Interview: Tim Drucker, Bonnie Milligan and Joel Waggoner of HALLMARK(ISH) at Meridian Arts Centre

After its previously sold-out world premiere in Toronto last year, The Unauthorized Hallmark(ish) Parody Musical is soon returning to sprinkle some holiday cheer, this time at the Meridian Arts Centre Lyric Theatre from November 28, 2026 - January 3, 2027. 

The Unauthorized Hallmark(ish) Parody Musical tells the story of Holly, an overworked Big City executive who returns to her quirky small hometown TO SAVE CHRISTMAS! Along the way, Holly juggles an old flame, a looming corporate merger, a cookie contest conspiracy and a moose on the loose! Packed with holiday movie tropes and original songs like, “Judge That Cookie” and “It Feels Like Christmas (Because It Is Literally Christmas),” the show offers a hilarious twist on the classic holiday movies you already know and love.

BroadwayWorld sat down with The Unauthorized Hallmark(ish) Parody Musical's Tim Drucker (Book, Lyrics and Director), Bonnie Milligan (Book & Lyrics) and Joel Waggoner (Music & Lyrics) to discuss their relationships with Hallmark/holiday movies, writing a parody musical under time and geographic constraints, and how they hope Hallmark and/or musical fans and critics alike will feel after seeing the show.

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For all three of you, what was your connection to Hallmark movies before creating this show?

Tim Drucker: Bonnie and I are fans. We're like deep, deep in. I think, Joel, you have a normal relationship? [laughter]. We were fans. Bonnie and I had written, way before the pandemic, something called A Christmas Murder where we took the [fictional] Christmas murder of Gwen Stefani and wrote our own murder mystery. So, we had been living in this space, and we're definitely coming from the fan side of this space. We watched them all. 

Bonnie Milligan: I always watched these movies with my mom and it's still her dream of all dreams for me to be in one. And now it's like the genre has blown up; it's on every channel, like Netflix, live chat; everybody's doing it. So, it's such a part of culture, and everybody, whether they have subscriptions to certain channels or not, has knowledge of this [Hallmark], so it's easy to have knowledge of what this [parody] is. You know what I mean? 

Tim Drucker: The knowledge base actually blows my mind, because I'll say to a friend who's not that immersed in this type of stuff, 'Oh, yeah, this Hallmark(ish) musical,' and they'll be like, 'Does a girl from a big city move back to the small town and meet her lumberjack high school boyfriend?' Always. And that was said to me by someone in the army the other day.

Joel Waggoner: I'm connected to it because I think Tim and Bonnie are hilarious, and I also have a history with Christmas humour stuff with my Instagram account with Julia Mattison and then that's connected with Tim. I like writing in different styles of music, which is really good for parody shows. I've been down from the second they asked; it was a no brainer for me.

Tim Drucker: Joel is the holiday music wizard.

Bonnie Milligan: Yeah. Right away, we thought, 'The one person we have to ask is Joel, right?'

Joel Waggoner: I'm going to need to retire from Christmas after this for a while.

Bonnie, was Hallmark(ish) your first time co-writing a musical?

Bonnie Milligan: No, when I was in college, you could write a term paper and do research, or, if you were in the theatre department, you could write a show. So, I said, 'That is what I want to do.' I was part of the writing company in college and I wrote a show called A Girl's Gotta Eat: The Musical, about being a young, chubby actress when everyone says, 'You'll work when you're 40.' And I'm like, 'But I'm 20, so what does that mean?' It was a 45-minute show. A lot of kids did one-person shows and I made it a four-person musical. I got teamed with a composer. We got commissioned to write a second half to it and opened in a theatre in downtown Columbus, then I toured it around Ohio. We would do panel discussions on body image at different campuses. Then I moved to the city and I co-wrote a show with my friend, Joe Maloney, at the New York Fringe Festival, called Hint, which was a murder mystery musical. I didn't write anything again until 2017, which was the night that Tim was talking about. We wrote A Christmas Murder for a ridiculous musical concert at 54 Below. So, I, for the longest time, had always identified as a writer. And then, being in New York City as an actress, trying to make it work, that part kind of went away and I felt like I couldn't claim it anymore. And then when we did that [A Christmas Murder], it felt like, Oh, yeah, this is part of my identity, and bringing it back has been such a joy.

Tim, you’ve created and/or directed several other parody musicals including Spidermusical and Love Actually: The Parody Musical. What makes Hallmark(ish) different from other shows you’ve worked on?

