FANGIRLS: The Ins and Outs of Producing a Musical Theater Success Story

Yve Blake has raised plenty of eyebrows at her concession that she “wrote a musical on her computer”. The proof is in the product however, and FANGIRLS has become a theater phenomenon since debuting in 2019. From its premiere run in Queensland, Australia to the Sydney Opera House and most recently, London’s Lyric Hammersmith, this musical about finding unconditional joy in the things you love is undeniably doing something right. 

When you experience FANGIRLS for yourself, it’s simple to understand its success. The heart of FANGIRLS is tied to a double standard regarding male versus female fanaticism, and its charm lies in dispelling the idea of pleasure being guilty when consuming pop music or taking part in a fandom. In our interview, Blake and musical director David Muratore share the intricate and iterative challenges that have come with graduating FANGIRLS from Ableton Live demos to iconic theater stages. 

Where did the FANGIRLS journey begin? Was there a genesis moment? 

YVE: At the beginning of this process, I would say I identified as a playwright who, secretly, had been writing songs in my head, but who didn’t play a musical instrument and loved musicals. Then what happened was I met a 13-year-old girl who changed my life. She was my friend’s little cousin, and she told me she’d met the man she was going to marry… and confidently assured me that his name was Harry Styles. So she began this era of my life where I became just feverishly obsessed with, at the time it was fans of One Direction, but I became really interested in the language that the world used to describe the enthusiasms of fans who are young women. 

I became interested in why we use words like ‘psycho’, ‘hysterical’, ‘crazy’, ‘pathetic’, ‘over the top’, ‘desperate’, and ‘a bit much’ to describe, you know, teenage girls screaming their lungs out at a pop concert. But if you take that image and you make it about young men screaming at a sports event, suddenly people reach for words like ‘devoted’ and ‘loyal’ and ‘passionate’. So I knew that I wanted to write about this and my intuition just yelled at me: ‘this has to be a musical’. In its greatest form, this has to be a musical that sounds like a pop concert meets rave meets church. It’s about the titanic feelings of falling in love for the first time at 14 with someone who doesn’t know you exist. Realizing that was the form I wanted this to be in, I was then confronted with the daunting task of ‘I’m just a simple vegetable, how am I going to make music?’ And that’s when I turned to YouTube and watched a lot of tutorials of teenage boys in their bedroom showing me how to operate Ableton.

I can’t imagine many of those YouTube tutorials would have been made with theater in mind. Was that something that you struggled with?

YVE: Well the thing is, I wanted it to sound like real pop music - it’s a story about the power of pop music. And this might be a bit too much, but I really felt there’s a specific adrenaline you feel when you’re 14 and you’re feeling emotions for the first time, everything’s kind of hypercolour, and that’s how pop music makes me feel, it connects me to the adrenaline of that time. So I knew that with this content I wanted the form to be the most hyperactive pop sound, and I wanted it to have these cinematic elements so you feel like the main character falling in love. Even now I’ll be in session with Dave saying things like ‘can you make the drums sound like the Olympics opening ceremony?’ I want big, big sounds, so in a way I wasn’t bothered by the fact that there weren’t many musical theater tutorials because I didn’t want to make a musical that sounded like a musical. 

I’m interested in the start-to-finish process of creating tracks for the theater. What kind of versions of songs do you end up having to create? 

YVE: What starts it is I send Dave a demo, and they've always been at varying levels of complexity. Sometimes it's just my top line and then some placeholder instruments and maybe even me literally kind of beat boxing a drumline. Sometimes I've done like 50 instruments and I've really gone ham but regardless, Dave takes whatever I offer and makes it sound so premium and polished. But then after that you're right, there's all these different destinations for the tracks.

DAVE: It's a really dynamic thing. We start one place and there's a whole bunch of checkpoints to get to before we end up at the stage. A big part of that process has been Yve and I figuring out our studio dynamic. It's similar to a writer/producer relationship, but Yve has grown so much in her knowledge of Ableton that she is able to manifest these things a lot easier and a lot more directly, and so we've been growing together in this, but we still end up with minimum five different versions of any given song. There's an incalculable amount of edits that are made - it’s as much a process of curation of sounds as it is a process of creation of sounds. Like there's songs that have been given facelifts between seasons, because we feel like the music is not as current as it needs to be. We're chasing something that does sound edgy and new, which is why it's so hard to find precedent for what we're attempting. We end up with these monstrous projects that are 300 tracks long and have, you know, 100 synth sounds in them because we're just constantly curating individual sounds, wondering if that's part of our palette still, and whether it’s part of the sheen of what we're presenting on the stage.

