Benj Pasek and Justin Paul Shared Their Origin Story and Jeremy Jordan, Lindsay Mendez, Keala Settle, and Ben Ross Performed on STARS IN THE HOUSE

Stars in The House, benefiting The Actors Fund, continued Tuesday night (8pm) with Benj Pasek and Justin Paul with special guests Keala Settle and more!

Justin and Benj started the show discussing how they met and started writing together.

Benj began, 'We met in college and we started writing songs together and we were actors, singers, and terrible dancers and we became friends because we were the worst people in our ballet class and we kind of have to make each other feel better about it."

Justin chimed in, "They were saying all these french terms to us and we were like 'we don't understand what this means...' I thought when you go to college then you learn to dance. We show up day one in baggy sweatpants and everyone's in these tights and they're looking fit. We're like 'what's happening here?' Everyone knew how to dance already...so they're doing these across the floors one at a time...we're like run a little bit, run a little bit, jump! It drove us into our first level of disappointment, 'ok we're not gonna be dancers. Not triple threats.' So now we're looking at a double threat situation. Sophmore year roles around and the spring production is CITY OF ANGELS and we're thinking ok this is our moment. What's a perfect show for non-dancers? CITY OF ANGELS."

Benj continued, "So we're ready for our big moment, we're ready to be cast in the musical and the cast list comes out and I am cast as 'man with camera' and Justin is cast as 'Harlan Yamato the Asian background dancer/coroner.' So that means in a two and half hour musical my job was to go onto the stage and take a photo and then leave the stage and that was the part I got. We thought 'if we were going to be cast in these terrible roles in this musical, why don't we write our own show instead? And we'll take all of these rejects, all the people that didn't get cast, and we'll make our own thing.'"

Ben Ross sang "Waving Through a Window" from DEAR EVAN HANSEN, Jeremy Jordan sang "Caught in the Storm" from SMASH, Lindsay Mendez sang "Isn't It Funny" from DOGFIGHT, Keala Settle sang "This Is Me" from THE GREATEST SHOWMAN.

Click HERE to watch the full episode

The next show will air today (2pm) featuring Plays In The House: TINY BEAUTIFUL THINGS: Based on the book by Cheryl Strayed. Adapted for the Stage by Nia Vardalos. Starring Teddy Can?"z, Hubert Point-Du-Jour, Nia Vardalos and Natalie Woolams-Torres.

Current and past episodes can be found on the website starsinthehouse.com, as well as a donate button linking viewers to The Actors Fund.