Fed UP!

Interview with Fed Up writer and composer Joseph Phillips, by dramaturg Daniel Summerstay.

FedUP! is a musical commenting on musicals commenting on boxes.

Daniel Summerstay: Hello.

Joseph Phillips: Hi, Daniel.

D: Hello, Joseph. So you wrote both the book and all the music and all the lyrics for Fed Up?

J: That's right.

D: It's a one-man-musical! So, as I understand it the history of this project comes from your real-life experience, doesn't it? Can you talk about the show and how it came to be?

J: So, in high school, me and my little brother came up with the idea of a FedEx and UPS Romeo and Juliet story called Fed Up, but we didn't do anything with it; we just thought, "that's a fun idea." And then when me and my wife were first married, we worked as Amazon delivery drivers. And so a lot of the content a lot of the content is from that, even down to Chloe getting attacked with Nerf guns by children. That happened to my wife on her first day.

D: Your first day there?

J: When she was getting trained.

D: Oh my gosh.

J: Yeah, while I was getting trained by Brian Wright [on whom Brian Bright is of course based], she was getting attacked by children with Nerf guns. We didn't just work there for one day to clarify. We were there for a whole summer. But yeah, a lot of it is real life.

D: And so, how long had you and Kali been married at that point?

J: We'd been married for six months.

D: And how has Kali helped you throughout the creation process?

J: I think, I mean, you said it's a one-man-show, but it's really a one-family-show, right? Everything that I do is me and Kali together, and she never gets enough credit for it.

D: Well, I'm glad I thought of the question, then.

J: Yeah, so, I mean, everything. She's always the first person to hear all of the songs, read all of the script and stuff. And so then she says, ‘I think we should add running into a tree’ because she ran into a tree once when I saw her while we were delivering. That's also where that comes from.

D: Oh. I didn't know that one.

J: Yeah, so much of it is collaboration with me and Kali.

D: And how long have you been married now?

J: We've been married three and a half years.

D: Are there any songs you wrote for this show that didn't make it into the current score?

J: Yeah, so, right now, we have ‘A Heart That's Breaking’, which is a really depressing slow song that opens Act Two to try and show how sad it is after this breakup kind of thing that happens. But the original act two opener was this kind of reprise of ‘60 Going on 70’, and ‘As She Drove Away’, that Brian and Chloe sing together.

D: In counterpoint?

J: Yeah, in counterpoint. Because I think all good musicals should have a counterpoint section at some point, and this one, it doesn't. But it used to, so the opportunity is there for that song.

D: I love that. I think that's one of my favorite musical tropes is when you have previously established themes that then come in on counterpoint.

J: Me too, I love that. And yet it's not here.

D: And yet. I think it's like every other song in [your musical] Shackleton, though, so it balances out.

J: [laughs] That’s true.

D: But the also the book, the book is much different than it was from the first read-through. That's especially Act Two, I think.

J: Yeah, so when we went through the WDA [Writers/Dramaturgs/Actors] workshop with acclaimed dramaturg Shelley Graham, it was so much changed. And it was super helpful to get all those different people thinking about it and saying, ‘oh, I think the word “viscosity” should be different.’ That's the minor things, but then more major things like, ‘I'm really not understanding why Greg has this change’ or other things like that. And so we really worked through a lot of it. A lot of it was changing the ending over and over and over again. Now we've arrived at the ending that I call deus ex tree, and also deus ex cats. It's kind of deus ex gattos, as I like to say. The Latin. But, yeah, so that's how we've arrived at that. It's probably still in development and will keep changing.

D: Oh yeah, for sure. I was gonna say the score has a really contemporary sound, but it also, I mean, I don't know much about music, so I don't know how to talk about this, but it feels very traditional, not like old fashioned or dull, but just like the whole genre of musical theatre is feeding into our expectations for the song. I remember when I—the first time I heard most of these songs orchestrated, as soon as the intro played, I was like, ‘Oh, yeah. That makes perfect sense.’ And I was just going along with that. I don't know how to articulate this, but do you know what I'm trying to get at?

