The Draw #9: Brian LaGuardia

A new series for the TAPAS blog. I wrote down names on little slips of paper, the names of everyone currently in the TAPAS Facebook group and Discord server, 41 people altogether, and will be drawing one name every day to write about them and their history with the group.

Today we have Brian LaGuardia, I composer I recruited into TAPAS early in the team's life, in late 2018. Having gone through two composers for my Drizzt musical who met with me but then swiftly flaked out, I sought another and approached Silver Letomi, a musician I met at a party once back in Colorado, who did a lot of World of Warcraft-themed parody songs at the time and, merely weeks ago, did an epic cover of a Baldur's Gate III song. Letomi didn't think composing a musical was in her wheelhouse and has never been a member of TAPAS to date, but I hope to get her to sing something one day; at that time, she introduced me to Brian.

By early 2019, Brian had whipped up something for "We Got This", the first of the half of the songs in the show for which I had lyrics but no melody ideas. I was so delighted to finally have something composed that I never even considered telling a single soul, especially not Brian himself, that it wasn't at all what I was looking for, which is a huge flaw of mine as a director, early on I could hardly bear to tell anyone that they had made a mistake, and I've gotten a lot better at it over time, but sometimes I still get socially drained enough that I accept things that still aren't right, so, my directing still has some growth to do.

That was the end of his involvement with the Drizzt musical. He just didn't seem to have time to dive into the project a second time, and by the middle of that year, I was starting to prioritize a newer project, Keys & Kingdoms: The Choices, and by a huge stroke of luck, he had the time to give us the songs "Get It Done" and "Stacky's Ballad", and so with completed songs, we managed to storyboard that pilot. No complaints about those compositions, just my own lyric-writing. I've managed to fix the more awkward lyrical moments, and we have had the cast recordings of the songs for some time.

In 2020, I consulted Brian about whipping up songs for the Irregular Fantasy! trailers, something I was taking from the very top as I didn't even have lyric ideas yet. There, Brian had to call it and admit he simply didn't have time for TAPAS, he was deep in some real professional composing jobs and had to prioritize. I thanked him for his time and said I was sorry it wasn't working out, and he told me to quit being so nice about it; he saw the previous two years as a pretty big failure of professionalism on his part and was down on himself about it. It was sad to see.

So, he brought in a friend -- Robert Mullis, who we'll talk more about when his name comes out of my little bowl, initially intending to split duties with Robert, each of them assigned to three of the six songs, but that didn't last long and Brian had to duck out entirely. Now we're working just with Robert and whatever assistants he has at a given moment, and that's working out really well.

Robert remarked to me once, at a later date, that songwriting was never Brian's forte either, his deal is composing score, usually for video games. I have an appreciation for video game score, as a guy with a wandering mind who needs help concentrating. Video game background music has a rather steady quality, as it has to be designed to play in uninterrupted loops for as long as it needs to, not ending until you, the player, have moved on to the next scene. That makes it great for studying.

Naty and I were once gushing over the work of Jeremy Soule, pretty excited at the realization that one guy had scored all our favorite video games, but Brian quickly cut in and explained that Jeremy Soule is a well-documented asshole, so... typical, really. That was a bit deflating. But only for our desire to work with the guy, we'd still like to compose like him. Without his business practices, and while hoping he doesn't work again. That's how I handle good artists who are jerks.

Brian's main project that I'm aware of is Shujinkou; as I understand it, it's something of an action RPG that also teaches you Japanese. Brian showed us the Kickstarter some years ago, which updated last month, looks like they're beta-testing after five years of coding. And Brian is the composer! I'm excited to see what comes of the game's future.

So, yeah, big shout-out to the first TAPAS composer who actually did anything, who eventually introduced us to the first one who does anything regularly... I love music and want my projects to be heavy with it and I wish I had the capability of contributing some myself, because Robert was pretty flabbergasted to discover that his workflow was delightfully productive by our standards. As with the first entry with Chris, I'm trying not to be bitter and crap on the composers -- I'm not upset to have worked with composers who just had the ill luck to have taken on more than they could handle. I think in the end it's all worked out perfectly.

Cast of Characters: Irregular Fantasy! part 9

A continuation of this series; we'll be introducing all of the currently-planned characters in TAPAS's upcoming series Irregular Fantasy!, based on David Morgan-Mar's webcomic Irregular Webcomic! In short, it's a typical RPG adventure set in a typical fantasy world, taking the silly atmosphere of the comic and making it our own.

Spoiler warning: While this presentation will try to avoid any details about backgrounds, plotlines, or relationships in order to focus entirely on the characters and not give away the story, some details that might be considered spoilers will inevitably leak through now and then.

We start here with a few characters appearing in Ardaxar's country, and from there, we'll look into all of the Great Old Ones we intend to appear in the story.

These character concepts were drawn by me and therefore aren't very good. Linework and color by Naty Jenfjord.

Click on the images to zoom in and read the descriptions.

Cast of Characters: The Choices part 9

A continuation of this series! We'll be introducing all of the currently-planned characters in TAPAS's upcoming series Keys & Kingdoms: The Choices.

The Keys & Kingdoms universe is an intended gaming setting that combines the feel of typical Dungeons & Dragons-style high fantasy with that of a Disney fairytale musical!

Spoiler warning: While this presentation will try to avoid any details about backgrounds, plotlines, or relationships in order to focus entirely on the characters and not give away the story, some details that might be considered spoilers will inevitably leak through now and then.

It's our final chapter of this series, meeting characters who debut nearer the end of the Choices story, some in the desert wilderness of Akhmis and others in the eastern kingdom of Magnae.

