Matt Werner's Blog, page 2

The Making of "A Burning Mixtape"

We've been busy in the studio!

Between May, 2015 through July, 2016, Gene Back and I have had the privilege to work with a talented group of vocalists, including Travis Kent, Natalie Weiss, Christina Bianco, Forest VanDyke, Molly Gallagher, and Colin Buckingham.

We've recorded songs from the first half of Burning Man: The Musical, and we're excited to release them to the public on August 22, 2016! The demo recordings will be made available to the public as "A Burning Mixtape."

Click here for photos from the recording sessions

#BARS Workshop - Week 1

Rafael Casal teaching the first #BARS Workshop #2On Monday, July 18, 2016 eighteen poets, rappers, actors, beatboxers, and playwrights gathered at The Public Theater in New York City for the #BARS Workshop #2.

The instructor Rafael Casal said that when he was selecting the eighteen out of hundreds of applicants that he felt like Professor X with Cerebro peering out into the universe and assembling the hip hop theater X-Men. Rafael is an experienced theater instructor with a strong background in hip hop and spoken word. I interviewed him for my book Oakland in Popular Memory. If you haven't seen his work, check out his videos on YouTube.
#BARS Workshop 2nd cohort at the Public TheaterThe goal of the class is to produce a new theater piece that we'll perform and film at The Public Theater on Monday, September 5. We'll be joined by Daveed Diggs and other leading performers in the hip hop theater space for our final performance.

The first class included an introduction to approaching verse and a rap battle exercise. Exiting the class, we ran into Daniel Radcliffe and Amy Poehler in the lobby. They were celebrating the opening night of Privacy at The Public Theater. After the class, we went for drinks at a local spot, and I learned more about the eclectic backgrounds of class participants--from beatboxing to acting in In The Heights, and spoke with some veteran actors who flew out from California specifically for this workshop.
Matt Werner with #BARS instructor Rafael CasalLooking forward to the next 7 weeks!

#BARS Workshop dispatch #1

Rafael Casal teaching the first #BARS Workshop #2On Monday, July 18, 2016 eighteen poets, rappers, actors, beatboxers, and playwrights gathered at The Public Theater in New York City for the #BARS Workshop #2.

The instructor Rafael Casal said that when he was selecting the eighteen out of hundreds of applicants that he felt like Professor X with Cerebro peering out into the universe and assembling the hip hop theater X-Men. Rafael is an experienced theater instructor with a strong background in hip hop and spoken work. I interviewed him book Oakland in Popular Memory. If you haven't seen his work, check out his videos on YouTube.
Matt Werner at the Public TheaterThe goal of the class is to produce a new theater piece that we'll perform and record at The Public Theater on Monday, September 5. We'll be joined by Daveed Diggs and other leading performers in the hip hop theater space for our final performance.

The first class included an introduction to approaching verse and a rap battle exercise. Exiting the class, we ran into Daniel Radcliffe and Amy Poehler in the lobby who were celebrating the opening night of Privacy at The Public Theater. After the class, we went for drinks at a local spot, and I learned more about the eclectic backgrounds of class participants--from beatboxing to acting in In The Heights, and spoke with some veteran actors who flew out from California specifically for this workshop.
Matt Werner with #BARS instructor Rafael CasalLooking forward to the next 7 weeks!

Interview with Daveed Diggs from the Broadway show Hamilton

Interview with Daveed Diggs in 7x7 MagazineBack in 2012, I called Daveed Diggs's Small Things to a Giant my favorite album of the year. I liked how he addressed gentrification in Oakland, made Gertrude Stein references, and put together a stunning album with his collaborators Rafael Casal and Chinaka Hodge.

Well, he's back, and this time with a Grammy. Diggs is an Oakland hip hop artist/actor who's currently starring in the hit musical Hamilton on Broadway. He won a 2016 Grammy award for his performance on the Hamilton cast album, and 7x7 Magazine recently published my interview with Daveed Diggs. The 7x7 interview is just an excerpt, and I've put the full interview below.
Meet the Oakland-Native Who Stars in HamiltonInterview by Matt Werner
Transcription by Korin McGintyBroadway’s breakout musical Hamilton is coming to San Francisco in 2017. Daveed Diggs, a rapper who grew up between Oakland, Albany, and El Cerrito, plays two of the leads: Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson. He’s performed for countless celebrities and political elites, including President Obama twice, the Clintons, Jay-Z, Beyoncé, and anyone who has managed to get a ticket to the hottest show in New York, where tickets on the secondary market routinely sell for over $1,000. So, how did this son of a former DJing Jewish mother and a MUNI bus driving father, who had never acted in New York before, come to star in the hottest show in New York City? We caught up with him in Manhattan and asked.

