Showbiz U: From Film School to Murder for Two- Kellen Blair, Joe Kinosian & Tim Kashani

What do you get when you have a Broadway professional and a camera crew? Long story short, you get a lot of cool info when you get Showbiz U Luminaries. Writing partners Kellen Blair and Joe Kinosian are making a splash off-Broadway with their musical comedy Murder for Two. The writing duo sit down with us to share what they've learned in their journey joining the New York theater community.

Welcome, gentlemen.

Thank you.

And I think we should start with congratulations first.

Oh, thank you very much.

You must be excited on the next journey of your of your show Murder for Two.

Yeah, very excited.

Very.

Yeah. Why don't we start simple with first, how did you meet each other?

Well, actually, Joe and I both have in common that we went to film school, so our education is actually in film. But a couple years after film school, I think we both realized that that wasn't really our passion or that we weren't particularly good directors.

Um, I crashed a truck as a PA. That was kind of my signal. I was not cut out for the fall.

You used up your insurance points and you were done.

Peter Falk yelled at me. It doesn't matter.

Come on.

And I think we both had these moments of, um, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but of like, okay, what is the universe telling me that I should be doing? You know, I know Joe was a composer and everybody was like praising the music he wrote for the films. I don't know if they were praising the films themselves. Um, and similarly, I'd always loved musical theater. It's all I'd ever listened to. It's all I ever wanted to do. And yet it never occurred to me that, you know, that was like an actual option in terms of career pursuit, and yet for some reason film seemed like the safe choice, which is, I know, also ridiculous. But, um, so we ended up both applying to this program called the BMI Musical Theater Writing Workshop, and we were just lucky enough to be there the same year. We got teamed up to write a charm song together, so we had to write a song for It's a Wonderful Life. We failed that assignment, which was actually a bit of a bonding experience, and it required us to write a second song for It's a Wonderful Life. So right off the bat, we got to write 2 songs together. And yeah, that's how we met. I think we found that we had very similar sensibilities and wanted to keep doing it.

Did you go in as a lyricist then?

I went in as a lyricist. Joe actually tried to do both. So do you want to tell that story?

Well, no, that was just— it worked out for the best, for sure. I had applied as a composer and lyricist because I really enjoy doing both. But Kellen's work as a lyricist is just far superior to mine, so rather than hold on to my pride, I decided that working with him was the better option.

And you do collaborate still on the process, I'm sure.

Well, the book writing we share full responsibility together. That's very much a 50/50 arrangement, whereas the music is all me and the lyrics are all Kellen.

Let's talk about Murder for Two. Take us to where the idea came from and what you did to get to the point where you are today.

Yeah, we were— we had completed our first year of BMI, and in the second year of BMI, you pick someone to pair up with. We had a summer between, between BMI semesters, I guess, and I was doing an off-Broadway show and Kellen was working in Times Square. No comment.

I was working on Broadway shows too, passing out flyers for them.

So we were like, we should work on something that we can essentially put up ourselves, something that is a full book musical, because we knew at that point that that was what we were both interested in, not so much doing concerts as writing shows, that had little to no requirements. And so the bare minimum seemed to be a piano, and two actors. It was just one long afternoon at a coffee shop, series of coffee shops that day, and we just kind of hacked out the baseline of this plot. And we decided a lot of things on that first meeting that are still in Murder for Two. Like, we picked the killer that day. We knew that the main character's name was going to be named after our friend Marcus Stevens.

Most of the suspects we had picked out.

Yeah, we had their names and what their jokes were.

I think I still have, actually. That copy date, I mean, we decided that we wanted to do, you know, two actors and a piano something because, like you said, I mean, we knew we were not going to get our big Broadway show up anytime soon and we thought this, at the very least, we can go do this at a small studio with a few friends and feel like we have some control over our lives in terms of producing work and having it be seen. But I remember going to that copy date and I think I still got the sheet of paper. It's got like 10 ideas that could require— like, the third one down was like murder mystery in which our friend Marcus Stevens plays Marcus the detective and Joe plays all the suspects. And one of the other things that we had to our advantage was the fact that Joe is a fantastic piano-playing singer-actor. And so sometimes you just have to sit back and realize, okay, what are your assets? What do you have that another writing team might not have? You know, find a way to turn what you might consider limitations in terms of—

because I'd work for free. So would Marcus.

Into assets.

Thank you, Marcus.

Yeah. And so that, that played a big part in deciding that too. It was like, okay, well, we've got a piano-playing singer-actor, let's use that. We've got a piano, let's use that. And what can we do with those couple of things?

And this was 2009?

2009. Yeah, summer of 2009.

And then when did the first time How did it get put up?

So we did a reading of the show, and the idea was just to do it for 20 friends and basically for it to just be kind of fun. But we did invite one producer who we had come across in our travels, and he kept trying to get out of it, and he kept almost not coming. And then he would email us and be like, oh, I've got something else that night, I have to cancel. And we'd be like, oh, we moved it 10 minutes for you, you can still come.

Yeah, it started at like 6:12 or something.

Some weird time just for this one guy and then 20 of our friends. He came and he, you know, I think he saw potential, the potential that, you know, theaters would do this, especially, you know, at that time with the economy. The other thing that was really inspiring for us— I guess not inspiring necessarily, but helped inspire this idea—

everyone's broke—

was the fact that everybody was broke. Joe was supposed to go do a big show, um, on the West Coast that then got canceled so that they could do 39 Steps. And it was like, this is what theaters are wanting right now, you know, these smaller shows. They're canceling their big shows and they're doing these smaller shows. So I think this guy saw that also happening in the world and saw that potential. And then pretty much from there on, he kind of paved a road of developmental readings and productions.

Yeah, we had like a year of readings at different theaters. Getting potentially other parties interested, which sort of led to reading with a lot of— when a lot of regional theater representatives were in town, and 3 of those theaters were interested in developing it. It was the Adirondack Theatre Festival, which was a year later, and then 42nd Street Moon in San Francisco, which was on Halloween of that 2010, and then Oh, that was fun. And then Chicago Shakespeare Theater, which ultimately got the rights to the world premiere, which they presented in 2011 and was supposed to be a 5-week run that became a 7-month run because it's a cheap show to run.

Yeah, well, that's nice for royalty checks, isn't it?

It was, yeah, very nice. Got a little too used to those for 7 months. They disappeared.

I was like, oh boy. Yeah, that was a sweet time.

But then you go to Second Stage.

Yep. And you got royalty checks. It's a nonprofit.

But you got a really good New York Times review.

Yes, thank you.

And now you are, you're about to take that next step, and that's got to be scary, exciting, all of the above, because now you're not just these little BMI students anymore. All of a sudden, yeah, part of this New York community of people that are creating, and it's an honor.

You know, it's a huge honor.

Yeah. This summer when Murder for Two was at Second Stage, there was a night I was like standing on the sidelines and I looked up and there was like this 80-year-old man sitting next to this 7-year-old girl and they both had this exact same like grin on their face and I was like, oh my god, these people, I don't even know them and they're just sitting here enjoying this. And it was like really one of those, this is why you do it moments. It was great.