Interview: Sean Persaud, Sinéad Persaud, Mary Kate Wiles, And Dylan Glatthorn on EDGAR ALLAN POE’S MURDER MYSTERY DINNER PARTY THE MUSICAL

Ten years after it first premiered on YouTube, Edgar Allan Poe’s Murder Mystery Dinner Party, created by Shipwrecked Comedy, is taking on a new life on the stage! Edgar Allan Poe’s Murder Mystery Dinner Party The Musical (referred to in the article as Poe Party) arrives in Los Angeles in August, with performances from the 21st to the 28th. Poe Party follows Edgar Allan Poe and his ghostly housemate, Lenore, as they host several different famous authors for a murder mystery party - but what happens when the murders become real?

Recently, we had the chance to speak with Sean Persaud (Edgar Allan Poe, Book/Additional Lyrics), Sinéad Persaud (Lenore, Book/Additional Lyrics), Mary Kate Wiles (Annabel Lee), and Dylan Glatthorn (Composer) about bringing Poe Party to the stage. We discussed how it first came about as an online video series, what the creative process has been like turning the series into a stage musical, and even some of their favorite authors in Poe Party!

Can you tell us a bit about how Poe Party first came about?

Sean: Sinéad and I started Shipwrecked Comedy with a series of sketches about Edgar Allan Poe and his ghostly roommate, Lenore. In one of them, you [Sinéad] improvised a bit about hosting a dinner party, and we were like, “Oh, that would actually be a really fun series!” And we love Clue . . . 

Sinéad: And classic authors!

Sean: So we were like, “Let's do that!” And we thought of that eleven years ago.

Mary-Kate: Longer than that!

Sinéad: Yeah! Kickstarted it back in the high era of YouTube web series, and it was pretty successful for the time, in terms of raising money on Kickstarter. Now we can't imagine how we did it with that little money! And now that it's the ten-year anniversary, we're like, “How do we celebrate with something special? Oh, a full musical!”

What is it like to be returning to the show ten years later?

Sinéad: It's pretty fun!

Sean: Well, we've grown as writers, and in ten years we've looked back and found a lot of things about the original that we would have changed, or we would have done differently. So, what started as an exercise to put music in this thing has become an almost total rewrite!

Sinéad: I feel like most people don't get to revisit their work in such a way. Now we go through the script, and we're like, “Wow, we can punch up jokes, we can cut things that didn't make sense.” And we have help making this one cohesive, so maybe it'll be better!

Mary-Kate: I think it might be better! The more we're into it, I'm just like, “Oh, this is what Poe Party always wanted to be.” It works so well as a musical, it’s crazy! It's cool that we're getting to give it another life.

And Dylan, how did you get involved with Poe Party?

Dylan: This particular project is very full circle for me, because William J. Stripling, the director of the musical and the original series, brought me on board back in 2016. Longtime collaborator and friend growing up, and I have been with Shipwrecked now for ten years as their film score composer. My first love has always been musical theatre, so now to both revisit our first project together and have it be a musical, it's just full circle.

What has the creative process been like to turn this web series into a musical?

Sinéad: Well, we started out at a writer's retreat, and we watched the series, and just got it back in our brains. And then we procrastinated a lot! Then we were like, “Okay, who are our new characters going to be?” Because it's been ten years, some people aren't available anymore, some characters we want to change this and that, so we decided on new characters that we were going to incorporate and what their roles would be. And then we're doing a fun thing where there are three different endings, so we decided what the three endings would be. So that's where we started from, and then we got together with Dylan. We started having writing sessions every week, and deciding where the best places for songs were - what scenes were begging to be sung instead of just talked through. And then we started writing songs while Sean and I were going through the script. We outpaced ourselves with the songs, and we were like, “Oh God, we gotta finish!”

Dylan: Originally, when we had talked about writing songs, it was like five or six, and then at some point we were like, “This needs to be a full musical,” so then we went all in!

Mary-Kate: This is a common problem Shipwrecked has! Every project will be like, “This will be a fun little thing,” and then it turns into the biggest thing possible. But hey, we've made it work for ten years, and no plans of stopping!

And what made you want to bring it to the stage instead of bringing it back to the online format?

Mary-Kate: We had been talking about doing some sort of live show for a while, because we are good friends with folks in StarKid and Tin Can Bros - their work primarily is live on stage, whereas we make film stuff. We were curious about what that experience would be like, and the idea of having something that our audience could literally come to and see us at was very fun and cool. Even a year ago, we were tossing around ideas of, “Maybe we do some kind of live reading!” We have a film noir world that we do and we have a lounge singer character called Vivian Nightingale that I play, and we were like, “Maybe we do a Vivian show, a cabaret!” We just kept playing with the idea of doing some sort of live thing. But it was coming up on the 10th anniversary of Poe Party, and that's when we were like, “Why don't we just do Poe Party, but make it a musical?” So there we are!

Sinéad: And I want to be in a play!

