Be More Chill, the beloved sci-fi musical from Joe Iconis, paved a path into the hearts of audience members a decade ago, and to celebrate the anniversary of the show, the place where it all began is throwing a party. Two River Theater in Red Bank, New Jersey, one of the most important regional theaters in the Garden State, is gearing up for special Be More Chill 10th-anniversary concerts, July 24-25. Iconis will be there, as well as many of the original cast members who brought this show from Red Bank to off-Broadway and eventually to Broadway.
George Salazar, who played Michael in the show, credits Be More Chill with kickstarting his career and giving him a theatrical gift that keeps on giving.
“I think it’s blowing our minds that it’s been 10 years since the world premiere,” Salazar said in a recent phone interview. “I think part of that is the pandemic. I feel like we all lost two years where time wasn’t a thing anymore. It’s wild, confusing, but it’s also such a beautiful and wonderful thing.”
Salazar hasn’t left Iconis-land over the past few years. In fact, the actor recently wrapped the composer’s latest show, The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical, at the Signature Theatre in Washington, D.C. Now he’ll head up the East Coast to Red Bank for these three special concerts.
Salazar remembers his introduction to Be More Chill as if it was yesterday. “I had auditioned for a show that Joe had written called The Black Suits,” he said. “They were doing a production of it in Los Angeles at Center Theatre Group, and one of the characters is a drummer. And I was a drummer before I ever did musicals, before I was ever an actor, and so I was like, oh my God, this would be so great to get to play drums in a show. I went in, and I carried a drum in from my apartment.”
Salazar said the audition for The Black Suits was one of his favorite auditions in his career — a career that also includes Broadway’s Godspell, off-Broadway’s The Lightning Thief and Pasadena Playhouse’s Little Shop of Horrors.
“It was one of the most fun auditions I’ve ever had,” Salazar said. “Didn’t get it. Screw you, Joe. [laughs] I didn’t get it, and I ran into him a couple months later. And he was like, ‘You did so well. Everybody loved you. They were casting younger than I was.’ I think by this point I was 28-29. I was like, ‘All good, all good.’ He was like, ‘But, I’ve got another musical that I’ve been working on, and there’s a part in it that I think you’re perfect for. So keep your eyes peeled because we’re going to do a workshop of it.’ And that was Be More Chill.”
When Salazar read Be More Chill for the first time, he fell in love with the musical. The show tells the story of Jeremy, who finds out that an intel processor can magically make him cool, but he gets more than he bargained for. Salazar’s part of Michael is a pivotal one to the overall narrative.
“I fell in love with the piece and fell in love with [the song] ‘Michael in the Bathroom’ in particular, and that began my journey with it,” he said. “When I came to the table, ‘Michael in the Bathroom,’ the big number from the show, was much lower. I think it was tonally a little different than what I had brought to the table, my performance of it, but Joe, being the incredible collaborator he is, worked on raising the key, making it higher so that it had more of an emotional impact. And that’s how it all began for me.”
The journey from Two River Theater, where Be More Chill premiered, to Broadway was an unbelievable ride for Iconis and company, with many ups and downs. Salazar said the Red Bank production went well, but the show essentially “died” after the final curtain. As an actor, he went back to the drawing board.
“I’m not the type of person that does a show and then gets his hopes up that this is going to be the thing that changes his life,” Salazar said. “As an actor, especially as an actor who works on a lot of new work, there’s a lot of times where you work on something, and you put your all into it, and then nothing ever happens from it. It was seeming like that was the case with Be More Chill.”
And then the show became … cool.
Salazar moved to Connecticut to perform in a different musical, and he started noticing more and more followers to his Instagram account. He didn’t know what was going on, that is until he started to see heartfelt messages from fans who had heard the Be More Chill music.
“Then I started getting tagged in a lot of fan art that was Be-More-Chill-centric, and I was like, oh, something is happening here,” the actor said. “Yeah, I definitely soaked it all in. … I was getting all this really intricate, very, very incredible fan art, and it was awesome to feel like my art and the art of my friends around me was inspiring younger folks to make more stuff. It was like this domino effect that continued to swell. I had never had anyone make fan art of me, so I was like, this is really a special thing. I paid very close attention to it, and Joe and I, we made a commitment that we would like everything. We would comment back. I don’t think either of us thought that what ended up happening with the show was going to happen. We were OK with it potentially being a moment on social media, but it became so much more than that.”
Salazar added: “And I somehow ended up with Joe in the eye of the storm, and that was 2017 when all of that started happening. And we rode that wave for about two years until we had our off-Broadway premiere.”
Then Broadway, and now a trio of 10th-anniversary concerts. Who knows what might be next.