YVE: Dave makes a really good point here, which is that on an album, like a pop record, you might want every song to sound fresh but cohesive. But for this, because it's a long form narrative, we quite literally want melodies and specific sounds to return and be motific and speak to different stories. So we have this incredible challenge where there's now 25 songs in the show, but we need to always keep track of whether they are cohesive, speaking to each other, and energy-wise for each song we have to consider not only the last song we heard but also the scene before it, so creatively it's this constant game of micro/macro.

And you’ve also presented the songs as a studio album, I assume some more fine-tuning had to take place there? 

DAVE: I thought it was gonna be real breezy. Like, hey, I've got all these mixed tracks, just got to lay down some vocals and polish them up. Wrong! Wrong-est I’ve ever been. Because essentially when you have a theater, you're thinking in three dimensions, like you're thinking I have speakers behind me, I've got the speakers to the side of me, I’ve got speakers upstage, I've got the vocal PA, I've got delays. You're thinking in 360 degrees, and condensing all that information down into a two track, down into stereo and making everything still feel 360, making it still feel like a pop concert with all the atmos, all the sound effects was the biggest professional challenge that I've ever faced. 

YVE: And never mind the fact that, imagine mixing a pop song, except you have seven soloists and they're not singing a top line, they're singing harmony. And then add on top of that you've got like synths, drums, but then you've also got a string section and French horns. The workload that Dave had was mammoth. And then remember that the album has 23 tracks, and we were in lockdown! It was a very special time in our lives. 

You mentioned you've changed songs between seasons, but how about during a season? Are you sitting at these shows and thinking actually, that's not hitting right in this room, and making incremental edits along the way as well?

YVE: It should be said that in theater, the way it works is you open a show and then you have a preview period where the tickets are cheaper, then you can change things but once it's opening night, the show is - as they say 'frozen' - so it's kind of done. We're currently in rehearsals for the London production, and the number of times we will email Dave in Australia from London and go, ‘hey, the cast need to be able to hear the count-in to that bar’. So, so much of what Dave has to manage right now is to do with the fact that musical theater people don't have in-ear monitoring and they not only have to find a beat to sing to, but to really dance to. 

DAVE: Totally. That practical thing is a huge deal because we have to solve problems in a way that is both practical and creative. The buzzword for us now is ‘handrails’, you know, so it's giving the cast as much tempo, like implicit tempo as we can, so that they have what they need to be a full on triple threat on stage and be dancing around hitting their pitch, knowing where they are in the song. We're solving these problems where we need to have a creative solution that works aesthetically, but we also need to disguise it, camouflage it into the tracks.

YVE: A really great example is often we have to find ways to sneak in a pitch indicator for someone to find their starting note. And there's a moment in the show where a teenage girl calls her mom to blackmail her into buying something. And so there's a ringing sound before the phone call starts and she sings this song, so Dave had to pitch the sound of the dial tone to give the actor her exact note, but no one can tell that's how she'll get her note out of nowhere. Because that moment is acapella, she better have her note because then she's gonna have seven people behind her harmonizing in free time to the note she sings.

DAVE: And small detail: we had to have a new phone sound because the old one was a G, the new one is a D! 

So you're hiding count-ins and this pitch information within the composition?

YVE: Yes, and Dave is a beast at it, like he'll do clever drum fills, where, you know, you've got the one, or he'll do side chaining that implies a beat. So he's just really smart at it. 

DAVE: And it's not just in-ears. Touring bands will have an in-ear mix and a monitor engineer side of the stage mixing for their ears. These guys have foldback, but they've got an omni mic hanging around off their head which is taking in everything, so they have like pitiful, intentionally small onstage foldback monitors that they can't get much from either, because if it's too loud, it’s just a feedback nightmare.

You’re also sound designers for FANGIRLS. Could you talk about any of the sound effects you created for the production?  

