Lindsey Ellis & Kaveh Taherian on Their New Podcast “Musicalsplaining”

  • Noah Golden

I bet that all of us at OnStage have that one friend who hates musicals. No matter how many cast recordings you make them listen to, no matter how many times you try to explain that "Sweeney Todd" and "Seussical" are as different as "The Sopranos" and "The Simpsons,” they won't listen. YouTube creator, writer and culture critic Lindsay Ellis has that friend. His name is Kaveh Taherian. That's the premise of their new podcast "Musicalsplaining," where each episode Taherian is tasked with watching a new musical. They've already tackled "Phantom Of The Opera," "Cats," "Hadestown," "Beetlejuice" and "Six." So far, he isn't swayed into musical fandom, but it does make a fun listen.

Although they've been friends and collaborators since attending film school at USC together, Ellis and Taherian's path diverged for almost a decade. Taherian went on to make films (his documentary "25 Prospect Street" premiere in 2018), work as a freelance illustrator, and publish a graphic novel. Ellis, on the other hand, was cultivating millions of video views with popular YouTube content deconstructing and commenting on everything from Michael Bay movies to the live-action Disney remakes. She's also made excellent deep-dives into movie musical history and form in videos covering "Phantom Of The Opera," "Cats" and "Rent." Ellis also produces the "It's Lit" series for PBS and is publishing her first novel, "Axiom's End," this summer.

To learn more about "Musicalsplaining" and the ways COVID-19 is impacting their schedule of recording, I spoke to Ellis and Taherian over Zoom. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

So how did you transition from being friends and working on a documentary together to making a podcast about musicals?

Lindsay Ellis: I thought [Kaveh] would be a natural at improvising performative anger that's not going to alienate people. That's a really hard line to walk whenever you're doing any critical thing like a podcast or YouTube video. You have to be opinionated or people get bored, but you also can't be mean.

How would you explain the podcast to people who have not listened yet?

LE: It’s a good-natured embodiment of every person who loves musicals, trying to explain musicals to their friends who hate musicals. A really distilled form, a synecdoche of that conversation, which I think happens a lot.

Kaveh Taherian: That's a nice way of putting it I'd say it's one friend torturing another person [laughs].

Have there been surprises in this process so far? Kaveh, have you changed your stance on musicals?

KT: I still don't like them. But as a person who's an illustrator and makes films, l get that there's a craft and a skill to it. I've come to learn and appreciate that a bit more. If this podcast were to go away tomorrow, I wouldn't necessarily be like, 'let's go to New York, I still want to see this, this and this.' It's just not my medium. 

LE: I think there have been a couple surprises, like the last one we did [on "Six"] where everyone thought I was gonna like it and you weren't and then like the total opposite happened.

KT: Because it was a concert. It wasn't a musical.

What are your plans for future episodes?

LE: It's just been totally wrecked. I had this color-coded spreadsheet of tours going through California. We were going to see “Hamilton” and then “SpongeBob” and “Mean Girls.” We were going to record a live episode of “Love Never Dies” at Vidcon. Now we're more or less stuck with proshoots. The next one we're doing is "Rent." We're one of the only podcasts that fundamentally hinges on going outside, being around a bunch of people. That's the thing about theater. When you watch a proshoot or a bootleg, you are losing something. Part of the experience is being in an audience and seeing how the audience reacts and seeing how the actors choose to play something differently. In the "Phantom" episode, we talked about understudies. 

Kaveh, are there any musicals you have an interest in seeing?

KT: I was excited for "Hamilton" because it's such a cultural phenomenon. I shouldn't say excited because I don't want to oversell it. I was less miserable about wanting to go see it. I think I'm realizing a pattern now that I seem to gravitate more towards funnier shows. 

LE: I think you'll like "Book of Mormon" more than me because I can't separate it from my special hatred of Matt Stone and Trey Parker. I was super hyped about "Les Mis."

KT: I was really scared of that one. Really dreading it.

LE: My love of "Les Mis" is very nostalgia-driven. There are like some classic ones on the docket like "Chicago" and "My Fair Lady." I wanted a nice spread of new and hip versus older, historical ones to get as broad of a spectrum as possible. 

Lindsay, your YouTube videos are so heavily researched and scripted, what is it like to work in such a different format?

LE: It's very different. It's a mental break from what I normally do on YouTube, where you cannot be wrong. In a video recently, I think I described something happening in the 1820s as Victorian and someone on Reddit kept going on and on about what an idiot I am because I missed the Victorian era by like ten years. Little things like that make the YouTube content so much more stressful because it's not only designed to be well-researched and have an interesting take, you can't get anything wrong, you can't mispronounce anything, you can't misspell anything. The podcast was a way to give me a license to not have to worry about that sort of thing. Part of the appeal is joking around about, maybe I don't know this thing and that's okay.  

KT: I think it was also meant to feel more conversational and less analytical and less like an essay. It's supposed to be, here's a couple of people talking about theater who aren't like New York Times critics. It's meant to be...I wouldn't say amateurish because we're not amateurs. 

LE: Prosumers? Accessible I think is the word.

Musicalsplaining” can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play and Stitcher. New episodes come out every other Tuesday.