“Dmitry & Me.”
Surround yourself with geniuses. I make it a rule. Or try to.
Dmitry Koltunov is an uncommon kind of genius. When we sat down for breakfast at what was to be a sort of arranged marriage to see if we would work together on a musical he was writing that would be taken to a development incubator at my alma mater, CCM’s music theatre department, I was skeptical.
What I knew about Dmitry was that he had been trying to get this thing going for a while about a boy (of vaguely Russian extraction) named Jim and a girl with a guitar named Jackie who comes into his bar. There was a book that no one really wanted me to read, some poetic if inscrutable lyrics, and some really, really, really good music. Unique, yet somehow familiar, it had a folk earthiness to it that was difficult to pinpoint at first, a great deal of variety (pop, funk, hip-hop, classic Broadway), and all of it made somehow cohesive.
But his show was the Russian Once. “Why would I want to work on the Russian Once?”, I asked him at breakfast, annoyingly. “I barely liked the Irish Once.”
Dmitry proceeded to tell me his story. The son of Russian immigrants, Dmitry and his family emigrated to New York from Ukraine in the shadow of Chernobyl, essentially escaping to Brighton Beach, where he was given a chance at the American Dream. Feeling responsible for repaying their sacrifice, he graduated with honors from U-Penn, became a Senior VP at a hedge fund owned by JP Morgan, and just before it crashed, made the decision to leave and found his own internet startup (a global company worth many millions) and then came to direct a startup community of close to 300 founders. I waited for him to get this story out, before I said -- “Uh, why aren’t we writing that? That’s a musical.”
And so it was. Those “poetic if inscrutable” lyrics turned out to be the perfect match for my nuts-and-bolts practical storytelling style, and we wrote the first draft of the first act in the first ten days of the CCM incubator, and put it on the voraciously talented group of kids there, under the direction of Shaun Pecknic, who miraculously managed to put on a full presentation of it with staging and choreography in under two weeks, as we sent pages down to the rehearsal studio on campus. Dmitry’s computer brain made the development of this complex story, that spanned thirty years, two continents, and three worlds, remarkably efficient. While he was writing new songs and spotting where to place his old ones (unerringly, I must add), he fashioned a computerized flow-chart to keep track of all the ages of the characters as they progressed relative to the story points and locales. He is a stunning combination of a beautiful mind with a truly beautiful soul. It comes across in his songs.
I can’t wait for you to hear them.
Two-and-a-half years later, after many revisions, rethinking, restructuring, workshops, research trips to Brighton Beach and internet startup seminars, Fallout is ready to go, whenever theatre is. In the meantime, I have made one of the best friends I could ever hope to have. Na zdarovya.