Tim Drucker: The thing that's interesting about parodies is that they're all based on the fan experience with the IP and its world, so it just changes for each thing. Hallmark(ish) is just such a broad audience. This is the first parody in a long time that I've also written and I just love the IP so much. The other ones that I've done, like Friends! The Musical Parody, I have a normal relationship with Friends [TV show] but I found out I wasn't as big a fan as some people really are. Even The Bachelor [Bachelor: The Unauthorized Parody Musical], I love doing that show, but I was not in that world. Hallmark, those holiday movies, I am a fan, so to come from it from fan service, it's really just so fun to create the world you want to live in. Like, you get to put yourself inside of it and then kind of live it. So, it's kind of, I guess, a selfish endeavor to put yourself in the space you want to be inside of, as a fan, for the holidays. 

Joel, could you talk a little bit about creating the music for this show?

Joel Waggoner: Yeah, the exciting thing was that Tim and Bonnie had so many ideas of what they wanted right off the bat. We did write this show, and I wrote the score, in a very short amount of time, so they really helped me with a lot of shortcuts. They were like, 'This song should sound like Kelly Clarkson's Wrapped in Red,' or, 'This song should feel like a 60s bop duet,' or, 'This song should feel like Kiss the Girl from The Little Mermaid.' I thought, Great, I'll take all of the help I can get in going in those directions. They were also open to me going off on a little tangent, like, 'Is it okay if I do a whole song with a billion moose rhymes?' And they're like, 'Please. We don't have much time, so just show us what you got.' It was really exciting to be able to have free rein to take what they wanted and run with it. And we all just kind of kept saying yes. It was a real blast. My ADHD brain loves to write in all different styles, so there's a gospel number; there's some 1970s Dream Girls-y stuff; there's happy Christmas stuff; there's ballet. It's all over the place. I think it's really fun and it was really fun to make.

What made you decide to create this parody as a musical and not a straight play, TV show or movie?

Bonnie Milligan: We love musicals. I think that's something that hasn't really been done in the genre. Obviously, we're parodying TV movies, so obviously it's been on television, but I haven't seen a television [parody] musical movie. We're taking it to the stage, where people come to be entertained, and what better way than to sing and dance with them?

Tim Drucker: And there are not a lot of adult Christmas musical stage properties. Like this is for us. Not that it's not for families, because people certainly brought their kids last year, but this is a show that we would bring our friends to. This is the only show I have done that my husband likes; he sings the songs to me and it blows my mind. We just wanted to make this the alternative to going to A Christmas Carol. This is the show you can go with your friends to, and drink champagne and have a good time. It's for adults. It's not A Christmas Story, or The Grinch or Elf. Those are all great, but they're family musicals. This is more of an adult experience. And, if you're a musical fan, we parody every Broadway musical. You don't need to know them; if you're just a Hallmark fan, that's fine; but Wicked, Dear Evan Hansen-

Bonnie Milligan: Annie, Waitress, Into the Woods-

Tim Drucker: So much Into the Woods.

Joel Waggoner: Yeah, there are a lot of Easter eggs in there. A lot of little stocking stuffers for you.

Hallmark movies famously feature so many of the same storylines and stereotypes. How did you decide which ones to include?

Bonnie Milligan: How did we decide? I feel like it just very organically came out. We were pitching ideas at each other. We knew that the whole 'a small town girl who moved to the city comes home' felt like a very safe, huge trope that goes into a lot of them. And then it was just like a long improv session of 'Yes, and.' 

Tim Drucker: I also called Bonnie's brain, on this front, Chat GPT because they're all in here [Hallmark story ideas in her brain]. It was like going through the internet; she was just spitting the stuff out. Also, we did want to create roles for middle-aged women, so we looked at a lot of those Melissa Petermans [movies] and a lot of those holiday competition ones.

What are some of the challenges you encountered when creating this musical?

Tim Drucker: How fast we had to write.

Bonnie Milligan: Time was the biggest challenge.

Tim Drucker: Although I think that ended up being our friend. We wrote the show so fast, so we didn't have a lot of time to second guess ourselves. I think most musicals you have a year or two to write. We wrote this in two and a half months.

Bonnie Milligan: And also space. Joel was not in New York with us, so we had a lot of text threads and FaceTimes. When he would come to the city, it was nice, but we're all busy people that have jobs that we have to pay bills with. So, schedules and time were our biggest obstacles, for me.

Tim Drucker: Joel, when we were in Toronto, he sent us a lot of random voice memos, walking down the street being like, 'What if it's this?'

