about isn’t having that connection and little by little it deteriorates until it isn’t here at all,” claims Bennett. “Every time the thing is one another you fill it right back up a little, however it’s like there is an opening into the base regarding the cup.”
Whilst the lifetime of Us is profoundly informed by their particular experience, the initial idea for the show bubbled up before Taylor had also met Bennett. In 2013 she had been experiencing artistically lost, therefore began after Julia Cameron’s popular self-help guide The Artist’s Way to encourage by herself. One evening she dreamt the plot about a relationship that is long-distance down to exactly the way the set should look.
“I’m different degree of musician and songwriter that Ben is, on my own,” says Taylor so I didn’t feel I had the skills to write it
The style sat inside her log for a long time until she became involved in Bennett and shared it as a task for them to focus on with all the pair co-writing the book and Bennett penning the songs and words. “Ben usually jokes now whenever we state goodnight, he is like please dream up something great,” laughs Taylor.
Inspite of the Life people being the very first musical published by either associated with two, the show scored them a spot during the ASCAP Foundation Musical Theatre Workshop in Los Angeles last year led by Stephen Schwartz, the composer and lyricist behind Broadway strikes Godspell, Pippin and Wicked.
The 2 had been the first-ever Australians selected for a coveted i’m all over this this system, which selects attendees through a global distribution procedure. They received mentoring that is invaluable Schwartz and in addition Winnie Holzman, who had written the guide for Wicked and created the acclaimed teenager television drama My alleged Life.
The tracks when you look at the Life of Us function a pop that is strong, utilizing the set citing the soaring anthems of Dear Evan Hansen as well as the Greatest Showman as similar in noise.
“[Schwartz] actually guided us on approaches to have that pop music sensibility but manage to drive a tale arc through it,” claims Bennett. “That opened my eyes, because he had been one of the primary visitors to bring pop music into modern musical theater right back into the ’70s.”
For the few working alongside the other person has only strengthened their relationship. “It’s the glue that holds us together,” says Taylor. “We fight about a large amount of things, not the musical. That has been hanging around.”