Daveed Diggs portrait by Laura Tomlinson
How did you first get involved with Lin-Manuel Miranda and the creative team behind Hamilton?

DAVEED DIGGS: Anthony Veneziale was trying to start a West Coast version of Freestyle Love Supreme, and we had both been accidentally called to substitute teach the same class in Marin, and I ended up giving him a ride home. That’s how I first got connected with Lin-Manuel Miranda and this group of people I’m working with now in Hamilton. For the Super Bowl in 2013, ESPN asked Freestyle Love Supreme to do some rapping on SportsNation about sports celebrities. And, they didn’t really want freestyle. This is write your verse and learn it really fast and then go do it in one take live. Which I’ve spent years doing in the Bay with Rafael Casal.

And how did rapping with Freestyle Love Supreme lead to you being cast in Hamilton?

DIGGS: While working on the Super Bowl gig Tommy Kail director of Hamilton had a reading of this play coming up and there was a lot of rap material that needed to be learned quickly. So they asked me to come out to Vassar in July, 2013 to do the first full reading of Hamilton. They sent me the music, and in my head I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna do this, and I’m also never letting anybody else touch this part.’  It was too much fun, and it was too good. I told Tommy to call me every time they had a reading, and I would make it work. So I’d been doing that until they invited me to the workshop in 2014, offered me the part for the Off-Broadway run at the Public Theater, and then we made the jump to Broadway in 2015.

What impressed me seeing Hamilton both Off-Broadway and on Broadway is the sheer energy of the piece, and also how you make these historic people come alive as hip and contemporary. 

DIGGS: Part of the thing about this piece is that we’re trying to take away the distance between us and the founding fathers. So, part of that is about allowing yourself to come through in these characters, and you taking as much ownership over this story as the character would have taken ownership over this story.

Everybody is asked to do so much and everybody has put so much more than they were asked to. It’s kind of a crazy feeling to go through every night. Every once in awhile you get to do something that reminds you why you do a thing, and this is one of those things. We all come out of this bigger than ourselves.

What will Bay Area audiences like about Hamilton?

DIGGS: The show is super multiethnic, but it’s never commented on, that just is the way it is. All the founding fathers are played by people of color, in fact all of the parts except for King George, are played by people of color. And that sounds like it should be a thing, but the real thing about it is that after the first two seconds of the play, it doesn’t matter at all.

And the same thing with the rap music in it right? It is ludicrous to me that it has sort of taken this long for rap music to become a standard part of the theatrical vocabulary because it’s a standard part of every other vocabulary. It’s on commercials all the time; it’s just what popular music sounds like. People come up to us afterwards and be like, ‘That was amazing. The rap music belonged so well, and I understood every word.’ Of course you understood every word--you hear it all day long. So I think those are the things about the show that, at least from my experience in the Bay I would find interesting. In a place that prides itself on multiculturalism, this play really embodies that.

What Bay Area hip hop aesthetic do you bring to your performance? 

DIGGS: In the Bay we breed nimble-tongued rappers, and we also over enunciate. We hit our R’s really hard--that’s just what rappers sound like in the Bay. When Lin-Manuel Miranda first started working with me on this show he was like, ‘Great, I can write things that are faster than I would be capable of doing them because you can do that.’ So I get a lot of really good fast rap moments. I get some stuff that really plays to my strengths.

Being from the Bay and working with people like Rafael Casal, that’s why I can do that. It’s because that’s what rap music has always sounded like to me. At the same time while Lin was listening to A Tribe Called Quest and Biggie, I was listening to E-40 and to Keak Da Sneak. These were my major influences at the time. It allows me to bring some of that onto the table.

Would you go as far to say you bring a Hyphy influence to your portrayal of Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson?

DIGGS: I probably bring a Hyphy influence to everything that I do, to be honest. So I guess it is fair to say, but I probably bring that same influence to like, you know, getting a sandwich.

In our prior conversation about being an Oakland artist in New York City, you said “You take Oakland with you.” Could you elaborate on that?

DIGGS: I don’t get to do Hamilton without knowing Rafael Casal. Or Bill Hutson and Chinaka Hodge, none of this happens without me knowing these people. And none of it happens without Oakland, that’s the city that I take with me everywhere that I go. And I’m very proud to be from there. It’s nice to be in a room full of New Yorkers and to be from Oakland, and to be holding my own and bringing an energy into the pot that they didn’t really know existed because we’re so overlooked in terms of being a real viable commercial arts community. But it is. So many great artists come from there. So I’m gonna keep shouting it all the time. It’s kinda my thing.

