OUR STORY &
DEVELOPMENT HISTORY

It was October 2020, during lockdown, and Margo Hera was working as a volunteer coordinator on “Save the Libraries: No on #2!,”a campaign to save New Orleans libraries from budget cuts. Operating from Zoom, she and her volunteer co-coordinator galvanized over 200 volunteers across the New Orleans metropolitan area over the course of two months. They organized daily phonebanking sessions and sent volunteers across the city to wave signs on election day. And they won the campaign!

After winning the campaign, Margo’s and her co-volunteer coordinator were discussing pandemic goals (virtually, of course) and she mentioned she had been reading a biography about Vladimir Lenin that she had checked out of the library and found a short passage about two sisters that would make a great musical: “Less bloody but equally squalid and morally dubious was the Schmidt Affair. Lenin came up with a plan to swindle two teenage girls out of their inheritance– and, quite possibly, to break their hearts in the process…While in personal financial affairs he was a pillar of rectitude and not at all greedy, in politics he was prepared to lie, steal, cheat and kill for money to further Bolshevik interests. ‘Everything that is done in the interests of the proletarian cause is honest,' he [said].” She had stumbled upon this incredible story lost to history and Margo immediately told her she wanted to help write it.

Margo immediately began writing lyrics and shortly thereafter brought in composer Ashlynn Hazel Pilger. They started by scouring the internet and library databases for all the historical resources about the true story that they could find. There were very few historical accounts and every one of them had differing and usually conflicting details. So they decided early on which version of the story they wanted to tell and then what they wanted to add to it to fill the gaps in the records. They worked in their separate corners of the country, Margo in New Orleans and then New York and Ashlynn in Portland.

In March 2021, just four months after they started a shared Google Drive, they held a table reading over Zoom with a rough first draft of the book, lyrics for 13 songs, and music for 9.

In February 2024, Margo had some singer and pianist friends come over for a jam session to sing through some of the songs and hear them out loud in different voices.

In March 2024, Margo and Ashlynn met in person for the first time on a writing retreat in New Orleans where they spent a week writing new songs and reworking old ones.

In September 2024, The Schmidt Sisters: A Revolutionary Situation had its first staged reading at The Chain in NYC as part of Emerging Artist Theatre’s Spark Theatre Festival. It was performed with a cast of 10 to a sold-out house with an audience of just over 100 and a waitlist.

In February 2025, The Schmidt Sisters had a song performed in the Collective Transformation: New Works showcase, a fundraiser for the Transgender Law Center, at Green Room 42 In NYC.

In July 2025, the team travelled to Texas for the Musical Writers Festival for development and presented songs at the MWF New Works Cabaret and Pitch Night.

Also in July 2025, they started recorded an EP of 6 songs from the show.

In June 2026, Stephanie Ren joined the writing team as book writer.

In August 2026, the team will be releasing their EP and having an EP Release Concert at Chelsea Table and Stage in NYC.