BWW Interviews: 'Soon' is Now...Meet Writer/Composer/Lyricist (and more) Nick Blaemire

If you happen to be looking for a role model for making the most of your particular strengths and talents, I'd like to introduce you to actor/composer/writer/musician/ director, Nick Blaemire. Lucky for us, Nick, whose new musical, Soon, is currently making its world premiere at Arlington's Signature Theatre, was gracious enough to share some of his secrets for a successful creative life with me, even as he works on three of his own shows in three different cities at once.

First off, there's being a true DC-area native, and then there's being an actual DC-area theater native, and Nick is both. Raised in Bethesda, he has wonderful memories of his passionate, theater-loving mother taking him to The Kennedy Center and The Shakespeare Theatre when he was young. In fact, ask any theater-lover about their earliest theater memory, and you open a floodgate. Delight and wonder resonate when Nick talks about the magic of seeing the Royal Shakespeare Company's touring production of A Midsummer Night's Dream when he was in the fourth grade. He was also encouraged, early on, to have sophisticated and challenging theater experiences, such as Henry IV, Parts I and II, starring Ed Gero (currently starring in The Originalist at DC's Arena Stage), who was a neighbor of Nick's growing up. As Nick says, "DC has put itself on the map over the years now, but even when I was young, I thought why would you want to go anywhere else?" Not surprisingly, he remembers productions of Phantom of the Opera, and LES MISERABLES having a major effect on him musically, but as for many future theater-lovers, it all started with Shakespeare.

One of the most intriguing aspects to Nick's career has been his chameleon-like ability to work successfully in multiple aspects of the artistic process. In the past few years, he has worked as an actor (Broadway's Godspell; Off Broadway's Found, among others), as a composer, lyricist and writer of A Little More Alive, (which had its world premiere at the Kansas Repertory Theatre in April '14), and Soon, and don't forget all those musical cabarets (some at Signature), in which he shows off his talents as a singer/songwriter/musician.

I asked how he balances all of these passions/interests as an artist. "I started realizing that trying to dictate where life is taking me has not been too successful, so I'm trying to go where the wind blows...and a nice thing has arisen lately in my life , having other disciplines to work in has made being an actor much more emotionally easy, because as an actor, you spend so much time waiting for someone to give you work; now there's this realization that making work alleviates the pressures...it's been a graceful back and forth, and I found that watching Soon, I was even jealous of the actors...remembering how fun it is to work on new work...it's helpful for me psychologically to just let the world tell me where to be and I don't have to decide what I am...as a friend said to me about himself, 'I'm a person who does stuff;' and that's me too...I do stuff."

But that "stuff" can take a long time to make, and I think that many of us are surprised when we find out how long the process of creating a work of theater can be. It can seem as if we see an ad for a show on Broadway, or at The Kennedy Center, and it somehow arrived fully formed that moment, because we don't often hear of the grueling years of work that have gone before. For Nick, both Soon, and A Little More Alive, are going on seven years of work.

Nick's favorite part of that lengthy development process? "Every part...I love the lonely time working and trying to figure it out on my own, love the show and tell and bringing it to people I respect and having them fire back things, love watching the actors take it and render me useless; watching designers bring things to life and use their imaginations to create a world for everyone to step into; watching marketing departments figure out how to brand the show, love watching how the directors bring their own personal experience to what I've put out there, and take my work and make it better and challenge me to push harder and dig deeper. Not any one person is the arbiter of the art...it's this real circle of people who are all looking into the middle, to create this kind of energy field; how every piece of the puzzle is important as the other...I used to think that the writer had some control or power...and you do, over the fact that you can work at any time, and don't have to wait to work...but the major thing, as a writer, is the idea of creating material so that other people can think, and do the jobs they were born to do...that equalizes it and makes it a much more humbling endeavor."

So given his love for all parts of the process, what happens when Nick is inspired by an idea; how does he decide through which discipline he will approach it? "Things I've seen or ideas that I have that I'd love to be in, I'll work on with someone else; I've not performed any of my own work...it's hard to see what's going on when you're inside of it...it works as an ego check..there are a lot of opinions flowing around, and it's easy to buy into them, good or bad...I want to know what will make it work the best; what can I bring to it that will be the most useful?"

Nick has worked on his last few shows as a sort of one-man band, but he's particularly enthusiastic about his current collaboration (a show called Fall Out), with Kyle Jarrow, member of the band, Sky Pony [with wife, Tony-nominated actor, Lauren Worsham (A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder)], who has also worked with Duncan Sheik, on two shows, Noir and Whisper House. This collaboration with Kyle has been "totally eye-opening and fluid," says Nick. "It's based on a great thought Kyle had that I'm really excited about; we're both writing music & lyrics together...Kyle is really smart, incredibly collaborative, incredibly talented in ways I couldn't conceive of, and comes from a place of 'let's try it,' and 'what about this?' I hate delineation...it's kind of an American instinct to classify and create linear construct and narrative out of things. But this thing is being made by brains and hearts, and not job titles or lines drawn in the sand."

Speaking of inspirations, let's talk about from whence Nick got the idea for Soon, a show involving a girl and her goldfish and the end of the world. Nick explains: "Living in NYC, having the romance wear off, and looking back at relationships I'd been having and wondering if I was actually any good for the people I was with...struggling to have faith in myself...and asking why are we so hard on ourselves, especially as people who make things...it's really tough to know where that stuff comes from; and the way that parents in their infinite nobility of being there for their kids and trying to impart lessons, accidentally infect them with their infections...an inevitable result of being a human being and having another human being. So I asked myself, how could I talk about that in the most compelling and direct way...stakes are always the first place I start...what if I set these questions at the end of the world and really investigate them in a very focused, seemingly small narrative, and hopefully ask big questions in a small way, with room to breathe and think around them."

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