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Tufts alum Allan Rice (A’04) is set to premier his new musical, Neurosis, at the Daryl Roth Theater in Union Square, New York City. ExCollege Director Howard Woolf recently sat down with Allan to learn more about the “musical that gets in your head.”
Allan was a member of the ExCollege Board as an undergraduate, and he has written for shows including The New Adventures of Old Christine on CBS, I Hate my Teenage Daughter on Fox, and Wendell and Vinny on Nickelodeon. He also wrote thirteen episodes of a show called Partners on FX with Martin Lawrence and Kelsey Grammar, and most recently, three seasons on a popular Disney show and single-camera comedy calledStuck in the Middle.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
HOWARD: Let’s start with you telling us more about yourself and how you first got started in media.
ALLAN: I graduated from Tufts in 2004 with a degree in Clinical Psychology. My other passion was making movies and doing improv comedy, some theater… I should probably give a shout out to Cheap Sox.
I realized after graduating and moving back home to LA that, while clinical psychology was interesting, it was not something I wanted to do professionally. Instead, I disappointed my parents by pursing the entertainment business. I started out as a night Production Assistant (PA) on TV shows where I would go and deliver scripts in the middle in the night before there were PDFs or before PDFs were popular. I worked my way up to being in writers’ rooms, and eventually I started writing on various TV shows.
HOWARD: Let's jump right into Neurosis, the musical. How did this idea get started and what made you move back to theater as opposed to writing another screenplay or pilot?
ALLAN: It was definitely a new experience for me; I'd never written a musical before, and I had only taken part in three musicals in my life – in high school. I've really only seen four of them professionally made, but I obviously always loved them. I loved watching them on TV or at the movies, and for some reason, it seemed funny to me for people to sing about their issues in a blunt way. The idea originally started during the writers’ strike. I'm embarrassed to admit, but I'm also happy to admit that I was listening to music and trying to create mashups.
I had no work, I was really bored trying to create these mashups on Garage Band, and I couldn't. From there I thought, what if I wrote a rap to go over a song that already exists? I ended up writing these neurotic raps about a guy who goes to a club with a woman; she wants to dance, but he doesn't because he's uncomfortable dancing – “You want to dance, but I'm too scared. I should have told you I’m neurotic, so you would have been prepared.”
Obviously, based on this story, I did not have a girlfriend at the time. I continued writing these raps, though, and they kept flowing based on whatever the song title was, each becoming its own story.
I eventually allowed one of my Tufts friends to listen to them while I was visiting Boston, and he said, “What if this was a musical?” And that was all he said.
Later that night, I basically brainstormed everything. I actually recently looked at my notes from when I first started writing a Word document with all the ideas, and the first entry is exactly what the logline still is for the show, which is either impressive or bad since you would think it would change over time. The basic premise of the show was the same from that initial nugget of an idea to what it is now, ten years later.
HOWARD: And give us the logline!
ALLAN: The quick elevator pitch is about a guy named Frank, whose best friend in life is his neurosis, basically all of his issues personified in a character on stage. It's a buddy comedy about their relationship, how it goes south, and how they can repair it. Meanwhile, there's a woman named Abby, who has her own set of issues, her own neurosis. Only they can see their neuroses, so they have private conversations with themselves while also talking to other people. After Frank and Abby make a connection, the story centers on whether two people can fall in love despite their issues and how they can make it work.
HOWARD: Looking back, where did you draw inspiration?
ALLAN: The idea partially sprang from the fact that I had been in therapy for a long time. The main character has a breakdown, goes into therapy, and works out his issues. That is how I viewed my own experiences in life. Everything that was holding me back was very clear to me, and I could see it, but it wasn't something I could get past. It was like this other person was right there, the little voice inside your head.Of course, these aren’t new concepts – to be staging what people are thinking. But the truth is, while the poster is a love story, the musical is really a buddy comedy. It’s the relationship between the guy and himself and the woman and herself. That's what's most interesting to me. So, hopefully the show has a lot of layers, and you can watch it multiple times.
HOWARD: Great! You've got a production almost ready to go. You've got a theater, you've got times lined up. When is it opening and how can someone go see it and what are you expecting the experience to be?
ALLAN: It's in a delightful ninety-nine seat theater, the DR2, which is a part of the Daryl Roth Theater in Union Square, NYC. You can expect to laugh, you can expect to cry. We'd like you to. It's okay to feel your feelings. Previews begin on July 25th and the official opening is August 17th through October. We encourage people to come as soon as possible and to go to www.neurosisthemusical.com. We're building out the website now, so it should have a lot more information.
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