MTR – The Musical Theatre “Red Pill”

“Musical Theatre Radio is kind of like the red pill in the Matrix. Just give it a try and what you discover may blow your mind.”

I recently had the wonderful opportunity to sit down with Jean-Paul Yovanoff – the founder of Musical Theatre Radio (MTR.) MTR is dedicated to playing stage shows from the musical theatre repertoire ranging from the 1890s to now. Shows that are both popular and rare, exposing the listening audience to a broad range of productions from around the world with a focus on supporting new works. MTR is unlike anything else out there and is the only radio station dedicated to supporting new or lesser-known works, instead of just playing the hits on twenty-four-hour rotation. I’ll let Jean-Paul explain…

Check out MTR here: https://www.musicaltheatreradio.com

Ashley: Tell me about MTR. How did it get started? What makes MTR unique?

Jean-Paul: Musical Theatre Radio is a free online radio station that plays showtunes from stage musicals new and old, popular and rare from around the world with a focus on promoting new creators and their works. What sets us apart from other stations is the sheer variety of songs and shows in our rotation. As much as I love hearing “Hamilton,” “Come From Away,” “Oklahoma” and “Company”, that is only a small, sliver of shows in the musical theatre canon. Musicals are more than just Broadway and the West End. Musical Theatre has over a hundred years and an entire planet to draw from…That 1963 Broadway flop may not be as well-known as, say, “Cabaret,” but its music is still worthy of a listen. We play shows from Canada, the US, UK, Australia, Singapore, Germany, South Africa to name just a few of the countries that can be heard on the station. But what sets us apart, and does truly make us the radio station with the most variety, are the MTR Exclusive songs and shows we play. When you tune into the station we try to make sure every sixth song is one from a new work or creator and we are the only ones playing them. This is literally the last six songs played on the station as I answer these questions: “Bye Bye Birdie,” “Bring It On,” “The Brain From Planet X,” “Ballroom,” “Big River,” and “Savage: the Musical.” New, old, popular, and rare, I try to make sure there is a little bit of everything for everyone.

Ashley: Tell me a bit about yourself - your background, how you got into musical theatre?

Jean-Paul: Musical theatre has been a part of my life since before I was born and I mean that literally. When my mom was pregnant with me, she was in an amateur production of “Oklahoma.” She says, and I take everything my mom says with a grain of salt, that I used to kick along, inside of her, to the beat of the music. After that, I wasn’t on stage in a musical for another 17 years. My family used to go to the theatre when I was growing up but I was never in a show until grade nine, and in a musical, until I was in grade 12. It was a production of Little Shop of Horrors where I played Mr. Mushnik, which made me realize that this is what I wanted to do with my life. I went to Sheridan College for musical theatre performance than to York University for a Bachelors in Theatre Studies. At York, I joined an extra-curricular theatre company, Vanier College Productions. I’ve been involved with the company for about 19 years. I started as an actor and now I am one of the associate producers for the company and I’ve done pretty much every job there is to do in the theatre thanks to that company.

Ashley: How did you start MTR?

Jean-Paul Yovanoff – the founder of Musical Theatre Radio

Jean-Paul: From the early 2010s to 2019, I was pretty much out of theatre. I was working as a mobile DJ and then running a photobooth company up in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. My partner and I closed the photo booth company and I started another one in 2017. I spent a year trying to make that company work. It got a great buzz, but I could not secure any funding to help me take it to the next level. So like any business does when something isn’t working you pivot. So I did. And then I pivoted again. And pivoted again. And pivoted once again. And once you pivot four times you’ve gone in a complete circle and you are back to where you started, so I decided it was time to give up on the company. I wasn’t making money with it and I wasn’t happy, so I decided to go back to what I knew, and what I was good at Musical Theatre and thus started the online radio station, Musical Theatre Radio. I already had hundreds of CDs and cassettes and rare LP’s to draw from, I’d been DJing for years, and knew how to talk on a mic so it was just a natural fit with my skill set. Plus, I knew it would make me happy, I’d probably still make no money, but at least I’d be happy.