J: Maybe. I think a lot of it is musicals very much have a formula that makes them work—not so much a formula as certain songs that can be used, right? And so, a lot of these, like ‘60 Going on 70’, you know, of course, is a joke about ‘16 Going on 17,’ but it's also literally the style of a conditional love song, which is a style that Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein kind of used all the time like ‘If She Loved Me.’ Not ‘If She Loved Me,’ that's from Toy Story. ‘If I Loved You’ and other songs like that, ‘People Will Say We're in Love,’ that kind of thing. So it follows the same form as that, but it's a little contemporary. And then, yeah, I mean everything that I do is kind of just standing on the shoulders of giant musical theatre writers that came before me.

D: Yeah, and so would you say that was an intentional thing? You tried to make this—you tried to intentionally draw on that formula, or would you say that's just the way it came out as you were writing?

J: Yeah. I think it's a spoof of FedEx and UPS, but it's also spoof of a musical, right? It's kind of a musical joking about musicals because there's so many musical references, but there's also, like, we think that we should get this song, Greg's Big Moment, and then it gets cut off before the chorus, right? And I like to use that throughout the show. So it's kind of a musical commenting on musicals, commenting on boxes.

D: That's a good tagline. I should put that at the top. Did you always have an affinity for musicals?

J: Yeah. I think so as long as I can remember. I think the big turning point for me was the summer, I think, before eighth grade, and I was going to scout camp with my dad and brothers. And my parents were like, ‘we're gonna watch Les Miserables,’ and I said, ‘that sounds boring.’ And it was boring, and it took us two days to watch it because we had to—anyways, it wasn't that exciting, but then I was at scout camp, and I was walking along logs singing ‘Stars.’ And I was like, ‘actually, I really do like this a lot.’ And then that kind of restruck a chord that I think I had had since I was a really little kid. My parents love musicals. Anyways, it got rekindled then, and, ever since then, I've loved musicals.

D: I remember the first time we met you were hired for BYU's Pride and Prejudice [2022] to write the music for that. Was that your first time writing music for theatre?

J: I think so. Yeah, I would say so. That was my first time really writing music for theatre. I had written a lot of songs for Shackleton, which is my other musical. Like we've talked about, I had never written plays before, and so I was just waiting for a playwright to come along to help me write these musicals. Then I went to Pride and Prejudice, and I got around so many cool theatre people, and I was like, ‘Wow. The theatre department is awesome. I wanna be more involved with that.’ So I got more involved with it, and took playwriting classes and became a playwright.

D: Yeah, well, you're stupid talented. Have I told you that before?

J: You are too.

D: Note that this is Joseph's second musical that he's ever written, and it's a crime that it's as funny as it is. So, when would you say your passion for storytelling began?

J: I think the first time I noticed that I liked to tell stories combined with music—because I think that's really what I love—was at a Halloween party when I think I was 13 or 14, and the kids at the party were telling spooky stories because I guess those are the kind of parties that I went to. And there was a piano in the house that we were at, and so I started playing piano to underscore the spooky stories. And it added so much, and I loved it. And so ever since then, I've loved adding music to stories, adding stories to music, and making them together something stronger.

D: And so you were a commercial music major before you graduated. Did you start your program with the intention to write musicals, or was that a discovery?

J: Yeah. I think I started, and I was like, ‘I wanna be a musical writer.’ But I think also and still to this day, I didn't know how to do that or how to get there and be that kind of person. And so it's been a lot of figuring it out. And, again, like I said, it's been huge to be a part of the theatre department. They've been so welcoming. I was a theatre minor. I was never a theatre major, but they welcomed me like I was family. So it's been really nice to be here and to learn so much about playwriting.

D: You know, you don't have to say nice things about BYU.

J: [laughs] I just, well, specifically the theatre department are my best friends. And still to this day, I keep up with Shelley and Alex [MacKenzie-Johns, the playwriting professor]. And even my first ever teacher to teach me playwriting was Kristie Post-Wallace. Three years ago or something, and I emailed her and said, ‘Hey, Fed Up, one of the musicals that I've written is happening in a week at the Harrington Center for the Arts.’ She said, ‘I got a ticket.’ She doesn't even work at BYU anymore, but she's still invested in us. So, anyway, I just think there's a lot of people here invested in our success.