What do you get when you mix chickens and Chaucer with an unlikely story of love and art set in a chicken coop?
We’ll find out when the new musical fable “Chicken Tinders” opens May 22 at Taproot Theatre. The show is a coproduction of Copious Love Productions and Gaisma Theatre Group, a new Seattle company whose raison d’être is supporting musical theater homegrown in the Pacific Northwest and is part of a promising local groundswell for that genre.
Both Gaisma (pronounced “guy-zma”) and “Chicken Tinders” formed, independently, in the dark days of the pandemic, said Gaisma Artistic Director Pauls Macs.
Macs was fresh out of grad school and living in New York when the world shut down. “How can I be a productive, helpful member of the theatrical community?” he recalled thinking at the time.
Returning to his hometown Seattle to support local writers seemed like a better use of his time and talents than striking out in a saturated musical theater town like New York, and so Gaisma was formed in late 2023.
“Chicken Tinders” bookwriter/lyricist (and Copious Love’s artistic director) Scott Zenreich was living in Dallas during the pandemic, when he and composer/lyricist John Gregor started tinkering.
An idea for a goofy, punny chicken musical collided with the loneliness and isolation of the pandemic and the work of medieval English poet Geoffrey Chaucer, “who was a radical in his day, writing about chickens and farms when others were writing noble poetry about kings and queens,” Zenreich said.
That led them to the idea of a chicken coop “where there are chickens around you but you can’t really have access to them,” Zenreich said. “As things started to open up, the play became much more about what you would do if you had one day left on Earth.”
In “Chicken Tinders,” our lead is a lowly chicken who ends up on a hero’s journey after the rock star chicken who crows for the sun dies, and all the other chickens think the sun will never rise again. Then, a fox persuades our hero to let her into the coop by promising to take him on a quest to crow and save the world, where he meets a hen (and artist) named Rose.
“So, we wind up asking these big questions about why are we crowing in the first place? What role does original art have in our lives? What does love do to our art?” Zenreich said.
“Chicken Tinders” is Gaisma’s first-ever fully staged production and a rare foray into musicals for Copious Love, so it felt natural to meld their companies’ resources, both financial and creative.
Writing about what Gaisma does proves tricky because, as Macs describes it, the company aims to fit into a writer’s process rather than the other way around.
Gaisma is just one piece of Seattle’s rebounding musical theater landscape, which suffered a stark (if understandable — musicals are expensive) contraction during COVID.
“More and more artists are turning to me and saying, ’Hey, by the way, I’m writing a musical,’ ” said Adam Immerwahr, artistic director of Village Theatre, which, especially prepandemic, had a long history of new musical development.
“These are music directors, actors, musicians in our orchestra,” Immerwahr continued. “These are folks coming at it from every angle imaginable, and then the natural question became how do we nurture that?” To that end, Village and Gaisma have announced they’re partnering on a fellowship to send a local musical theater writer to the 38th annual Festival of New Musicals in New York City this fall to spend critical time in the national scene.
New musicals are cropping up throughout Seattle this summer, from Seattle Public Theater currently producing a world premiere of “Aviatrix”— which was part of the company’s developmental distillery program last year — to Seattle Rep presenting “Freak the Mighty,” a world-premiere adaptation of Rodman Philbrick’s novel co-produced with Cleveland Play House, beginning July 30. Additionally, Village’s second-ever professional production of “We Ain’t Ever Gonna Break Up: The Hymon and Parfunkel Musical” — which was part of the company’s Festival of New Musicals in 2024 — starts performances Tuesday.
All this “new” is lucky for fans of original musicals, but it isn’t necessarily an “if you build it, they will come” situation. In a cultural world that’s increasingly reliant on recognizable IP, ticket buyers can be hesitant to spend money on art they’re not already sure they’ll like. Producing new work is a risk, but one worth taking.
Which brings us back to one of the central questions in “Chicken Tinders”: What role does original art play in our lives?
“In the show, the chicken can crow because he’s so moved by his new love experience,” Zenreich said. “That’s the beauty of art — you can start something, and if you let yourself be affected by your environment, you can create something that’s even bigger and better than you ever could if you just sat down to write it alone.”
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