For the Fans: The Building of Twihard

“I’m at 54 Below right now,” an excited Tiffany Keane Schaefer, founder and artistic director of Chicago’s Otherworld Theatre, said via Zoom.

It was just a week before tech rehearsals for the remount of Otherworld’s hit parody musical Twihard! A Twilight Musical Parody, but Schaefer, also the show’s director, was in New York along with the entire cast of the show. From the lobby of the midtown Manhattan cabaret, affectionately known as Broadway’s living room, Schaefer panned her phone to show a Tony Award mounted next to her.

“This is where musicals get their start,” she said. “We applied and the one time slot they gave us was during our tech week. We were like, ‘Well, if this is our only shot, we gotta take it.’”

So Twihard tech week was pushed back so the cast could head east to perform a cabaret reading of the show on Oct. 22 in hopes of being picked up for a New York run.

“It’s been crazy,” said Schaefer. “People are flying out from Colorado to come see us here tonight. I just don’t know theatre fans like that—that are like, ‘I’m gonna drop everything and make sure that I can come and support you tonight, because we want Twihard! to go on Broadway.’” READ FULL REVIEW HERE

Composer Brian Rasmussen at 54 Below