Read the interview on 7x7

Oakland Unseen First Season Launches!

The first season of the web series Oakland Unseen is online! Oakland Unseen is Oakland, California's premiere source for fake news in the tradition of the Daily Show. Watch the series on YouTube.

From ‘Hipster Ariel’ to Sparkle Pony, Meet Molly Gallagher from Burning Man: The Musical

Molly Gallagher performing as Sparkle PonyMolly Gallagher plays the character Sparkle Pony in Burning Man: The Musical. We caught up with her to discuss her experience on the first video shoot, her theater training at NYU, and how her character is a Disney princess meets a badass ninja warrior.

You can watch her and others perform the opening to Burning Man: The Musical live at the 10-minute musical theater festival Sound Bites on January 18, 2015 in New York City. - Burning Man: The Musical team

How did you first get involved with Burning Man: The Musical?

Matt Werner (the writer) saw me in other videos on YouTube and thought I would be good for this project so he asked me to play Sparkle Pony! I got extremely lucky.

How did you prepare to sing all of the female vocals on the opening track? What was that experience like?

I was first sent a recording of the composer singing the song and a lyrics sheet. I listened to it a million times before I went to record. When I got there I was really nervous because I am a crazy person, and I always get nervous but Gene and Matt were both super supportive. I pretty much just followed their direction the whole time and it came out sounding amazing.

What is it that you like most about the character of Sparkle Pony? What have you done to make the character your own?

Sparkle Pony pretty much embodies the spirit of Burning Man. She's all about love, sharing, community and just having a really great time. She's extremely passionate about Burning Man and about life in general, which is a quality that I admire and hope that I posses as well. It's always really fun to get to be the first to bring a character to life because the character forever becomes a reflection of you (the actor).

Molly Gallagher as Sparkle PonyDuring the filming of Burning Man: The Musical over the weekend of August 8 and 9th, you wore a dazzling Burning Man costume. What was that experience like?

It was absolutely amazing! Originally I had no idea what to expect in regards to costumes but Suzie Ford, the costume designer, did an amazing job! The costume I wore was a collection of actual Burners’ clothing and the hood was handmade! And getting my makeup done by an actual makeup artist, Dori Jay made me feel so amazing and beautiful.

Molly Gallagher with co-star Travis Kent between shootsWhat were your favorite onstage and offstage moments from the Burning Man: The Musical shoot?

I think my favorite part on set was getting to ride on the amazing art car made by Allan Haigh. I always love getting to work with Travis Kent, we did videos together on the AVbyte channel and have become really amazing friends.... Plus he's amazingly talented and funny. I also loved getting to meet so many new amazing people. The whole cast and crew made me feel so special and loved.

Could you talk more about your theater training and education at NYU? Which past roles have you played that prepared you for this role?

I am a vocal performance major concentrating in musical theater. It is a bachelor of music degree inside of a liberal arts college, so I have classes that range from music theory to “Visible and Invisible Cities.” I’m in my senior year, and I've had the privilege of working with two really amazing voice teachers during my time here: Tyley Ross (freshman and sophomore year) and Kristen Ruiz (my current teacher).

The program is classically based so my teachers pretty much took everything I thought I knew about singing and changed it completely. It was a HUGE adjustment in the beginning, but I am learning a much more efficient way of singing.

I've had the privilege of playing a lot of strong female characters that are willing to stand up and fight for what they believe in, and that is something that helped me a lot when preparing to play Sparkle Pony. I like to think of Sparkle Pony as Éponine from Les Mis meets Mimi from Rent, meets every Disney princess, meets a badass ninja warrior.

Molly Gallagher with Danny Bellini playing "Burning Man cop" between shootsWhat reaction have you heard from friends and family about you being in the video?

Everyone seems to love it and they can't wait to see the full musical! My friend’s dad actually heard me mentioned on the WB Chicago news radio one morning a while back, which I think is really awesome.

What’s next for Sparkle Pony? What can we expect from her in future scenes?

You’ll have to wait and see.

Meet Travis Kent, the lead in Burning Man: The Musical

Travis Kent as Joe in Burning Man: The MusicalTravis Kent plays the lead character Joe in Burning Man: The Musical. We caught up with him after the shoot to discuss skydiving into Burning Man, his past roles of playing an insane asylum inmate and a televangelist preacher, and his background in Irish dance. -Burning Man: The Musical team

How did you first get involved with Burning Man: The Musical?

I did a solo concert at 54 Below in April, 2015, and Matt Werner came to see me perform. He gave me his card, and the rest is history!

