While bored one day, Communication senior Rachel Weintraub went down a rabbit hole reading the “missed connections” section of Craigslist — a site where users post descriptions of people they briefly meet and want to reencounter — and was inspired to turn it into a musical.
She created “Missed Connections,” an hour-long student-written folk musical that held three preview shows on Friday and Saturday — transforming a basement classroom in 555 Clark St. into Southside Bar, a rural Appalachian bar set in 1997.
The bar faces foreclosure, and the musical follows a handful of people as they come to terms with the bar’s closure and its effect on their relationships with each other.
The basement classroom transformed into an operating bar 30 minutes prior to each show, allowing the audience to order snacks and drinks, interact with characters and walk around the space. This choice allowed the actors to develop their characters and warm up before the shows, Taub said.
Weintraub said she plans to continue adapting the show between now and August, when the show will be performed for a week on Edinburgh Festival Fringe, an annual, three-week long showcase of performing arts. The Los Angeles Theatre Initiative will bring “Missed Connections” to the festival Aug. 18 to Aug. 23.
Communication junior and Director Millie Rose Taub attended the festival while studying abroad in Scotland last year. She said that Festival Fringe takes over the entire city, with shows being performed in massive theaters, tiny theaters, classrooms and even basements of bars.
Taub said that she was particularly excited to work on “Missed Connections” because of its setting in rural Appalachia because it is not often used in musicals.
“Through a couple of posters up on the wall and the energy that the cast brings into the space, it completely transforms into this bar in the middle of Appalachia,” Taub said. “That’s really always so exciting to see.”
Weintraub wrote all of the characters based on people in her own life, she said. Some were inspired by multiple people and interactions, while others were more directly connected to friends and family.
Tom, an awkward, nerdy character who struggles through a situation with a girl he meets in the bar, was based on one of Weintraub’s friends, she said. Her friend once told her, in excruciating detail, a story about him and a girl in a bar, and it inspired Weintraub to include it in “Missed Connections,” she said.
Weintraub also worked with Eric Powers (Communication ’24) to write the musical. When she initially had the idea for the show, she proposed it to Powers, who she had previously worked with on the “The Waa-Mu Show.”
Because Powers was abroad in France, Weintraub said the writing process was different this time. Typically, the duo worked best by bouncing ideas off of each other and improvising together, but this was much more difficult to do online, Weintraub said.
Bienen freshman Paddy May played an old man named Earl, inspired in part by Weintraub’s grandfather.
May said he enjoyed the challenge of working on a show that was still in development. When rehearsals started for the show, it was still being written and edited, and one of the songs was added just three weeks before the show’s previews, he said.
As Weintraub continues to tweak the show and add details from her own life, she said she hopes people will leave thinking about their own relationships and taking away a “sense of home.”
“This is truly a slice of life musical,” Weintraub said. “These are regular people doing regular things having regular big feelings.”
Email: r.huizenga@dailynorthwestern.com
X: @reganmichele215
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