Feature: LAKE NORMAL at Theatre Under The Stars' Student New Works Series

If someone told me they were making Twin Peaks: The Musical, I would probably already be interested. And that is essentially how director Mitchell Greco described Lake Normal, the newest project in Theatre Under The Stars' Student New Works Series. And while it is definitely NOT officially Twin Peaks: The Musical, the writing team of Ben Chavez and Yianni Papadimos describe their original work as “a spooky Christmas Carol with ghosts, drinks, a mysterious death, and a lakeside community.” But what makes Lake Normal particularly fascinating is how the story is being created, and how students got to see “how the sausage is made.” TUTS brought together 27 high school performers, ranging from ninth graders to those who recently graduated in the class of 2026, and gave them a brand-new musical to develop with these professional creators. The entire process took place at a breakneck speed: rehearsals began Monday, August 3rd, and the students presented a partially staged reading of the complete one-act musical just days later on Saturday, August 8th. Nobody even heard the entire script read aloud together until that first day.

"It's a wild, fast process," director Mitchell Greco stated. “That's part of what makes this program so unique. This is one of the only ones like this in the country, where students get to experience something like the professional world. We have a 29-hour reading, which is a contract you can get with Equity, and you have actors for 29 hours to put it together. Take a new work, and put it on its feet to read it. This is our version with students, but they're doing this in real time. From Monday, we started. No one had, I mean, including us, no one had heard the script aloud, altogether.” 

Lake Normal is genuinely new. Book writer Yianni Papadimos and composer Ben Chavez created the musical specifically for TUTS. The two have been writing together for 13 years and have four full-length musicals under their belts, but this project gave them something particularly valuable: a room full of young actors willing to test-drive their newest creation. The musical follows a group of friends returning to a lakeside community to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the death of a friend who died under mysterious circumstances. Her death happened around Christmas, which explains the holiday-meets-horror quality, and also the Twin Peaks pitch. There are ghosts. There are drinks. There is a mystery.

The students had to learn approximately 12 songs in roughly two and a half days. Some feature challenging harmonies and complicated duets. There is no elaborate set, no finished costume plot, and no Broadway-style production. Instead, director Mitchell Greco is working with music stands, chairs, a few stairs, and essentially, "bodies in space." The goal is to give a test audience a glimpse of what the show might eventually become. The creative team changed the script during rehearsals. Lines were cut, scenes were adjusted, and songs were tested on actual student performers rather than imagined voices in a composer's head. That kind of immediate feedback is invaluable because the book’s writer, Papadimos, can write a scene in one room, and composer Chavez can record himself singing harmony parts in another spare room, but eventually the material has to meet actual performers. "You gotta hear it on performers who are doing it live for an audience," Ben Chavez says. “And suddenly, the theoretical becomes very real.”

One potential challenge was obvious: The characters in Lake Normal are adults in their late 20s and early 30s, while the actors playing them are high school age. Yet Greco says the students approached the material with surprising maturity. "They are approaching it with so much maturity and groundedness," he said. "You would think that they are late 20s, early 30s." The biggest lessons these students take away from the experience—not simply how to perform, but how theater actually gets made. Theatre Under the Stars hopes they return to their schools and approach a familiar musical like Addams Family or Sound of Music differently, understanding that those seemingly finished productions once went through countless conversations, revisions, and decisions. “In other words, they're getting to see how the sausage gets made. And perhaps some of them will decide they want to make their own sausage. We need more voices out there," Mitchell Greco said. Ben  Chavez and  Yianni Papadimos know something about starting young. Their own writing partnership began when they were college students living together and working on a musical about Barbie and Ken. That project eventually went to the New York Musical Festival, but it started with a student New Works project.

So perhaps Lake Normal isn't just about producing a new musical. Maybe it is about giving the next generation of musical theater writers permission to try. "You don't have to be like Jason Robert Brown to write a new musical," Chavez says. "You can just... start somewhere." And for 27 Houston-area students, that "somewhere" happened to be a mysterious lake, a dead friend, a Christmas gathering, a handful of ghosts—and a musical that was still being written while they rehearsed it. Welcome to Twin Peaks, kids! 

Photo provided by Elizabeth Gentry