‘TURBULENCE!’ GETS JUICED-UP FOR NYC

This summer Robot Teammate delighted audiences at the Hollywood Fringe Festival with their original musical Turbulence, winning: Best Musical, Best World Premiere, Outstanding Songwriting and the Critics Choice Award. Now this L.A. born musical is invited Off-Broadway to participate as part of the Fringe Encore Series at the SoHo Playhouse. Turbulence! is set at the 4242 Intergalympics and follows the bitter rivalry between the people of Earth and Mars at an all-time fever pitch. The cast features Kat Primeau, Miles Crosman, and Molly Dworsky as well as “Most Unleashed Performance 2016” nominees Dave Reynolds and Chris Bramante. Miles Crosman serves as head writer, with direction by Lauren Pritchard and musical direction by Sam Johnides. In this Tin Pan L.A. exclusive Robot Teammate shares insights into this new musical and tells us what audiences can expect from the New York experience of Turbulence!

Darren Lee Cole, who runs the Fringe Encore Series at SoHo Playhouse, travels to Fringe Festivals around the world scouting talent for the series. It was his first time catching shows at the Hollywood Fringe, and he requested tickets to one of our sold out performances day-of. Thankfully, we’d saved some seats for just that sort of opportunity, and a few weeks later, he reached out saying he wanted to co-produce the show in NYC.

TURBULENCE! NYC will be a more “juiced-up” production than audiences saw at Sacred Fools this summer 🙂 We are elevating the production level, punching up jokes, and reviewing our performance tapes with an eye on clarity, brevity, and sincerity. Our original production, from drafting page one of the script to opening night, was put together in less than four months, so we’re grateful to have more time to spruce up the ol’ space ship!

Lauren has been our musical improv coach since 2015 and to say that we are obsessed with her comedy, musicality, and directing abilities would be a huge understatement. She brings a wealth of experience and a genuine love for our ensemble to the table, and we are so fortunate to have her helping to polish and refine this world with us!

HFF has been an incredible incubator for us, a place to try out ideas and reach new audiences outside of the improv world. It’s challenging to have a writers room and get seven people in agreement about every major script decision, but we’ve learned the struggle pays off in dividends. This year especially, we saw that audiences really needed an escape, and it was an honor to make people laugh and come along for the ride with us.

We have to provide our own travel and lodging, so we’re selling merch and music on our website www.robotteammate.com to help buffer some of that cost. We’re also fundraising at Boardner’s in Hollywood September 7th at 10pmwhile performing music from TIMEHEART, THUG TUNNEL, and TURBULENCE! Since we are not yet a known commodity in NYC, we hope SoHo Playhouse’s PR team and our LA fam can help get the word out. It would be great if more shows had the opportunity to travel to NYC from Hollywood Fringe, so there’s some self-imposed pressure to be a commercial success and represent LA theatre artists positively in the series.

PERFORMANCES: