"One Thing" by @clockmaker931
Jase and Judith by @Sissieart
Self portrait on Bushwick steps where "Hear Me Out" was written; '19
Two Up's official Making Of Video by Alison Grasso
Lyrics & Sheet Music
Interviews
"36 Questions" and the Future of Musicals
BROWN: How do the two of you work together? Are you generally in the same room, or is more via email? Does one write the melody and the other the lyrics?
WINTER: We’re basically workers of necessity. We work in the same room when we can.
LITTLER: For this show, it was a lot of Ellen at the piano, and me sitting right by the piano. She’d go, [hums] “Hmm hmm hmm” and I’d go,”There it is!”
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Radio Drama Revival Interview
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Stuart Spencer Interview
SS: What did you do to take of, for instance, the musical theatre audience?
CL: The first five minutes of the show is a good example. The rules of musical theatre are that you start with a song. That way, no one questions that you are in a world of music. We struggled with that. We didn’t have a song for the beginning. We really needed to walk the listener to the moment of the first song. Well, podcast audiences love mysteries, so we set it up as a mystery, but at the same time we scored the section so that the musical theatre people wouldn’t be thinking, “Is this really a musical?”
EW: We were excited by the rhythm that can come from a non-musical scene, and that was how we went about scoring them — and eventually how we orchestrated them as well. Another factor was that we went upstate on a writing retreat. And our band-mate came with us to make sure we ate and didn’t die of hunger, and he is not into musicals.
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Musicals with Cheese Interview
In this super bonus episode Jess is joined by the composers of the Podcast Musical “36 Questions,” Ellen Winter & Christopher Littler. He talks about their creative process, the inspirations for the musical, the storytelling methods, and how this show became the incredible piece it is today. It’s a wonderful bonus episode with a ton of insight about creating a musical!
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Reviews
"In '36 Questions,' the composers Chris Littler and Ellen Winter and the sound designer Joel Raabe have created a radically intimate, slightly twee and seriously winning musical... the show is a little like 'The Last Five Years,' if 'The Last Five Years' nixed the dual timelines in favor of some dorky board-game jokes."
"Littler and Ellen didn’t set out to be pioneers with this piece, but there’s no question they’ve opened a door of possibilities."
"It's charming, moving, and fresh—and the music is incredible (think Once for 2017)."
"Groff was curious how anyone would be able to give the rather staid audio genre the all-singing, all-swinging trappings of a musical. As it turns out, Littler and Winter knew exactly how. The script cleverly weaves relational difficulty with cutesy pop-cultural relatability."
"Frankly, the podcast is a blast: the songs are pretty good, the couple is played by the ever-charming Jonathan Groff and newcomer Jessie Shelton, and the story swerves in and out of interesting places while gesturing towards some profound questions. Just how well, exactly, do we know the ones we love, anyway?" [List: Best Podcasts of 2017]
"It’s a gorgeously wrought, two-person musical, the best of a new generation of podcasts exploring what the format can be, and its perfectly undone, folksy songs will be stuck in your head for weeks."
"Littler and Ellen didn’t set out to be pioneers with this piece, but there’s no question they’ve opened a door of possibilities. “I just keep thinking about all of the young composers out there,” says Groff. “If people were able to express their voices through a medium like this, think of all the great new composers we could have getting to really figure [their] stuff out.”
