Benj Pasek and Justin Paul are 32-year-old songwriters for musical theatre, movies, and television. They met at University of Michigan as college freshmen where they became instant friends. After they were cast in background roles in the school's musical, they decided to team up and start composing their own songs and creating their own shows. Their first show, Edges, a series of songs about transitioning into adulthood, was very well received by their peers. They graduated in 2006 with Musical Theatre degrees, and have accomplished a great deal since.
Pasek and Paul have created a number of other masterpieces in addition to Edges. In the domain of musical theatre, they have written music for James and the Giant Peach, the musical adaptation of Roald Dahl's famous book; Dogfight, an off-Broadway musical; A Christmas Story: The Musical, which was nominated for a Tony award for Best Original Score in 2013; and, most recently, Dear Evan Hansen, a musical about a teenager with social anxiety dealing with the death of a classmate. Dear Evan Hansen was nominated for nine Tony awards in 2017--6 of which it won, including Best Musical--and Pasek and Paul took home the award for Best Original Score. They have also written music for a variety of television shows, including Smash, Johnny and the Sprites, and The Flash. They also wrote the lyrics for the movie musical La La Land, and won the 2017 Golden Globe award for Best Original Song, as well as the 2017 Academy Award for Best Original Song. They have been hired by Disney to write the songs for the upcoming live-action adaptations of Aladdin and Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. They are said to have potential to EGOT (win an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony) in the next couple of years.
"Waving Through A Window" from Dear Evan Hansen
The Creative Process
The physical writing process consists of writing the lyrics and then adding music on top of them. Generally, Pasek writes the lyrics while Paul does the music, but they share credit for both.
At a deeper level of their process, Pasek and Paul intentionally try to connect with their target audiences. When writing their first production, Edges, they used the rising popularity of social media to fuel their inspiration. Paul said, "[Edges] happened in 2005, which was the same year Facebook and Youtube first appeared. We were writing songs about 19 year olds, because we were 19, the people using the technology were our age, and we were able to spread our songs online using this new technology. It was a really exciting time." Social media is also incorporated into Dear Evan Hansen--a big theme in the show is how a person can be connected to so many other people through social media yet still feel isolated. Pasek said, "I think social media has amplified this sense that we are connected, but ultimately we are doing it in front of a screen and we are in these isolated pods ... but our generation and the time we are living in now, people are lonelier than they have ever been." Their incorporation of social media into their work is likely a reason that so many people have been able to identify with the characters in their shows, especially in this day and age in which social media is so prevalent.
In one of the class readings on insight, J. Jason van Steenburgh stated, "...the problem solver has to restructure or change his or her thinking about some aspect of the problem or the solution in order to achieve insight" (van Steenburgh, 475). The initial premise of Dear Evan Hansen was supposed to center on the tendency of us as humans to try and become part of a tragedy when it occurs, whether it is the death of a classmate or of a celebrity. However, they found that that particular viewpoint was too cynical and instead decided to take a different take on the situation, as mentioned by van Steenburgh, and gained some insight which allowed them to create what is now the Tony award-winning Broadway musical that Dear Evan Hansen is now.
http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/dear-evan-hansen-creators-benj-pasek-justin-paul/story?id=47864862
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/theater/benj-pasek-justin-paul-dear-evan-hansen.html
http://www.ronniesawesomelist.com/blog/pasekpaul
https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/tackling-dark-themes-broadway-hit-dear-evan-hansen-strikes-chord-n725486
http://www.goldderby.com/article/2017/benj-pasek-and-justin-paul-could-egot-before-lin-manuel-miranda-thanks-to-dear-evan-hansen/
Jason van Steenburgh, J., Fleck, J. I., Beeman, M., & Kounios, J. (2012). Insight. In The Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning Oxford University Press.
It is incredibly interesting to me the initial concept of Dear Even Hansen. It does not surprise me though. I have been lucky enough to see the show twice, once on its opening night preview. I remember people asking what it was about and not being able to put into words. It was so much more than anxiety and mental illnesses but it was also so much more than technology and so much more than grief and dealing with the death of a classmate. It was discrete and powerful. It encompassed a wide range of emotions and remained real and emotionally raw. The deviation from the initial concept has definitely made this show amazing but the underlying issues remaining considering humans trying to become part of a tragedy has made it all the more complex, perplexing and lastingly powerful.
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