Interview: Brian Holden on StarKid’s Reboot of Viral Hit, THE GUY WHO DIDN'T LIKE MUSICALS

After raising more than $650,000 in its most successful crowdfunding campaign to date, the popular online theater company StarKid is bringing one of its fan-favorite shows back to the stage.

The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals, which originally debuted in 2018, will run at the El Portal Theatre in North Hollywood from July 11 through August 10.  

The show follows Paul, the titular “guy,” who is horrified to discover that an alien lifeform is turning all of humanity into a singing, dancing musical theater production. Like all StarKid shows, the original Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals was posted on the Team StarKid YouTube Channel, where it racked up more than 9 million views. 

StarKid was founded in 2009 by brothers Nick and Matt Lang, along with fellow University of Michigan students Brian Holden and Darren Criss (who later starred in the Fox series Glee). The group garnered a devoted online following with "A Very Potter Musical," a Harry Potter stage parody that earned more than 19 million views on YouTube.  

BroadwayWorld caught up with StarKid co-founder and lead producer Brian Holden to talk about how the reboot became Kickstarter’s most-funded theatrical project ever—and what audiences can expect from this quirky sci-fi zombie musical mashup.

Not everyone reading this will be familiar with StarKid, so give me your best three sentences on what it is. 
So, StarKid is a hybrid live-digital musical theater company. We started in 2009 by doing a parody musical called A Very Potter Musical. We do comedic musicals for the Internet, basically.

How do your productions work?
Our model is to do shorter runs of live theatrical productions and then share them with everyone online.

Explain to me the whole crowdfunding aspect of StarKid.
Crowdfunding has become a great way for us to continue operating. We do one basically every year, and it’s not like a traditional sort of fundraising model, the way larger theaters might have annual donors and stuff like that. Instead of doing a program like that, we do crowdfunding campaigns.

How often do you do these crowdfunding campaigns?
We’re a company that already produces one or two shows a year and at least one or two that are large enough to require funding at this level. The advantage is that we eventually put all of our shows online for free. 

Basically, every large project we do eventually ends up on YouTube. And that’s how we started, that’s how we garnered our fan base. That’s how people continue to discover us.

I just checked, and “The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals” has more than 9 million views on the Team StarKid YouTube channel! That’s pretty amazing. 

Oh yeah. I wish we could explain it. I think part of it is that we were in the right place at the right time: we started in 2009 as YouTube was becoming a legitimate place to get entertainment from. So we were kind of on the early end of that trend, right? 

Also, the crowdfunding campaign for this show raised more than $600,000. Is that the most one of your shows has gotten via Kickstarter?

It's not only the most that one of our musicals has ever made; it’s the most any musical has ever made through Kickstarter. We're the number one funded theater or theatrical project. And we broke our own record from Cinderella's Castle last year, which made somewhere in the $500,000 mark. 

Will you use all the money for this show? If so, what is it buying?  

Well, the set is definitely a lot bigger budget than the first time we did the show in 2018.  And then there's things that we didn't have back then, like understudies [laughs]. We used to be just more fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants, but. Basically, as we get more money, we just pad out everything with more legitimate, more standard, theatrical practices. Things like understudies and our lighting package. It's a lot of tech stuff. 

Why did StarKid decide to revive The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals? 

We're 16 years in. We've been creating original shows pretty much every year, sometimes two a year. And it's just a lot of work to keep the invention going like that every year. So if we can remount some of our older shows, I think that would be great. The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals was one of our more popular shows, for sure. So we thought that if we're going to try and see if this is a financially viable thing for us to do, we should try that one. 

Will there be anything different this time around? 

There are definitely a few surprises in there, but I don't want to reveal too much. I know that the choreography is kind of new, or at least modified. The sets are going to be totally different, so there's going to be a lot of different movements in terms of stuff like that. 

There will be some updates to the script, along with a few surprises. There might be some special Hatchetfield stuff [the fictional universe of several StarKid shows] in there that wasn't in the original one. 

I'm guessing a lot of those additions will only be obvious to the hardcore fans.

That’s right. It’s deep into the lore. 

Your fans are so into the show, I’m sure they’ll love it. 

For sure. It’s interesting to have that culture around musicals. I feel like that doesn’t happen too often, so it’s fun. 

Is everyone from the original show coming back to reprise their role? 

It’s pretty much the original cast. 

Is the show already sold out? 

We sold out 20 performances. But we just put some more tickets on sale.  

Can you give us some tips on how people can get tickets—even if it’s “sold out?” 

We’re going to be releasing tickets that we’ve held for cast and industry comps, throughout the weeks. So people should check out our website and we'll have a mailing list there. More tickets will become available—we'll probably do it on a Monday or Tuesday each week for the shows. The shows run Friday through Sunday. 

Last question: What is it about StarKid that people love so much? Why do you think these shows have gotten so popular? 

I think, with the Hatchetfield shows in particular, the fans really do love the lore of that world. Also, what has always drawn people to StarKid is that they see us as people who love what we're doing — especially in the early days, we were all friends and together in college, so [fans] saw that we loved doing theater with each other. 

In our earlier shows, the budget was not so high, so it looked like it was something achievable that they could do with their friends. So I think there's a little bit of wish fulfillment there. And, of course, the silliness, the great music. Frankly, I think we've been really lucky to have some amazing musicians and composers throughout our time in StarKid.  

Thank you so much, Brian! Good luck with the show! 

Thank you!