How did you prepare to sing all of the male vocals on the opening track? What was that experience like?

With a good vocal warm up. Ha ha. And plenty of water. I’m used to creating distinctive character voices through my work with the YouTube channel AVbyte. It was fun to create so many vocal characters all in one day for Burning Man. Usually I’m playing one character for a day, but in recording Burning Man, I got to bring an entire company of characters to the microphone in one session.

What is it that you like most about the character of Joe? What have you done to make the character your own?

I like Joe’s ambitious perseverance. No challenge is insurmountable to him, and he doesn’t take no for an answer. Even when it seems impossible to achieve his goals, he finds a way to make it work. Joe and I are both really active dreamers, but where we differ is that he spends his work days behind a desk with a computer screen. My work life couldn’t be farther from that! So to bring myself closer to him I added personal touches like my Rubik’s cube to his work space.

Travis Kent (right), with Mitzi Akaha and Yaron UrbasDuring the filming of Burning Man: The Musical over the weekend of August 8 and 9th, you were quite ill. Do you want to talk about that?

No. Ha ha. But I will. I got a stomach bug the night before we started shooting. In the first day of shooting, which included the shots in the office space and on the rooftop captured over 13 hours, I ate two bananas and about a half gallon of gatorade. By the end of the second day, I was feeling significantly better, and after two days of starving with no appetite, the slice of pizza at the end of the shoot was the best thing I’d ever tasted.

In the photos on Facebook, we see there’s a deleted scene of you hanging from a rope in front of a green screen. Can you describe that shoot?

I really can’t wait to see the bloopers of that footage because there’s so much gold in it. The original concept for the opening sequence of the video was to see Joe skydiving into Burning Man (If you watch closely, you can see that I throw a parachute pack out of frame at the beginning of the studio-lit dream scene). To achieve the effect, I was suspended from the ceiling of a Brooklyn studio space by a rock climbing harness turned backwards with an air compressor blowing in my face as I sang the opening lyrics. It was by far the most painful thing I’ve ever done for the fine art of acting. Ha ha. The idea ultimately got scrapped as the deadline quickly approached, but the memories will last forever.
Travis Kent skydiving into Burning Man in deleted scene (photo by Jianna Hall)What were your favorite onstage and offstage moments from the Burning Man: The Musical shoot?

It was really a pleasure getting to know everyone in our incredibly diverse cast and crew while the camera wasn’t rolling. It’s an amazing group of collaborators with boundless amounts of creativity and artistic vision. I especially enjoyed learning how to juggle from Kat and conversely teaching her how to solve a Rubik’s cube. On camera I really enjoyed filming options for the moment when Steve Jobs reaches out of the frame of his portrait and touches Joe. It was at the end of the second day of shooting, and we were being as ridiculous as we could be. I also loved filming the dream sequence. Those shots involved almost the entire company and required a lot of precision choreography around a moving camera. Way to go, team!

Could you talk more about your theater training and education at NYU? Which past roles have you played that prepared you for this role?

I trained at the Atlantic Theater Company and CAP21 in my time at NYU. In that time I played a Latin-American political prisoner, a disgruntled English school boy, a sexually frustrated German teenager, a disco Shakespearean war hero, a presidential assassin, a televangelist preacher, and a rebellious insane asylum inmate… So I don’t think any of those roles have quite prepared me to play an entrepreneurial techie. Ha ha. I do always love a new challenge, though!

What reaction have you heard from friends and family about you being in the video?

My friends and family are loving the video! It’s making people who don’t know about Burning Man really curious as to what it is, and my friends who do know about or have even been to Burning Man think it’s hilarious. My grandma has no idea what happened in the entire five minutes, but she loved it still!

You have already played characters in viral musical videos on YouTube, such as Sherlock: The Musical on AVbyte. How was the filming of Burning Man: The Musical similar or different to those?

Filming Burning Man was a veeeery different process from filming the AVbyte videos. First of all the scale of the production for the Burning Man shoot dwarfed that of an AVbyte shoot. I think there were somewhere around 50 people involved with shooting Burning Man. A typical AVbyte shoot involved around six people. The timing was very different too. The amount of time between my first meeting with Matt to discuss the script and characters for Burning Man and the release of the finished video was about three months whereas the amount of time between Antonius (the composer of AVbyte) pitching an idea to me and release of a finished video was never more than a week. The process was also reversed for Burning Man. To make videos so quickly for AVbyte, we would record the video to a scratch track and then record the audio to match the video at a later date. For Burning Man, we recorded the audio track long before we started filming. It’s fun as an actor to experience different styles of production and see how they manifest in the final product.

