How we got here...
Talent Show was born from my desire to create something new for Hollywood Fringe Festival 2025. A friend and occassional producing partner challenged me to write a show focused on the struggles of the artist's journey. This is far from novel subject matter, I imagine for as long as their have been artistic storytellers, there have been stories about the struggles of being an artist. Still, I began tinkering with the concept a little bit and pondering why these stories are so popular. I understood that, sure, storytellers love to tell artists' stories because its familiar to them and writers are often told to write what we know, but these stories about creative talents and the people who posess them have something special in them that appeals to everyone whether they consider themselves an artist or not. Human beings of all kinds are fascinated by talents: their rarity, how they affect a person, and how that person affects others with them.
I believe this is because a talent is a relatively unexplained phenomenom. That's why they're so commonly referred to as gifts, because they're surprising and we don't know for certain where they come from. Sure, talents can be nurtured by their environment, but more or less they occur in people at random, like mutations or superpowers in Comic Books (If you were wondering why Superman is such a motif in this show). There's no scientific explanation for why Adele can sound the way she does or why Disney's drawings captivated audiences of all ages. People are less surprised when a creatively talented person emerges from a family of other creatively talented people, but is it any less miraculous? There are perhaps even more artists who come from non-artistic roots and many self-proclaimed non-artists who choose not to follow in their artistic parents' footsteps. Is this rebellion or just a person recognizing where their abilities fit best in the world? I come from a family of self-proclaimed non-artists. All of whom posess remarkable abilities and have been recognized and revered in society for those abilities. Between my father's honorary doctorate in Humanities, my mother's MD, and my older sister's newly obtained PhD, I'm the only non-doctor in the bunch so far. Instead of the respected traditional paths the rest of my family have not only followed, but excelled at, I'm putting on this wonderful little show, because I have something in me that they've assured me is rare and have encouraged me to pursue and showcase. I have a talent.
The more I thought about what to do with my talent, the more I thought about others. Other artistic journeys that I felt were under showcased in fiction I've read and seen so far: Magicians, Burlesque Performers, Fashion Designers, Graphic Novelists, Inventors (at least through the lens of invention as an artistic pursuit). These were the first to come to mind. I wanted to consider these artists individually, how do they define or redefine success, how do they deal when the industry that best suits their talent feels unstable or when they feel incapable of breaking through. And, in a world where other people's value of an artistic pursuit in general is... varied at best, are they able to resist a capitalistic path of least resistance. When and why does a talented artist become a sell-out?
In addition to the under represented artist story, I also pondered different takes on the journeys audiences are quite familiar with at this point.
