The music for our upcoming world premiere musical, Folk Wandering, was composed collaboratively by nine emerging singer songwriters. In advance of our first performance on February 23, we’ll be sharing interviews with each of these composers, as well as with many of the key artists involved in the production. These conversations will bring you inside this show’s very unique process of creation, and bring you a bit closer to this brilliant and wild group of emerging artists. Today, we are pleased to bring you our very first spotlight on Andrew R. Butler, who is one of our composers and who will also be performing in Folk Wandering in the role of Everett Ruess.
Read the full interview below and get your tickets at the highly limited pre-sale rate (while supplies last!) today!
Pipeline Theatre Company: How do you identify yourself as an artist?
Andrew R. Butler: I’m a writer, composer and performer.
PTC: How did you come to work on Folk Wandering?
ARB: [Andrew] Neisler and Jaclyn [Backhaus] invited me to participate in its creation! I knew them both from past projects and from our overlapping artistic communities. Neisler and I were already collaborators in the music-comedy group Political Subversities, and I knew Jaclyn from working with Theatre Reconstruction Ensemble.
PTC: What has been exciting to you about working with so many collaborators?
ARB: It’s super fun to get to write songs with a whole crew of other writers. I’m usually a more solitary songwriter, and while I’ve brought some of that process to music in Folk Wandering, it’s been incredibly rewarding to write music to Jaclyn’s words, or to write words that someone else puts to music, and to do every combination therein, all on the same show. Even more fun is hearing the collaborations of my collaborators! It’s neat to recognize different writers’ voices and styles in the music, and just as neat when the alchemy of the combination produces something you can’t trace.
PTC: What other projects do you have coming up?
ARB: My experimental theatre company harunalee is in the Under The Radar Festival this year with a show called Memory Retrograde, written by the company’s co-founder and namesake Kristine Haruna Lee. Right before Folk Wandering begins rehearsals I’m going on a short writing retreat to Guild Hall in the Hamptons with my writing partner Andrew Farmer, culminating in a concert of songs from our musicals.
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Folk Wandering begins preview performances on February 23, opens on March 4, and runs through March 18. Tickets are now available to all performances at a highly limited pre-sale rate. Get your tickets today!