Given your dance background, can we expect any Irish dancing in this?

Ha ha. I guess you’ll just have to wait and see. ;)

Support Burning Man: The Musical on Indiegogo

We launched our campaign to fund the next songs and videos for Burning Man: The Musical on August, 24, 2015. The campaign is to fund the creation of the next songs and accompanying videos for this new musical about Silicon Valley and Burning Man. Please support our project!

Burning Man: The Musical now on YouTube!

We launched the first video from Burning Man: The Musical on Monday, August 24, 2015. For more info, please visit http://burningmanthemusical.com.

A Night of Revelry or Riots? Giants Win the World Series

Photo, video, and text by Joe Sciarrillo, November 1, 2014

The Giants won their 3rd World Series in 5 years on October 29, 2014, and San Franciscans took to the street ecstatic from the victory. From the crowds jumping over the blazing fires set in the middle of Mission Street to the champagne spilling out of boutique wine bars, Giants celebrations were portrayed by the media as a tale of two cities. But there's more to the city's celebrations than meets the eye. They included culminations of socio-economic and political movements that have been taking place in San Francisco and the Bay Area since even before the Giants 2010 win.
Police intervene on celebrations in the Mission District after the Giants won the 2014 World SeriesSocial media and headline news focused on the mayhem and crowds in the Mission District, such as people taking selfies in front of a burning couch, or the video of a girl trying to cross the police line to catch her Uber car. While crowds got chaotic later in the night, right after the game, the majority of the Mission was filled with people from different backgrounds gathered in the streets together cheering and dancing on the warm night. The constant sound of drums, honking horns, loud-bass stereos, and "Let's Go Giants!" chants were reminiscent of the Mission's Carnaval celebrations.

Giants post-season wins have served, since 2010, as a chance for city residents, and those living in neighboring cities, to reclaim public spaces as their own. At a time when the city's population grows denser, long-standing businesses are shutting down or are being pushed out, Ellis Act evictions are skyrocketing, and the 49ers moved to Santa Clara, the Giants are one of the remaining cultural institutions that all San Franciscans can celebrate together.

While many outdoor celebrations were diverse, with hipsters and homies chugging beers and dancing side-by-side, the city's segregated elements were also apparent. In the early hours after the Giants' World Series win, Valencia Street at 16th and 19th Streets was filled with large crowds of mostly white 20 to 30-year-olds spraying Pabst Blue Ribbon and champagne. On Mission Street at 19th and 22nd Streets, largely Latino youth, with an increasing trickle of white bar-hoppers, lit small fires and danced on car hoods. There were also mostly Latino youth at the sideshows on 24th Street and South Van Ness, with lowriders booming their music to 24th and Folsom. As the night grew on, the crowds on Mission and Valencia mixed to reflect the city’s demographics.
A six-year old pleads with fans to not riot in the Mission District before the Giants won. (image credit: Andrea Valencia)What was a joyful celebration got out of hand after 10pm in some parts of the city. Some areas were more chaotic than other years, but at least no Muni bus was set on fire like in 2012. However, those in the street did not heed the six-year-old’s letter posted on Mission Local earlier in the week, calling people to not hurt the neighborhood.

Around 10pm, I witnessed roughly ten police officers in riot gear trying to break up a crowd gathered around a fire in the intersection of 22nd and Mission Street. As police tried to push back the crowd, they were met with over a half dozen glass bottles being thrown at them within 30 seconds. The police quickly retreated while several firemen entered the crowd to douse the flames. I had never seen police retreat like that in my years covering Bay Area demonstrations, from the Occupy to Oscar Grant protests, to the 2010 and 2012 Giants wins. Police Chief Greg Suhr said at a news conference, “To the clowns that came to San Francisco to act out, I guess you just don’t know what it’s like to have a good time without being a jerk, and we had a lot of them last night.”

SFPD fatal shootings of Oshaine Evans and Alex Nieto during the past year also exacerbated tensions between those taking to the streets and the police who responded. Protests for both Evans and Nieto occurred during post-season games, in which participants drew parallels to what’s been happening in San Francisco to the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. In both games, the Giants played teams located not far from Ferguson (St. Louis and Kansas City).

In the end, after the World Series “revelry” or “riots” (depending on where you stand on the issue), two people were non-fatally shot, and 40 were arrested after the World Series in San Francisco, with at least 6 of them in the Mission. 36 were arrested in 2012. Only 6 were arrested after the Giants won the World Series in 2010.

~
Joe Sciarrillo lives and works in San Francisco's Mission District. He's co-author of Bay Area Underground: Photos of Protests and Social Movements, 2008-2012.