This is essentially what my interview with Josua looked like. Photo by Kate Hess. Image courtesy Bushwick Starr.
I think the best show I saw last month was The House of Von Macramé, a madcap, bloody musical currently playing at The Bushwick Starr. Today, I interviewed the playwright, Joshua Conkel.
What makes fashion such a juicy subject for a musical?
I’ve always loved fashion. I love clothes. I think of clothes as art, and I love the way that people can express themselves through what they wear. What I don’t love is materialism and label whoring and that sort of stuff. I find that really unappealing. That comes into conflict a lot in my life.
You like fashion, but not the fashion industry.
Yeah. It’s fun to make fun of. In terms of theater, theater is pretty geeky, and I for one would like theater to be cooler and hipper and more wild. So the play was an attempt at that.
The music was certainly a lot cooler than most of what you’ll hear in a musical, even a contemporary one. The synth has a lot of sex in it.
A lot of these rock musicals are not rock musicals. Rent is the nerdiest thing that ever existed, and nothing like the Bohemian 90′s sound that it’s pretending to be.
Read the rest here, sucker.
When the interview was posted, Conkel posted this on Twitter:
I think it's my favorite thing anyone's ever said after an interview. He's wrong, though. He doesn't sound like a dick—he sounds like a guy who's sorry that the artform he loves is too often held hostage by lameness. I think many of us can relate to that.