Heart Failure Backstory

Heart Failure began its life as an joke. I thought it would be funny if the generic company wanted to have its own advertising campaign. I imagined a pair of opposite advertisers with no people skills thrown together to work on it. This led to me writing the short Generic Musical, and then to wondering what I should do with this little 15 minute crème puff.

Around the same time, I was working on my first major national submission process. Trying to shop my then-latest musical around was an eye-opener! It was fascinating to read over and over again that most theatres didn't want new musicals, and that if they did they better have a cast of under five and minimal sets. Well, that was not what I had written. That time. So, I started to think of how I could make a musical with so few resources.

The problem is that Musical Theatre developed as a form that depended on its large size for variety. But with a cast of four, the easy solution of “a cast of thousands” is gone. So I hit on the idea of linking short musicals. Maybe about love, since I hadn't written a romantic comedy yet. Generic Musical could come first, because I made it about people who couldn't meet people. But where to go from there?

Thankfully, I heard another joke. Kind of. I was at a party and someone was talking about their new pond they put in the backyard and how they were having trouble with the Koi fish they had just put into it jumping out. Apparently, Koi fish will try to jump out of their new ponds for about two weeks when they are moved. A friend said- "A suicidal fish. Mark, you should make that a musical!" Everyone laughed. But it stuck with me. A suicidal fish. I did a little research and found out that Koi fish have 50,000 children. I thought that was even funnier, so I took my suicidal fish and gave him a pregnant wife. That would be a story that would bookend well with the Generic Musical. So I came up with three more major relationship points in between meeting each other and having children and gave them ideas and characters that matched the magical realism of the existing pieces.

Ad execs, compulsive liars, a singing teddy bear, superheroes, and a suicidal fish. All combined by the event getting to a point in a relationship where you fear you are going to self-destruct. All set to a contemporary soundtrack of pop and show tunes.

And now, it's my latest show that I am shopping around.