“Ghosted!” takes an exciting step this summer as the cast and crew make their way from Trinity’s very own Samuel Beckett Theatre and into the renowned Edinburgh Fringe Festival August 11-16. Makena Margolin, a recent Trinity graduate who first started this project as her fourth year capstone as Drama and Theatre Studies major, created the lyrics for this brand new musical. It’s the first ever original musical in this department to be accepted as a capstone.
The plot of “Ghosted!” follows the life of Henry, who is reeling from the loss of his best friend Mia. To help process this grief, he joins a paranormal support group to attempt to bring her back to life. There he meets Lydia, a self-taught exorcist. Together, Henry and a mischievous ghost that was already haunting him, Lydia, and the ghost of Mia set off to ‘untangle the chaos of the living and the dead,’ as the official ‘Ghosted!’ website states. ‘So it’s very Beetlejuice meets Next to Normal… it’s got depth to it. And then a little Rocky Horror campy-ness and like a whole lot of soul,’ Margolin said.
The University Times sat down with Makena Margolin to discuss her inspiration and writing process- how “Ghosted!” came to be. I asked Margolin to tell me about where the story came from, the experience of writing her own lyrics and working with composer Hayden Kline, and the process of taking this musical out of Trinity and into Edinburgh Fringe. Not an easy affair for an independently funded show!
Margolin shared that she had tragically experienced two very intense losses of a close friend and a grandfather only a few weeks before her capstone proposal was due in July, leaving her prepared to create a piece surrounding the complexities of grief.
She credited three women as her main inspirations for writing: Marina Carr, Greta Gerwig, and her capstone supervisor, Melissa Sihra. She described a recent work of Carr’s that she had seen in the Abbey Theatre, “Audrey or Sorrow,” where older actors were playing the ghosts of dead babies. Margolin recounted her impression of the show saying, “You’re laughing, then you find out everything… and you kind of feel bad for laughing but it’s really funny and I love the idea of ghosts and the haunting.” This connects to ‘Ghosted!’, which she described as having a plot that “Starts off kind of weird and spooky, then it gets really really funny, then it gets really f***ing sad, and then it gets funny again.”
“And after directing Carrie with Trinity Musical Society, I knew I wanted to write a musical.” She’s been writing song lyrics for her whole life, so she got together with Hayden Kline, who was the vocal musician on Carrie, to come up with an idea. Margolin knew she wanted to do a ghost story and the rest came very organically, she related. “It’s been a love story to the grieving process,” she said. In lieu of a story centering on death, it’s a musical that focuses on what happens after, and “the ghosts you carry,” as Margolin put it.
This ghost story has come a long way since it first debuted in the Samuel Beckett. When asked about the difference between the two versions, Margolin explained that the Beckett version was good for the time they had to work on it, which was about four weeks. With the time they had before Fringe, they worked on fixing continuity errors that come with inventing an entire spirit world. She talked about the process of reinventing the script, saying, ‘I knew what the cast reflections were, I knew what my reflections were, I knew what audience reflections were. I knew what we needed to do in order to get better.” An entire song was cut, and another was redone. In the end there were six versions of the script, and the Fringe show is “a lot cleaner,” according to Margolin.
With regards to the collaboration process, Hayden Kline briefly joined the interview. “We were able to kind of maximize both the songwriting capabilities and work them into the script in such a way that it felt natural, going from lyrics to music and back,” he said. He spoke about each song having its own identity and reason for its place, despite all the changes the musical has undergone over the course of a year. Margolin agreed and jumped in, explaining that they sought each other’s opinion for every aspect, nothing was just left alone once it had been questioned. She went on to add that “Hayden really let me kind of process my own grief with this.”
This grief is apparent in the show as is evident from an encounter Margolin had with an older woman who approached her crying after watching ‘Ghosted!’ in the Samuel Beckett Theatre. In a very powerful moment the woman held Margolin’s hand and shared her own story with grief that the musical had caused to resurface. Margolin was moved by this, saying ‘How wonderful as a creator that you can see what an emotional impact your work can have on someone.”
Margolin explained that in experiencing grief, the people that have been lost appear in different ways. For her, she sees her lost friend in the beauty of sunflowers. In order to dedicate this play to her, Margolin included sunflowers in various ways throughout the piece, from something as small as a sunflower on the main character’s T-shirt, to another character noticing sunflowers everywhere while she’s being haunted. These subtle touches were the fan favorites most commented on by audience members. She mentioned that most people will find the show very funny, but for those who have experienced grief it will hit very hard.
This production has risen to success through passion and perseverance, and it is clearly a labour of love.
‘Ghosted!’ is on social media @ghostedmusical on Instagram, Tik Tok, and Facebook. There will be a recorded show available shortly and details can be found on the musical’s Instagram page. Margolin even mentioned that the show may be revisited for the next round of Fringe Festivals if you missed it this time.