Mary-Kate: It's really exciting, because most of the cast was in it ten years ago. A lot of them are people that we've continued to work with for many various projects. We brought in a couple new folks for this that we don't know as well! But the idea of getting to play with those people in this new way and format was just fun. We're excited to get to do it with them in a completely new environment.

What has it been like bringing in these new characters?

Sinéad: Great! It's so fun. We're TV writers, and ten years ago when we were trying to get our start in it, you write a lot of scripts for existing TV shows, so you have to learn to write in other people's voices. This is trying to write in all these different authors' voices, so it was fun to have three new ones to try and write for!

Sean: And they're so distinct and different from all the other characters, but also the characters they're replacing. I really like them! They're really fun.

Dylan: And I will say, there are a couple writers that we thought we were happy to kill early, and then we ended up loving them! We were like, “Oh no, why are we killing them?”

Dylan, can you go a bit into the musical side of the creative process for creating these songs for the characters?

Dylan: Sure! For this particular musical, it was fun because I'd already created a score for the series, so there was this underlying musical world that was already painted. A lot of the songs are pulling from the themes from the series, and then expanding that universe. And then having them fit the individual authors, which was already part of the series in the first episode. There is a cue called “The Bells,” and it is when every author comes to the door, rings the doorbell, gets introduced, and has their own variation of the musical theme. We were able to turn that into the opening number, put lyrics to it and expand it. So it's been a lot of fun!

Are there any main musicals that you're taking inspiration from for this?

Dylan: Again, with plays, I feel like Clue is a huge influence, and then just an assortment of different influences and favorites that I have. Urinetown meets Wild Party meets everything in between!

Mary-Kate: We've also had people in the team liken it to A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder, which I haven't seen, so I don't know if that's true, but it sounds correct!

Dylan: Another fave!

Sinéad: A little Les Mis, probably? 

Dylan: Definitely!

Sinéad: With some of the songs, we would not necessarily take inspiration from how they sounded, but we were like, “This song should do what this song does in this musical.” Sean and I got inspired a lot because we're less familiar, so we had to have a place to come at it from.

What has it been like collaborating with the book, lyrics, and music?

Dylan: Amazing!

Sinéad: A challenge, because I feel like I'm learning as we go, but very fun!

Dylan: Which is very silly, because they're both absolute pros!

Sean: Well, it's just crazy to watch, because prior to that, we've written a couple songs with Dylan before, but mostly we just hear his scores, and we're like, “How did he do that?” And now we get to watch him come up with stuff! We're just sitting there trying to come up with lyrics, watching him on Zoom, doing something completely different that I can't wrap my brain around, and a lot of times, within a session or two, coming up with a full song!

Sinéad: And then he'll come up with a rhyme scheme, and Sean and I will be like, “Wait, can you sing that again? We don't remember what the rhymes are.”

Dylan: And sometimes I'm like, “I don't really know either, but let's try this! This feels right.”

And what has it been like seeing the audience reactions to the return of Poe Party?

Mary-Kate: It's been very lovely that people love it so much, and it’s clearly so dear to so many. When we were first teasing it, we had so many people be like, “We are so back,” and we were like, “We've been here! Where have you been? Have you watched our other stuff?” Obviously, so happy anytime anybody watches anything, but it's nice that there's so much love around this show. And I get it! I love it. It was a very special project for all of us involved, and it's clear that we still feel that ten years later. Even when we first went to some of the cast, and were like, “Hey, we're thinking of doing this,” they were so excited and ready to get back into it. That's really special. 

Do any of you have a particular favourite author from the series? Not necessarily the actual author!

Sinéad: It's so hard to choose! I mean, the whole reason for that [Poe Party] is that I love Edgar Allan Poe so much, and his writing . . .  There's no one doing it like him. So, in terms of words, Poe and Jane Austen, but in terms of the characters . . . 

Mary-Kate: Everybody makes them so distinct and memorable!

Sinéad: Lewis Carroll is a new fave!

Sean: I was gonna say that! Also a fave in the show, but reading some of his stuff, which I hadn't done since I was a child, is very funny.

Sinéad: Yeah, he's got a weird brain.

What do you hope audiences take away from this show?

Sinéad: Please keep reading books, please don't let the illiteracy crisis go up!

Sean: And supporting independent art!

Mary-Kate: And also, just having fun! I think that was a big part. It's not our goal or anything at Shipwrecked, but that's what I love about the way you guys write and the ideas that you have. People don't allow themselves to look at classic literature and make it fun and silly when there's so much levity and enjoyment to be had around these things. That's what keeps them alive - finding ways for them to be fun for a modern audience. It's not our mission, but it's a cool thing to do. I hope people are like, “Oh, wow, I never thought about George Eliot that way!”

Sean: Or at all! [Laughs]

Sinéad: And I want them to listen to it in the car, like I listen to the SIX album. I think they will!

Dyan: I want them to leave the theatre with some melodies in their brain that they're humming.

Sinéad: Saying, “I would want to play this character!”

And finally, how would each of you describe the show in one word?

Sean: Friends.

Sinéad: Oh, cute! I'm gonna go with madcap.

Dylan: Macabre.

Mary-Kate: Fun!

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