BWW interviews: Tysen Hopes to Score a Runaway Hit With FUGITIVE SONGS

After several projects fell through, lyricist Nathan Tysen and composer Chris Miller were left with a handful of songs they just couldn't give up on.

The two found a perfect home for the "fugitive" songs in the aptly titled FUGITIVE SONGS. The musical runs Nov. 13-30 at the Short North Stage's Garden Theater (1187 North High Street in downtown Columbus).

"We started out with a bunch of songs which didn't have homes," says Tysen who will be co-directing the show with Carrie Gilchrist. "We were so proud of the material and thought 'Let's see if we can find some sort of dramatic home for these songs.' And we came up with the idea of "Fugitive songs.'

"In all the material, the characters in the songs were either literally or figuratively running away from something. That was the jumping off point for the piece."

The result was a 19-song journey across the United States with a half dozen characters, each facing some sort of a cross roads in their lives. Among those hitting the road are a jilted cheerleader, a couple of Patty Hearst fanatics, a stoner who is forced to hold up a convenience store against his will and a disgruntled Subway sandwich employee.

The show stars Angela Miller, JJ Parkey, Dionysia Williams, Ezekiel McCall, Viktor Nilsson and Melissa Hall.

Miller, who plays a woman whose "perfect" life is thrown off kilter by a less than perfect boyfriend, believes audience will relate to the struggles of the six characters.

"(The show) is all about motion - whether it is going forward or looking backward," Miller says. "They are all coming from different worlds but they're all lost in a way. They don't know what lies ahead but they know they're going somewhere."

The show had a successful run off Broadway in 2008, earning a Drama Desk Award Nomination for Outstanding Revue. But the run in Columbus will be the first time the show will be performed the way Tysen envisioned it to be.

After beginning a Kickstarter campaign in 2011 to raise money to make a cast recording of the show, Tysen and Miller realized they had the chance to rework the show and its songs.

"This is actually going to be the first production of the final version of the show," says Tysen, who recently won the $100,000 Kleban Prize that is given to an up-and-coming lyricist. "We realized we had the opportunity to change some of the things we thought didn't work in the off Broadway production. I'm very excited about the stuff we've added."

The pair added an additional character, so they'd have three men and three women as well as three comedy numbers to make the show a little lighter.

Unlike many of the characters in FUGITIVE SONGS, Tysen doesn't appear to have gone through any sort of midlife crisis when it comes to his career choice. Since attending the Lovewell Institute for the Creative Arts when he was 16, the Kansas native knew exactly what he wanted to do. The Lovewell Institute, which conducts workshops across the United States and Sweden, prepared Tysen to write and produce musicals.

Miller, Gilchrist and Tysen are graduates of the program as is Rick Gore, the executive producer of the Short North Stage.

"It changed my life," Tysen says. "I had always wanted to be a performer but being behind the scenes and hearing people sing my work was most rewarding feeling I've ever felt. By the time I got to my senior year (at Missouri State), I was completely done with performing and I wrote my first musical."

Tysen will be a part of four musicals that will open this year. In addition to FUGITIVE SONGS, he penned a rock opera STILLWATER that will open in Kansas City, a musical version of TUCK EVERLASTING which opens in February in Atlanta and is currently working on a musical version of AMELIE, which is scheduled to open this summer in New York.

"I'm finally in a place in my career where I can write full time," Tysen says. "It takes so long to develop shows, so it's hard to make a living at it. (Winning the Kleban Award) has opened a lot of doors for me.

"I was able to give a little bit (of the prize money) to my collaborators. Clearly I wouldn't have won the award without them. This gave me the chance to quit my job and focus on full time on my writing."

FUGITIVE SONGS will be held 8 p.m. Nov. 13-15, 20-22, and 28-29 with 3 p.m. shows Nov. 16, 23, and 30 at Garden Theater (1187 North High Street in downtown Columbus.