BANNED began with a much smaller musical and a very different Internet. The story traces its roots to the summer of 2008, when composer and playwright April Alsup began developing a collection of songs about finding yourself, accepting who you are, and figuring out where you belong. Many of the songs had been written years earlier, as the Internet was beginning to change the way people met, communicated, and created identities for themselves. That idea became WYSIWYG the Musical, a reference to the early computer expression What You See Is What You Get.
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Edinburgh Fringe Performance
FROM AN IDEA TO THE STAGE
In early 2012, Alsup placed an ad on Craigslist looking for singers interested in developing an unusual new musical. Kelly Zick answered, leading to an informal meeting near the Lamont School of Music with Drew Bradley. Drew recommended Tony Domenic to transcribe the music, and Tony eventually became the production's vocal coach and music director. Kelly Zick, Drew Bradley, Blake Nawa'a and Mark Del Monte formed the original four-person cast, and on September 14, 2013, WYSIWYG received its first staged reading at Denver's Black Crown Piano Lounge. A few weeks later, Alsup met Evan Duggan at Denver's Rooster Cat Café and brought him into the project to help develop the book. The story continued to change as songs were added, rewritten and expanded. Duggan eventually took on directing duties as well, helping transform the original concept into a complete stage production. Throughout the first half of 2014, the company rehearsed wherever it could find space, including First Baptist Church and spaces connected to the Lamont School of Music. The script, music and characters continued evolving through rehearsal. On June 6, 2014, WYSIWYG the Musical premiered at Denver's Crossroads Theater, completing its first theatrical run on June 8.
TAKING THE SHOW TO NEW YORK
Following its Denver premiere, WYSIWYG continued its development in New York City, where it was presented as part of the Planet Connections Theatre Festivity. The New York production marked an important step for the young musical. What had begun with a collection of songs, a Craigslist ad and a small group of performers was now reaching audiences in one of the world's great theatre cities and earning recognition along the way. WYSIWYG received multiple Planet Connections awards and nominations, recognizing the production, performances and creative work behind the show.
For an independently produced original musical making the journey from Denver to New York, that recognition was an encouraging sign that the story and music could connect with audiences well beyond where the project began. More importantly, New York became another part of the show's development. Each performance revealed something new about the characters, music and story and helped shape ideas about where the musical might go next. Those lessons would become particularly important years later, when the original four-person WYSIWYG was revisited, expanded and ultimately transformed into BANNED.
WYSIWYG BECOMES BANNED
The story wasn't finished. Years later, Alsup returned to the material with a different perspective. The Internet that had inspired the original show had become social media, dating apps, smartphones and an almost constant negotiation between our public and private selves. At the same time, conversations surrounding gender and identity had become increasingly visible and increasingly polarized. The intimate four-character story began expanding. New characters were introduced from across the gender spectrum, including people who are transgender, nonbinary and gender nonconforming. Rather than centering the story around a single experience, the new version followed a group of imperfect people trying to understand themselves and one another. The expanded musical became BANNED.
At its center is a group of artists who meet through a gender identity support group and eventually form an ensemble of their own. Online, they can experiment with who they want to be. Offline, relationships, families, attraction, labels, pronouns and expectations are considerably messier. Their shared music gives them somewhere to belong. When the group decides to enter a performing arts festival, their work and eventually their right to perform it becomes part of the story. What begins as something personal grows into a larger question about who gets heard, who gets marginalized, and what happens when simply being yourself becomes controversial. BANNED doesn't attempt to create perfect representatives or turn its characters into symbols. They make mistakes. They misunderstand each other. They fall in love, argue, laugh, change their minds and occasionally say exactly the wrong thing. They are human. As the show's creative strategy put it, the goal was to tell a story about real people succeeding in spite of adversity—and to suggest that if marginalization contributes to inequality, inclusion might be part of the remedy.
TAKING BANNED TO EDINBURGH
The expanded production was developed in Denver before traveling to Scotland for the 2024 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where BANNED played Greenside @ Riddles Court. There, the larger ensemble and the years of development behind the show came together. Writing in The Scotsman, critic David Kettle awarded the production four stars, praising its ambition, strong and memorable songs, complex ensemble arrangements and its human approach to questions of gender and sexual identity. For a musical that began years earlier with a handful of songs about becoming comfortable with yourself, Edinburgh represented another step in the same journey.
TWO SHOWS. ONE BEGINNING.
Today, WYSIWYG and BANNED exist as two versions of the idea that started in 2008. WYSIWYG the Musical remains available for licensing as the original, intimate four-performer production. It preserves the smaller story and structure developed for the 2013–2014 production and is particularly well suited to theatres looking for a compact cast and production footprint. BANNED the Musical is the expanded ensemble work. It takes the questions at the heart of WYSIWYG and places them in a larger, contemporary world of gender identity, social media, relationships, belonging and the freedom to be seen as you actually are. The world changed. The show changed with it. But the question underneath both versions remains remarkably simple: What happens when what the world sees isn't necessarily who you are?
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