Ashley: What do you think of the landscape of new musicals and new musical theatre writers? How is it different than 10 or 20 years ago? Where do you see things heading?

Jean-Paul: It is an exciting time to write (for) musical theatre. Probably one of the easiest times as well to be a creator. First, what is considered the sound musical theater? Back in the “golden era” of musicals, everything pretty much sounded the same. Then you have someone like Kurt Wiell who brought a new sound. Then “Hair” came along and said ‘why can’t rock music be the sound of musical theatre as well?’ the latest being “Hamilton” and addition of hip hop. Nothing is off-limits, there is no right, there is no wrong when it comes to what a musical can now sound like. Writers of any writing style can now create and know there is an audience out there for their works.

Secondly, and probably the greatest game-changer of all is the technological advancements over the last twenty years. When I was writing my musical back in the late 90’s I was doing things more like the writers in the 50’s than the writers of today. Yes, I had a very basic music writing program, but I still did most things by hand. There was no social media to help get the word out. Hell, I had just gotten my first email account in 1996 and to get a Gmail account it was still by invite only. (Now) you can record an entire album on your own computer. You can access resources and contact people for help by searching online. Even have your writing partner 15 time zones and 3 continents away. You can get your songs discovered on Youtube, or Tik Tok or Spotify, or iTunes.

I think the biggest change coming for musical theatre isn’t going to happen on stage but off stage with online streaming. The pandemic was horrific, but it did force our industry to adapt, which I don’t think it would have done for at least another decade at the earliest if the pandemic had not happened. We can’t do live theatre, so what do we do? We figure it out. We adapt, we evolve, we learn and we did. We learned skill sets we probably would never have procured if we were not forced to by necessity. We learned about audio and video recording and editing. How to stream live events around the world. It was an adopt-or-die situation for our industry.

Online theatre gives the opportunity for those who might not have access to musical theatre because of geographic, physical, or economic limitations the chance to experience a theatrical event. Because of this my partner Laurie Glodowski and I created the Jill Edmund Virtual Theatre. We all know the online world will never replace the experience of going to the live theatre, but we wanted to create something as close to the real thing for those who could not, for whatever reason, get to see a production or event.

Ashley: What makes you want to feature a new artist or show?

Jean-Paul: Currently, just over a million and a half species of animals have been named or identified. That’s only 19% of the total that inhabit the planet and I’m pretty sure if we replace species with musicals the percentage of known shows is even lower than 19%. There are probably tens of hundreds of thousands of musicals in the world that no one will ever hear of because no one has had the chance to discover them. The artists themselves concentrate on the show part of show business and either don’t have time or don’t know how to build the business side. I totally understand that a creator of a musical needs to focus on their work, I’ve been there I know what it’s like, so if I can help with the business side of things, I’ll do what I can.

Ashley: What are your goals?

Jean-Paul: I am a disrupter at heart or as my grandmother used to call me, a shit disturber, but in a good way. I want to help people recognize that there is more to musical theatre than just the hits of Broadway or the West End. That there is a whole world of musical theatre to discover. I mentioned earlier that technology has been great for the creators in our industry but I think it’s been detrimental to the consumers of musical theatre. There is access now to millions of songs but the algorithms that the music providers use keep feeding the listeners the same music and types of songs. Humans like feeling comfortable and safe so they never explore beyond what they know, what they are comfortable with. Musical Theatre Radio is kind of like the red pill in the Matrix. Just give it a try and what you discover may blow your mind.

My ultimate goal is to see one of the new shows or creators we play on the radio station take their musical to the next level, whatever that may be. I’ve been told by a few of the artists we feature, that they had given up on their show, but it just took one person to remind them why they started writing the show in the first place. It was the spark they needed to keep going with their show. This is a little cheesy but to quote the musical “Snoopy” “If just one person believes in you. Deep enough, and strong enough, believes in you.”