Pop Culturalist Chats with Max Vernon

Max Vernon’s star is rising. Last year, his Off-Broadway musical KPOP took New York by storm. It was nominated for a bunch (and won some) awards and enjoyed a sold-out run. And, to top it all off, he had another show premiere last year, The View UpStairs, which he wrote the book, music, and lyrics for; that was also successful.

But Vernon isn’t resting on his laurels. He’s been hard at work on his first-ever residency at Joe’s Pub at The Public in New York City entitled Max Vernon: Existential Life Crisis Lullaby. Not only will he be sharing songs from his popular shows, but he will also be sharing new music from his upcoming new musical. Each residency show will have a unique set, costumes, and special guests. We were able to snag him in between sewing sessions (yes, he is working on hundreds of costumes for the Joe’s Pub shows!) and chat with him about the residency and his art.

PC: What drew you to music and theater and wanting to create shows?
Max: Musical theater was my first passion. When I was four or five years old I remember my dad playing Les Mis. I would sing along, and I had a dream that somehow I was going to be Cosette on Broadway—which would have been a very gender-fucked version of that role. So, I loved musical theater; like many people of my generation, I was obsessed with Rent.

But then, around the time of twelve or thirteen years old, I started becoming very, very bullied in school because in a pre-Lady Gaga world dressing like a crazy person wasn’t socially acceptable and celebrated. I was twelve or thirteen years old, and I was wearing face makeup and kimonos and bondage boots and all kind of crazy outfits to school as a part of my creative expression. I was getting called “faggot” five times a day. So, I took a hard left in my life. I became very embarrassed of my love of musical theater, and I divorced myself from that part of my identity. I got really into punk music, fashion, art, and drugs and sex and all that stuff. That was kind of like the next ten years of my life. Then, around twenty-two, I had the realization that I still really, deeply loved theater. The next eight years of my life have been [about] how I can stitch these two parts of my life back together and how I can write musicals that appeal to people that maybe don’t like musical theater, feel more radical and experimental, and relevant to the music we’re hearing. [Musicals that are] full of fashion and punk and sex and all those subversive things we like so much.

PC: What is your creative process like?
Max: I honestly don’t really know where my ideas come from. I channel them. The same thing with music. I’m not the kind of person who sits at a piano and tinkers around for hours and hours and hours trying to find a melody. The melody and lyrics will just show up fully formed in my head. I feel, similarly, with the ideas. I just wake up, and I know. For me, I feel like that’s what creativity is: creativity is the WiFi, and all of our brains are laptops. We’re trying to get connected. There’s certainly moments where my connection goes in and out and I have to reboot the modem, but, at the moment, I feel like I have a high speed connection.

I’m really into excavating forgotten histories. I want to put stories and communities on stage that have never been on stage before with actors and bodies that typically do not have representation. I love “Golden Age of Broadway” stuff, but, typically, I will not put that type of material into a show unless lyrically there’s some way to make it subversive. Like, if there’s a tap dance number that’s like a Busby Berkeley thing, but it’s about dismantling the patriarchy…then that’s dope. But, otherwise, I want to write musical theater that is incorporating synth music and R&B and soul and punk and white noise. I want to include genres of music that haven’t been in a musical before.

PC: Do you work with collaborators? 
Max: It depends. For The View UpStairs and my other musical that I’m going to premiere in November, I did book, music, and lyrics. For KPOP, I just did music, lyrics, and orchestration. For The Tattooed Lady, I did music, lyrics, and orchestration. But, you may know, for KPOP the playwright is Jason Kim. For The Tattooed Lady the playwright is Erin Courtney. So, it depends. I love writing by myself, but there has to be a justification for why I would do that. It has to be a story that’s so personal to me that I really feel like I’m the best person for the job to write it. In the case of KPOP, I felt like it was important that that show, because it’s about Korean identity, to be written by a Korean writer. In the case of The Tattooed Lady, it’s an all female ensemble; even though I am gender non-binary or somewhere on the fluid spectrum, I felt like it was really important to work with a female-bodied playwright because they have a different perspective into all those issues which is especially important for a story that is all about women and their body.

