On his time at Beaver …
My Beaver experience was incredible. In the 7th grade at Beaver I loved music and was really heavily studying classical piano. I don’t remember how old I was when I shifted to working with Beaver’s Artist in Residence who ran the chamber music program. I started taking classical piano with her privately because I thought that I was going to do classical piano as a profession, but I was also very into the drama program with Jen Yolles.

Basically when I was a junior I kind of freaked out a little bit because I was doing both things and loved them equally but couldn’t really figure out how the two things could work together. With the guidance of Jen and Peter Krasinski, who was the head of the music program at that point, I figured out that I was going to try to get into musical theater. I didn’t exactly know what that meant or what it might be, but I applied to NYU and got in and that set me on that trajectory.

It was really cool and it started as early as the 7th grade with David Coleman who was the middle school music teacher, my advisor, and just a giant musical influence in my life. He didn’t water anything down for us just because we were kids. He’s a professional musician, he’s a writer, and he does gospel choir. It was so transformative and informative for me as a child to see that people are artists and can do these things professionally.

On his professional path…
While I was in college I met Andrew Lippa. When I was about to graduate he turned to me and was like, “You know you need a job because you have to make money to live in New York City.” That was very true and I wasn’t really sure what that was going to be because getting into the Broadway scene was a very, very complicated thing. He sent an email on my behalf to a music contractor, who is somebody who hires musicians for Broadway shows and things like that, and Wicked had just opened. Michael Keller was like, “Would you ever tour?” And I was like, “Sure, why not? What do I have to lose?” I got a job playing piano on the first national tour of Wicked when I was 21 or 22 years old. Everything sort of grew from that because I realized on that tour that I could play the piano and I did a lot of growing up really fast because I was thrown into a situation that was so above where I was.

I did Wicked for two and a half years and then quit to get back to the city and figure out what I wanted to do next. I did score prep for a couple of Broadway shows to pay my bills and wet my feet in the industry here in New York. Then I went back on the road conducting the national tour of Grease with Taylor Hicks. It was kind of strange and I did that for a year. Then I came back to the city to do The Addams Family on Broadway in 2010. I’ve been working here ever since which has been amazing. I left The Addams Family to do Rent which was off-Broadway and I was a music director. Then I left to do Kinky Boots, which was a giant hit. It was my first time working on a big giant hit show. I was able to work very closely with the arranger orchestrator. When I left, it was to start doing that work myself. The first show I did that on was Pretty Woman, which opened on Broadway last August and ran for a year. Now I’m doing Little Shop of Horrors off-Broadway. In January I’m going to go to California to do a show called Fly. I’m also writing my own stuff. I just put out an album. I’m constantly writing musicals and that sort of thing and creating this creative habit.

On pursuing a creative talent professionally …
I personally feel the way that you combat the lawlessness of creativity is to treat your craft as you would a job. I wake up every morning, work out, have breakfast, and then at like 10 a.m. I sit down at my desk and from 10 until 5 on a normal work day I try to be creative, whether that’s orchestrating a show or writing a song or doing any of those things. Some days I’m much more successful than others.

“I personally feel the way that you combat the lawlessness of creativity is to treat your craft as you would a job. ”

– Will Van Dyke ’02

On establishing creative habits…
I think for everybody it’s different. For me, it’s the idea of knowing that I’m going to wake up at 8 a.m. and having a routine in the morning before I sit down so that when I sit down, I know that I did the things that wake my body up and wake my mind up. I can’t sit there and know that I have to be creative and have to do something if I don’t have the structure of the time before I’m creative. If I sit down to write a song and it’s not coming, that’s okay, I’m not going to write a song that day. But I have to do something because I’m sitting at the piano, so I’ll do an arrangement or I’ll do an orchestration. Carving the time out and carving the space out is the thing that sort of forces the creativity to come. I have found that if I don’t set my day up in a way that allows me to have the time, then it just gets away from you and you can easily make excuses.

Creativity is such an interesting thing because when you get into the flow of it all, yes you’re incredibly present because you’re creating something, but time sort of ceases to exist in a weird way. If I get an idea at like 10:15, it can be 4 p.m. before I know it and I’m like, “Where did the day go/ What happened?” You lose a sense of consciousness when you get into that real creative brain. Doing the shows at night, which is something that’s a bit more of a repetitive routine, forces you back into connection and creating with other people because writing is such a singularly individual experience.