These character concepts were drawn by me and therefore aren't very good. Linework and color by McKenzie Eby.

Click on the images to zoom in and read the descriptions.

So that's it for The Choices, but we're not quite done with the Keys & Kingdoms blog series. Stick around and we'll be moving on to a big exploration of the deities of the K&K setting.

The Draw #8: Mekia Gay

A new series for the TAPAS blog. I wrote down names on little slips of paper, the names of everyone currently in the TAPAS Facebook group and Discord server, 41 people altogether, and will be drawing one name every day to write about them and their history with the group.

Coming along a little quicker this time, it's Mekia Gay! I first laid eyes on Mekia in a 2020 promo for QCT's production of Chicago, where her intense performance immediately drew her right out of the background and caught my eye.

At around that time -- as that production, nearing its opening night, was postponed as the pandemic hit in full -- I was hoping to audition lots of women in Quincy for Keys & Kingdoms, and asked fellow Chicago cast member Mason to seek out Mekia in particular. Mekia got back to me and was by far the most committed to my virtual audition event; she read the monologues of four characters and ended up cast as Maer.

It was years later that the theatre finally did put on that production of Chicago, and as we started putting the voice casts together for our TAPAS projects, I also worked with Mekia in ensemble for Beauty and the Beast, and saw her in Mame and Legally Blonde. A pastry chef by trade, she often bakes things for the cast when she's doing a show, and I also see her now and then doing livestreams where she sings people's requests. Very prolific, as you'll see, and a very strong performer, I'd say that's a needed quality for Maer, a character who's ever the foil to the rest of the group, the one who fuels most of the interpersonal conflict within the cast of heroes.

Last year she was in Rent as Mimi... let's euphemistically call that show a production so good it put me in the hospital... see the blog entry from last May. In fact, that's not a euphemism at all; after all, most of why I was so upset was how good it was. But before I realized I had to get help, I definitely did my best to focus on how mind-blowing Mekia's performance was. One of my better takeaways from that production... Maer has always worn heels, but in the upcoming, very minor redesigns of all the characters, I'm looking to make absolutely sure she rocks those heels just like Mekia did in Rent.

And I've most recently seen her in Peter Pan, playing... well... the title role. I was immediately gleeful when I heard she was cast, getting the information first as whispered rumors on the set of The Hobbit before it was officially announced. Peter Pan is a very important show to me; my "theatre bug" moment was playing Captain Hook at a summer camp in 2003, something that a lot of my relatives who saw it still won't stop talking about. I couldn't wait to see it, and... yeah... I've never seen someone so completely disappear into a character before. Incredible stuff.

Her Facebook profile claims her as a singer-songwriter, and when I asked her about that when she was first auditioning for me -- always being on the lookout for someone who can write songs; I want a strong musical element in these projects but, as mentioned in the first Draw blog, it was friggin' hard at the time to keep my hands on a composer -- she said that she didn't really have the credentials to claim that, hadn't really done it in a while. But later on... last year or earlier, I think, I'm pretty sure it was before Rent... we did have a meeting to talk about putting together a song. Just one at first, but I hope more later. We'll get back to it later.

The Draw #7: Mason Ellison

A new series for the TAPAS blog. I wrote down names on little slips of paper, the names of everyone currently in the TAPAS Facebook group and Discord server, 41 people altogether, and will be drawing one name every day to write about them and their history with the group.

Oof, okay, I delayed a good long while again. We've got a big one today, it's Mason Ellison.

As with most of my friends and acquaintances at this point, I first met Mason when working on the 2015 performance of Spamalot. When the principal knight actors like myself were added to the "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" number, Mason led the way in the big whimsical umbrella dance. I once heard him expressing some frustration and fear about if he was getting the choreography right... people being vulnerable always wins me over. All my life I'd been told that everyone else is struggling through life just as hard as me, and I did not believe it because nobody else looked like they were struggling. I value the honesty of anyone who'll admit it. And I made sure that he knew that he was the one I'd been watching to make sure I was getting the steps right -- he'd absolutely been getting it right.

We kinda stayed in touch afterward, and when I made my return to Quincy a little over two years later, we reunited when I was ensemble on She Loves Me and he signed on as crew. And a couple months after that is when I started TAPAS. I brought Mason on board right away because I had him in mind to play the master assassin Artemis Entreri in my Drizzt musical -- I still think that's gonna work out perfectly whenever we get to it.

And in that time, he showed me a play he had written, Better Yet? And when I talked about it and he saw how clearly I understood it, he wanted me to play the lead role. During the pandemic, I pondered how we might still put some art out in the world by producing it as an audio drama. And when I returned to Quincy yet again in December of 2020, we started recording it little by little as pandemic restrictions slowly began to be lifted away.

And so in July of 2021, the first and still only complete TAPAS fiction project was unveiled, and it was Mason's thing.

In the time since then, he's jumped on board our main two stories of Keys & Kingdoms and Irregular Fantasy! - producing, co-writing, he's into it, and he made a last-minute takeover of the role of Mordekai when the actors were first assembled and recorded. As an outsider to fantasy gaming, he's great at helping make sure everything makes sense, as most of us are from inside that world and can't quite see it from without.

Popcorn Culture Podcast was mostly his idea, a way to produce consistent content while working on our big visual media. It hasn't been consistent, holidays and stuff, but we're jumping back on pretty soon. He's proved himself a vital core member of the team, part of the "Team Salmon" that consists of our most important founding members.

In the present timeline, the production of Matilda mentioned in Dominic's entry is still going on, haven't worked with either of them in a while as that rehearsal is in its endgame, so we're taking February kind of nice and easy as far as production, and hoping to hit the ground running again in March.