Joel Waggoner: There were a couple of times where, because I was away, I would do a draft of the song and send it back to them, and they'd be like, 'We should talk about this.' I would go a different direction than the plan, so we'd have to get together and sort of chiropractically bring the song back together. And there were other songs that were just like, 'Yep, that's fine.'

Bonnie Milligan: 'Perfect.' Yeah, exactly. That includes 'Moose.' The moose one we thought was genius.

Tim Drucker: The moose song he did [wrote] cold and it was insane.

Bonnie Milligan: It was perfect.

Tim Drucker: It's crazy.

Joel Waggoner: The other challenge we had was that it's all to tracks, right? So, not only were we trying to finalize the music, forms, lyrics, keys and harmonies, but then I was also communicating with an orchestrator in Palm Springs, which was three hours behind. He was orchestrating the tracks and hiring musicians to play drums, sax and guitars, meanwhile I'm sending him emails in the middle of the night saying, 'We're taking this up a half, we're taking this down to this many beats per minute, and we're making a cut.' So, it was kind of a last minute, 'Yikes. Are we going to be able to have something to sing to?' It ultimately worked, and I'm sure I frustrated the hell out of him, but I did send him a nice bottle of wine after it was all over. That was really interesting to make the tracks in that time span, but it was fun. The funny thing is, I felt like I was in high school again. I was doing everything I loved to do; I was staying up late on my computer, writing songs, and I was exhilarated by it. You know what I mean? I kind of like a quick timeline. I like a really intense work period and then vacation. 

How much of the show has changed since its initial sold-out Toronto run?

Tim Drucker: A few minor tweaks for this year, but somehow we did it right [last year]. Because we wrote it so fast, I was sitting in rehearsal in Toronto last year thinking, I can't believe this crazy idea is working. We took some big swings; the Moose song alone; the song is called 'Moose on the Loose!' Although, when we ended up in Toronto last year, the condo we were staying in was down the block from the Loose Moose Bar, and we thought, This is a sign that we are correct. And we went there and we said, 'This is a song in our show!'

Bonnie Milligan: And they were like, 'Here's your poutine.'

Joel Waggoner: I think the funny thing about this too is, because it was so fast, I think we're actually going to find out a lot from this new Toronto run and from the tour. The good thing is, with parody, if we're making you laugh and giving you songs that you can sing, we're doing a lot of it right. I think anything that we would want to fix would be just making people laugh harder and sing louder.

Would you say the show is more for people who love Hallmark movies or dislike Hallmark movies, or just for everyone?

Tim Drucker: If you don't like them, you'll like the show, because even if you have no frame of reference, you'll get what's going on. I think the nice thing is that we also made it like a Broadway musical. The scale of it is absurd; it's just a big show. We do go full tilt in trying to make it feel like a Broadway musical. So, it's for people who like musicals, people who love Hallmark movies and people who hate Hallmark movies. I'm not just saying that to sell tickets, because people who love Hallmark movies alone could fill the theatre, but a good parody is for both data sets.

Joel Waggoner: It's also for people who don't like musicals. Because if you like musicals, you'll be like, 'Oh my god. Oh, goody.' And if you don't like them, you'll be like, 'Oh, these people think musicals are also silly.' I think there really is something for everyone.

What do you hope people will feel when they leave the theatre after seeing Hallmark(ish)?

Tim Drucker: In the spirit. Honestly, I said this last year and I'll say it again. And this is also just the work we do. The world is so dark, and if we can give people an escape for 80 minutes and they leave feeling more in community with the audience and each other. That is the holiday spirit, right? And that's also what holiday movies do; they let you escape. We turn our brains off and we let them run into each other, right? I watch those movies, I just leave the channel on and I'm like, I don't know if this is the one I was just watching an hour ago.

Joel Waggoner: It's the scented candle of TV. You just let it go until you go to bed and then you blow it out.

Bonnie Milligan: Such a vibe and it stays with you. 

Joel Waggoner: I would like them to feel immediately like, 'Should I come again?' I will never forget when I saw 27 Dresses in the theatre. I went with a friend and it was so good. After we watched it, we went to Applebee's, and while we were eating, we were like, 'Do you just want to go again?' And we went again right after we ate, twice in one day because I just loved being in there and we were like, 'Let's just mainline this s**t.' So, I would love people to leave wanting to go again, wanting to bring their mom or their friends.

If you had to describe the show in three words, what would they be?

Joel Waggoner: LOL. Is that three words? 

Bonnie Milligan: That's three letters. You could say laugh out loud.

Joel Waggoner: LOL, gay, belting.

Tim Drucker: Better than Cats.

Bonnie Milligan: Hilarious, surprising, addicting.

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