DAVE: There's a lot of psychology behind a lot of the sound effects. The biggest one probably, and quite a little hack of Ableton we found, was with the Vocoder. On the stock standard Vocoder, the carrier to begin with is noise, which is just white noise chained to whatever audio sample you've plugged into it. But I've found that if you plug in the audio of the topline of a song, chain it to noise, squash it, saturate it, give it some reverb, it sounds like a crowd full of people screaming the lyrics, especially when you bury it amongst other crowd ambient sound effects. So I have four separate stereo sends of just crowd noise that are going to surround left and right, rear surround left and right, and upstage. So if you put the same sample in all of the speakers, if people are physically hearing different crowd samples coming from different directions, you actually do feel entirely ensconced in this crowd. It really feels like you’ve got the energy of 10,000 people around you. 

Well that’s a huge part of big concerts, the artist needs the crowd and the crowd needs the artist. So you’re using clever sound design to bring that energy. 

DAVE: Tricks! Little sound tricks. Mikey Waters, our first sound designer and PA designer just helped us so much with designing the right PA for the system. The main PA is almost 100% vocals, it's all vocals because you have to stay conscious of just keeping that high end completely clear for the vocals to cut through, because people need to feel the energy, but they also have to hit lyrics - there's story in it. So they have to hear that. And that was really helpful. Something I found is that you can insert so much more energy into a show in the low end with a clean sine wave that will just not get in the way of that vocal being pristine. So the balance of the live tracks is very much energy in the low end, drive the subs, get people's whole body moving. You've got to divvy up that energy in a way that people can receive the information and also get their faces melted by sub bass waves. 

YVE: Dave's onto something too which is that in a musical, annoyingly, you have to hear every syllable of every lyric, and there's no exceptions. People come to your show and if they miss a lyric, that could break the whole story. So poor Dave has sat through almost eight years now of me saying ‘can you please put a low pass filter on that?’ Because we need to hit every ‘t’ and ‘d’ and ‘s’, and if someone is competing with a snare pattern, it's game over. And so making sure you create an authentic pop sound but that everyone can still articulate is probably one of the biggest battles that we've faced.

DAVE: Something I was super proud of is there's a couple of lead lines where there's a ghost vocal that is sidechained to the high band of a multiband compressor and there's a ghost vocal that is ducking everything above 5k. Like a de-esser, but it's kind of de-essing in real time and around the lyrics so that you can have your cake and eat it too in a couple of sections. It's just little things like that, we had to be creative, the way we solved things. There's just too much information to really fit in such a small amount of space and time. So you’ve got to be creative and we had to invent a lot of our process around what was required. You've got to find solutions, you know? You've got to find them, or there's none. So we've learned so much from having done this, it's really changed my perspective on what you can achieve in a space with a set of speakers and you know, QLab.

It sounds like the iterative process that's been unique to this show and to the medium has been helpful in helping you embrace that mindset.

DAVE: For me, starting this off, I felt out of my depth, like ‘what's gonna come out of these giant speakers? I don't know how that's gonna sound.’ Then something that really clicked to me is there's no point where anyone is gonna go 'oh yeah, your tracks are good enough' or 'this is good enough'. You've really just got to trust your instincts, send it and fix it. Just send it, learn something from it. And then do it again. I remember using this kick drum in our first showcase and realizing that there's all this info below 50 hertz, realizing that I'm just blowing out the subwoofer speakers, stuff that I just couldn't hear on my little 5-inch monitors. And so I just started changing the way I reference things and changing the way I listen to things. Knowing that the PA that they're going to come out of is not going to let you get away with this, it's going to tell you everything that's going on in your tracks. 

YVE: It's also mental if you think about how long it might take to produce a pop song, and then imagine that... for us, this will be the fifth iteration of FANGIRLS – it's had three live presentations in Australia, a workshop in London two years ago and now this big UK premiere. And so imagine you make a pop album, but then you get four chances to remake the pop album. In some ways it's great but sometimes you feel insane because you're like 'didn't we do this eight years ago?' But it is ultimately a privilege as well because the audiences that we've had - we've had people of all ages, but specifically the response of young people who've loved this has been incredible. And we have audiences that come dressed up as the characters and bring signs for the fake boy band in our show. So that's been a reward that has got us through eight years of being in windowless studios and working sometimes on the same eight bars again and again.

Follow Yve Blake on her website, Instagram and the official Fangirls site

Text and Interview: Tom Cameron
Photos: Manuel Harlan