An American Playwright In London: Nicholas Schmidle Details Writing A Disco Biscuits Musical

“I’m pinching myself all the time, because it still feels unreal,” said author Nicholas Schmidle, co-creator of the new musical he’s writing with Jon Gutwillig and Aron Magner of The Disco Biscuits.

But the circumstances of Schmidle’s personal and professional life make him an ideal writing partner, and he has found himself, a longtime fan of the band, building Gutwillig’s late ‘90s rock opera, Hot Air Balloon, into the forthcoming The Very Moon: A Steampunk Musical.

Schmidle grew up wanting to be a writer. He wrote short fiction in high school and college, earning a bachelor’s degree from James Madison University and a master’s from American University, before embarking on a journalism career. He got into the Disco Biscuits during college, meeting the woman who would become his wife at a show.

“I was falling head-over-heels for this woman and then she told me she was about to move to Ireland for nine months!” said Schmidle. “Suddenly those Hot Air Balloon songs about lovers being separated by an ocean took on a whole new meaning.”

In 2004, Schmidle began traveling the world as a freelance foreign correspondent. He covered stories in Asia, Africa, and Europe for The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and others. In 2009, he published his first book, To Live or to Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan.

Two years later, he joined The New Yorker as a staff writer. For one assignment, Schmidle spent four years embedded with Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson’s space tourism venture, which became the subject of Schmidle’s 2021 book, Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut.

Dreams of Flying High

In 2019, Schmidle was writing Test Gods when he and his family moved to London. He began to pursue writing work in film and television, attending more theater and getting to know others in the space. He soon met a television producer who also produced theater and who’d encouraged Schmidle to pitch ideas for the stage.

“I thought he was kidding, cause I didn’t know anything about writing plays,” said Schmidle. “Then one day I was jogging through the West End and suddenly had this vision of making the Hot Air Balloon into a musical for Broadway.”

Schmidle set out to find Gutwillig. Applying his journalistic skills (“I’d like to think I can find most people if I try”), Schmidle got Gutwillig’s number from a friend of a friend. When he messaged Gutwillig, the Disco Biscuits guitarist wrote back and said the number was “defunct” and that he preferred to communicate over Instagram. They eventually connected, and Schmidle recalled asking Gutwillig if he’d have any interest in going back into the world of the Hot Air Balloon that he’d created 25 years prior.

“I remember Jon saying, ‘People have these lyrics tattooed on their bodies. These songs mean a lot to them, and they mean a lot to me.’” said Schmidle. “From that point, we were off to the races.”

A few months later, they had an outline. A few months after that, in February 2023, Schmidle, Gutwillig, and Magner began writing music. They’d scheduled a three-day workshop for May, followed by two sold-out showings, which meant that 400 people had paid to come see a show they hadn’t yet written. As a journalist, Schmidle was used to working on deadlines.

“But this was different,” he said. “On the one hand, we had no experience and no idea what we were doing. But on the other hand, those couple of months just reaffirmed my belief in Jon and Aron’s genius, as I got to witness them repeatedly spin my raw narrative ideas into musical gold.”

You Could Feel It in the Air

The team spent dozens of hours in March and April 2023 writing music – Schmidle from his home in London; Gutwillig and Magner from Gutwillig’s studio outside Philadelphia.

Schmidle describes them as “riding a wave of creative energy.” One day, he brought the group lyrics he’d written for a song sung by the bad guy character, Manilla Trane.

“I remember telling Aron, ‘It should sound like an untended cigarette in a hotel ashtray,’” said Schmidle. “He somehow knew exactly what I had in mind. Within an hour, we’d written ‘Turn The Tables’ and we were onto the next song.”

Still, it was not yet clear how much of Hot Air Balloon would translate directly into The Very Moon. Schmidle had proposed the name change early on, suggesting The Very Moon might be “a little more cryptic.”

“There were some hard choices to make,” Schmidle said. “Like losing ‘Once The Fiddler Paid.’ It’s an incredible song, but it’s one of three songs in the original nine-song Hot Air Balloon that are essentially jailhouse songs. For a play, that’s a lot of stage time to keep your main character in one place. So we cut ‘Fiddler.’ And then we made one of the main characters a 12-year-old orphan, which might have felt a little funky at first. But Jon’s amenability to revising what was to me, as a fan, kind of sacred canon, speaks volumes about the trust we developed.”

Over two dates in May 2023, Schmidle, Gutwillig, and Magner presented the first iteration of The Very Moon: A Steampunk Musical at Philadelphia’s FringeArts theater. Five actors played the main characters, while Alex Bechtel, the music director, played piano.

“Safe to say, the workshop far exceeded any of our expectations,” said Schmidle, who even received fan mail. A middle-school attendee wrote, “I was not a previous Disco Biscuits fan, but all the same, I think what you did was stunning, and I loved it. You even inspired me to start trying to write my own musical.”

Magner, whose late mother founded the Philadelphia Young Playwrights in 1987, described the experience as one of his proudest moments as an artist.

“My mother most admired collaboration, perseverance, and transformation in her students, and this could not have resonated more for me through the writing process and debut performances of The Very Moon,” Magner stated. “It was powerful to see these qualities manifest themselves in these performances of our songs, both new and old.”

After the workshop, Schmidle returned to London, repacked his bags, and three days later flew to Iceland to see the Biscuits. On the second of their three-night run, the band debuted “Falling,” which Schmidle had written a month earlier with Gutwillig and Magner.

“Totally surreal,” said Schmidle.

Last year, Schmidle, Gutwillig, and Magner launched an Indiegogo campaign to support the next stage of development, initially scheduled for January 2024. They were in the midst of finishing the music when Gutwillig’s father passed away, forcing them to cancel the January workshop.

“We were devastated,” said Schmidle. But the setback, he said, gave them time to strategize and think about the best way forward. “We were speaking to Broadway producers who kept encouraging us to make a concept album and get the music out. So that’s what we’re doing.”

The Life He’s Begun

Last month, Schmidle, Gutwillig, and Magner went into the studio to begin recording a concept album for The Very Moon. They were joined by Jason Fraticelli (of Magner’s project SPAGA) on bass, and Marlon Lewis (of Bisco bassist Marc Brownstein‘s project Star Kitchen) on drums.

“At one point, we were working on a new song and I was the only one who knew the lyrics,” said Schmidle. “So I’m there singing while Jon and Aron are playing. Are you kidding me?! I’m still pinching myself.”

In addition to The Very Moon, Schmidle is developing a number of film and television projects.

“I love figuring out new ways to tell old stories, and each of those projects has its own allure,” said Schmidle. “But nothing is like working on The Very Moon. The collaboration and chemistry between me, Jon, and Aron has been like nothing I’ve ever experienced.”