What do you get when you mix chickens and Chaucer with an unlikely story of love and art set in a chicken coop?<\/p>\n
We\u2019ll find out when the new musical fable \u201cChicken Tinders\u201d 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\u2019\u00eatre is supporting musical theater homegrown in the Pacific Northwest and is part of a promising local groundswell for that genre.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Both Gaisma (pronounced “guy-zma”) and \u201cChicken Tinders\u201d formed, independently, in the dark days of the pandemic, said Gaisma Artistic Director Pauls Macs.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Macs was fresh out of grad school and living in New York when the world shut down. \u201cHow can I be a productive, helpful member of the theatrical community?\u201d he recalled thinking at the time.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cChicken Tinders\u201d bookwriter\/lyricist (and Copious Love\u2019s artistic director) Scott Zenreich was living in Dallas during the pandemic, when he and composer\/lyricist John Gregor started tinkering.<\/p>\n
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, \u201cwho was a radical in his day, writing about chickens and farms when others were writing noble poetry about kings and queens,\u201d Zenreich said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That led them to the idea of a chicken coop \u201cwhere there are chickens around you but you can’t really have access to them,\u201d Zenreich said. \u201cAs things started to open up, the play became much more about what you would do if you had one day left on Earth.\u201d<\/p>\n
In \u201cChicken Tinders,\u201d our lead is a lowly chicken who ends up on a hero\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, 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?\u201d Zenreich said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cChicken Tinders\u201d is Gaisma\u2019s first-ever fully staged production and a rare foray into musicals for Copious Love, so it felt natural to meld their companies\u2019 resources, both financial and creative.<\/p>\n
Writing about what Gaisma does proves tricky because, as Macs describes it, the company aims to fit into a writer\u2019s process rather than the other way around.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Gaisma is just one piece of Seattle\u2019s rebounding musical theater landscape, which suffered a stark (if understandable \u2014 musicals are expensive) contraction during COVID.<\/p>\n
\u201cMore and more artists are turning to me and saying, \u2019Hey, by the way, I’m writing a musical,\u2019 \u201d said Adam Immerwahr, artistic director of Village Theatre, which, especially prepandemic, had a long history of new musical development.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese are music directors, actors, musicians in our orchestra,\u201d Immerwahr continued. \u201cThese are folks coming at it from every angle imaginable, and then the natural question became how do we nurture that?\u201d To that end, Village and Gaisma have announced they\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n
New musicals are cropping up throughout Seattle this summer, from Seattle Public Theater currently producing a world premiere of “Aviatrix”\u2014 which was part of the company\u2019s developmental distillery program last year \u2014 to Seattle Rep presenting \u201cFreak the Mighty,\u201d a world-premiere adaptation of Rodman Philbrick\u2019s novel co-produced with Cleveland Play House, beginning July 30. Additionally, Village\u2019s\u00a0second-ever professional production of “We Ain\u2019t Ever Gonna Break Up: The Hymon and Parfunkel Musical<\/a>” \u2014 which was part of the company\u2019s Festival of New Musicals in 2024 \u2014 starts performances Tuesday<\/span>.\u00a0<\/p>\n All this \u201cnew\u201d is lucky for fans of original musicals, but it isn\u2019t necessarily an \u201cif you build it, they will come\u201d situation. In a cultural world that\u2019s increasingly reliant on recognizable IP, ticket buyers can be hesitant to spend money on art they\u2019re not already sure they\u2019ll like. Producing new work is a risk, but one worth taking.<\/p>\n Which brings us back to one of the central questions in \u201cChicken Tinders\u201d: What role does original art play in our lives?\u00a0<\/p>\n “In the show,\u00a0the chicken can crow because he’s so moved by his new love experience,\u201d Zenreich said. \u201cThat\u2019s the beauty of art \u2014 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yakimaherald.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What do you get when you mix chickens and Chaucer with an unlikely story of love and art set in a chicken coop? We\u2019ll find out when the new musical fable \u201cChicken Tinders\u201d opens May 22 at Taproot Theatre. The show is a coproduction of Copious Love Productions and Gaisma Theatre Group, a new Seattle […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2415679,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[21741],"class_list":["post-2415678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/New-Seattle-musical-part-of-the-genres-rebounding-in-the.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2415678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2415678"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2415678\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2415680,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2415678\/revisions\/2415680"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2415679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2415678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2415678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2415678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}