PC: Was there a goal or thought behind how you wanted to create the residency show and present it?
Max: I haven’t done a solo show at Joe’s Pub in six years because even though my shows sell out, I lose thousands of dollars. Some artists are the type of people that can do a show and it’s just them and piano and that’s the thing; but, that’s not what I’m about as an artist. I’m about creating experiences, creating spectacle. I have, you know, performers, all these costumes I created, a full band, and a full ensemble so it takes a lot of energy.

I basically had to save up money to lose money. I had, as a composer, about eight years of struggling to get my kind of radical vision of musical theater seen and heard. But I had a really breakthrough year this year. KPOP was the most nominated show of the season, and my other musical, The View UpStairs, is now licensed for twelve productions around the world. This all happened in about six months, really. I wanted to celebrate that and give something back to the fans and the people who have been on this journey with me. Each show, I get a new surrogate family of fifty people so, at this point, I feel like I have an army of 500 creatives. I wanted to bring some of my favorites back to sing with me and to bring in some new dope people who I idolize who I haven’t had a chance to work with like Tonya Pinkins and Daphne Rubin-Vega. I just really pay homage to the three shows I’ve written: The Tattooed Lady, The View UpStairs, and KPOP.

PC: Do you have something about the show that you’re really excited for audiences to see?
Max: Before I started becoming known as a musical theater writer, I was really a singer-songwriter in the city. Before the age of twenty-two, I had performed over 100 concerts in the city. Over the past eight years, as my musicals have started getting known, I’ve pushed that to the side, and I’ve let other performers take the stage and perform my work. At my show, even if there are other performers, I’ll be performing three to four songs so I’m excited to take the stage again and show people what I can do as a performer—not just sing, but tell people about my life, my experiences, and the parallels between that and the shows I write.

PC: I’m sure you have had interactions with fans who have been effected by your work. Do you feel pressure to write a certain way because of that?
Max: I feel like if you were to look at what the through line is for all my pieces, I write about outsiders. Like I said, I was bullied. I felt like such an outsider for so much of my life. I still do, frankly, in the musical theater community even though I have some legitimacy. I feel like I still get side-eye from some people because I’m more Siouxsie Sioux than Sondheim. I write about all these different communities. For The View UpStairs, the community of people that feel very seen and heard by the 70s glam rock aesthetic are not necessarily the kind of of outsider community that really resonates with tattooed ladies and the freak show in the circus, or the kind of community that resonated with pop stars in Seoul in 2018. So, even though I write about outsiders, all outsiders are not the same. I don’t feel like fans of The View UpStairs have to love my other shows. I want it to resonate with the people it resonates with. In a more general sense, I’ve seen people be really moved by my work, and people have told me my work is uncompromising and truthful. That kind of feedback made me want to double down on that and be unafraid to really write stuff that feels radical for the genre.

PC: Looking to the future, is there a dream project you would like to do?
Max: I’m really excited about The Tattooed Lady and Show and Tell, my show about the apocalypse. I think those pieces are game-changers, and I think they’ll really impact people in the theater community. So far, I’ve only written original musicals, but, oh my God, if I could adapt something I would love to adapt Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as a musical. I would love to potentially adapt a painting like Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights and look at his depiction of Hell which is so imaginative and real. [I want to] subvert our expectations of the people in Hell and have it be a satire of our world.

PC: What would you tell your younger self ?
Max: It’s a marathon, not a sprint. You think it’s going to take a year, but it’s going to take a decade. Keep being fearless; keep pushing ahead; keep your nose to the ground and keep working. Keep writing.

Pop Culturalist Speed Round

Last TV show you Binge watched
Beauty and the Beach

Favorite Movie
Welcome to the Dollhouse by Todd Solondz…would also love to adapt that!

Favorite Book
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Favorite Place
Joshua Tree

Place You Most Want to Visit
Seoul, Korea

Five People You’d Invite to a Dinner Party
Stevie Wonder, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Joni Mitchell, Anna Wintour, and Annie Baker

Be sure to follow Max Vernon on Twitter and Instagram. For more information on his Joe’s Pub shows, click here. 

Photo Credit: Roberto Araujo