OUR STORY

Rebecca Farley and Margo Hera met in October 2020, when they were both working on “Save the Libraries: No on #2!,” a political campaign in New Orleans. Picture this: New Orleans, a struggling city in the Gulf South, has a problem. Their mayor, in a desperate ploy for funds, wants to cut the public library’s funding by 30%. After a public outcry, a few of the city’s left-leaning organizations form a coalition titled “Save the Libraries: No on #2” to fight this proposed city ordinance. Margo and Rebecca worked as volunteer coordinators for this campaign. Operating from Zoom, they galvanized over 200 volunteers across the New Orleans metropolitan area over the course of two months. They organized daily phonebanking sessions — both Rebecca and Margo make pretty awesome phonebankers — and sent volunteers across the city to wave signs on election day. And they won the campaign! A group of several hundred library-obsessed volunteers saved the local libraries!

The Schmidt Sisters feels like the natural child of this union. During the campaign, Rebecca told Margo about a story she couldn’t stop thinking about: the story of the Schmidt sisters. Rebecca had read about it in a book about Lenin — a book from the library, no less! — and thought it could make for an interesting Les Mis-style dramatic musical. Or maybe a Great Comet. Margo confessed she wrote lyrics. Rebecca confessed she wrote librettos. They decided they would continue their political partnership by writing a musical. Rebecca and Margo met Ashlynn shortly thereafter. Margo found Ashlynn Hazel Pilger, a recently graduated composer from Boston Conservatory, through mutual friends. They were thoughtful, kind, and brilliant. Margo was ferociously organized, meticulous, and erudite. Rebecca dreamed and wrote a lot. Ashlynn composed with an astonishing atttention to detail. They all learned a lot about Stravinsky.

In March of 2021, just four months after they started a shared Google Drive, they held a reading over Zoom with a full libretto, lyrics for 13 songs, and music for 9. They received feedback from actors and made a call to keep working, to keep going, to keep Schmidt-ing. They worked in their separate corners of the country, meeting over Zoom and phone calls, working away in Google Drive, until February of 2024, when they finally all convened in New Orleans for a week-long writing retreat. They got to work writing more intensely than ever and submitting to theatre festivals and competitions.

This musical has been in development for 4.5 years. There has been a Zoom reading, jam sessions to sing through the score with friends, a concert performance of one of the songs at Green Room 42 in NYC, and In June 2024, The Schmidt Sisters was accepted to Emerging Artists Theatre’s Spark Theater Festival. For the festival, the writing team presented a one-night-only staged reading September 18th at The Chain Theater in NYC. It was performed with a pared-down cast of 10 to a sold-out house with an audience of just over 100 and a waitlist. The rave reviews poured in.

As for next steps, the writing team would like to mount a 29-Hour Industry Staged Reading or a developmental production at an incubator theatre or university. In the big-picture-future, we see The Schmidt Sisters on a big stage like one on Broadway or the West End.

  • Book

    Rebecca Farley (she/her) is a writer living in her native New Orleans, Louisiana. She has a Bachelor’s in creative writing from Columbia University, where she wrote books for two musicals. She studied musical theater in high school at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts and the Professional Performing Arts School in New York City. Most recently, Antigravity Magazine published her work. She previously wrote for Martha Stewart Living Digital and Refinery29, a women’s website. In her spare time, she works in labor organizing and harm reduction.

  • Lyrics

    Margo Hera (she/her) is a multi-hyphenate theater artist who lives in New York City after escaping her hometown in South Florida. In between those cities she got her B.A. in Theatre Performance and B.S. in Psychology and Gender & Sexuality Studies at Tulane University in New Orleans. She also studied theatre in middle and high school at Bak Middle School of the Arts and Dreyfoos High School of the Arts. This is her first foray into writing a musical after a lifetime of working onstage. She is part of the musical improv team Elevator Pitch which started as a house ensembles team at the People’s Improv Theatre. She can be seen doing theatre, standup, improv, and sketch comedy around the city.

  • Music

    Ashlynn Hazel Pilger (they/she) is a non-binary composer, music director, and pianist residing in Portland, Oregon. They received their BM in Composition at Boston Conservatory at Berklee in 2020 under Jonathan Bailey Holland, Marti Epstein, and Eun Young Lee. Additionally, Ashlynn took musical theatre writing classes with Michael Wartofsky and David Reiffel at Berklee College of Music. For 8 years, they music directed at educational, community, and professional theatres. Ashlynn wrote a full-length musical entitled Indigo with their brother, and the reading was performed in Boston Conservatory. Additionally, Ashlynn is a mathematics educator and tutor. They have an MS in Mathematics from Portland State University and started their PhD program last fall. Ashlynn is a proud member of the Musical Theatre Writing Collective.