On collaboration …
There’s never a project where I don’t have a collaborator. I write musicals with a guy named Jeff Talbot who is a brilliant playwright. He and I write lyrics together. I write the music and he writes the book to the musicals that we’ve written. He and I are constantly working on things back and forth via email. We don’t spend a lot of time in a room together just because that’s not the way that he and I operate. Very often we’re writing in our own individual spaces because we’re creating better in our own spaces. But I speak to Jeff every morning before I sit down at the piano. That’s the phone call that I make to have a connection and then go and do the thing. Even if I’m working on something that Jeff has nothing to do with, he’s still a part of that process. He knows creatively what I’m doing and I know creatively what he’s doing.

With my band, we very often write via voice memo back and forth. Sometimes Chris Dawn, who’s the lead singer, he’ll come over and we’ll write together in a room and mess around on the piano, but usually we have a pretty fully formed idea before we get to that stage. So it’s all a little different but all that is to say that none of it is possible without collaborating.

Kinky Boots is a great example. Jerry Mitchell, the director of Kinky Boots and Pretty Woman, is so successful as a director and choreographer because he is constantly listening to the ideas in the room. If he has an idea, it’s more often than not the best idea, but if other people have ideas he’ll listen to every single one before he chooses one. You can’t create the thing without the other people, and if you’re not listening to the other people, you won’t create successful art.

On the R+D process in his profession …
Little Shop of Horrors was an opportunity to work on a show that I love and to work with a director that I really respected but never had worked with, and to work with Alan Menken, who is, as a composer, someone I idolized. When they hired me, it turned out that they needed new orchestrations and new arrangements and somebody to supervise the project, so I was the music supervisor, orchestrator, and arranger on the show.

The first thing for me was figuring out how the hell I was actually going to do it logistically. It’s a small off-Broadway show, so I didn’t have a team. The research element of it for me is usually figuring out, can I do this? And then, how am I going to achieve it? It’s assessing the time I have to hunker down and figuring out what it’s going to be and then, in that time, committing to it and going to my desk every day to explore what it is and how I’m going to do it.

Then talking to Alan, learning about what the show was to him and why it was created the way it was. What were the reasons why the music, stylistically, is what it is? Learning all those things from him, that’s the research element of it. I’m working on another show called Fly which is a Peter Pan story, but it has a very pop but also sort of rhythmic tribal element to it. Bill Sherman wrote the music to it. On Little Shop, musical influences are the choral groups of the 1960s. On Fly, that Bill is super-influenced by Radiohead and things like that. Understanding that these are the worlds in which this music is inspired, it’s then filtering that into how I can tell a cohesive story. That’s the design of it. How do I take all the information that I have and make a thing? For Little Shop, I knew I had four instruments to work with, so how do I design a show that tells a story musically as much as it does on stage? For me that was giving each of the four main characters an instrument and seeing what happens. It sounds different than the original because I tried to keep each character’s musical identity to each of their instruments.

On advice for current Beaver students …
It’s two-fold. One is treat your craft like a job because that’s what it is, and creativity can’t be a fleeting thing. You have to foster it. You have to do whatever you need to do to allow yourself to succeed. You will not be able to succeed at being creative if you don’t structure your life properly. I think that’s more of an adult artist concept.

The biggest piece of advice that I can give somebody back when I was in high school would be to trust your gut and ask for help and say what you want. That was a big lesson for me to learn, but once I learned it, every opportunity that I’ve been afforded in my life creatively and work-wise has come from me taking a chance. Taking a risk to ask somebody who did not know me from a hole in the wall, “Hey, can I show you what I do and can I be helpful to you?” I asked Andrew Lippa this in college. He did not know me and had never met me. I sent him an email and I told him what I wanted to do and that I thought he could be helpful to me and my learning. I asked him if he needed an intern, and he wrote back. That singular email basically started the domino effect of what my career has been. I never would have done that if I had not when I was in high school said to Jen Yolles, “I don’t know what I want to do. How do I do this?”

The hardest part for me as an artist when I was young was that I was so scared that I was different because I was creative and that terrified me. I was afraid to express that. Once I popped that cork and learned that I could say those things out loud, it changed my life.