Interview: Min Kahng of HAPPY PLEASANT VALLEY: A SENIOR SEX SCANDAL MURDER MYSTERY MUSICAL at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley

I think it’s a pretty safe bet that you’ve never seen a show quite like Min Kahng’s Happy Pleasant Valley. Its subtitle, “A Senior Sex Scandal Murder Mystery Musical” pretty much says it all. The show is a cheeky mashup of high-spirited ribaldry and classic whodunnit set in a community of folks of a certain age and awash in tuneful musical numbers. When Kahng first got the idea for the show several years ago, he thought it might be too wacky to attract a producer. Then TheatreWorks Silicon Valley Artistic Director Giovanna Sardelli (at the time its Director of New Works) told him she loved the idea and exhorted him to “Go for it!” and he realized he might just be onto something. At the 2023 TheatreWorks New Works Festival, early readings of the material were met with delirious responses from the audience, some of whom returned for multiple viewings, and it was clear to both Kahng and the company that they had something special. Now, in what constitutes warp speed by the standards of long-range planning required to put together a regional theater season, Happy Pleasant Valley is about to receive its official world premiere at TheatreWorks.

I caught up with Kahng by phone recently, having last spoken to him almost two years ago in advance of the 2023 New Works Festival. At that time, Kahng had already made a significant mark on the musical theater scene with his The Four Immigrants: An American Musical Manga, which premiered at TheatrerWorks in 2017 where it was an award-winning hit. This time, we talked about the changes he’d made to the script post-festival, his joy at the fervent audience response to the show, why he thinks it appeals to such a broad range of theatergoers, and the fabulous cast of seasoned actors, including Gilmore Girls’ Emily Kuroda, that has been assembled for director Jeffrey Lo’s production. Kahng comes across as a delightfully upbeat musical theater savant who is living out his dreams and couldn’t be more jazzed that this is happening to him. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The last time we spoke, you were getting Hapy Pleasant Valley ready for staged readings as part of the 2023 TheatreWorks New Works Festival. What did you learn about your show from that process?

I think the biggest joy was just seeing the audience response to it. We had a great turnout for all three readings, and heard how it was meeting people from different audience groups, so to speak. There were some who would laugh at jokes that were maybe more familiar with older references, some who knew some of the younger references, and then people who knew musical theater jokes and people who knew murder mystery jokes. It was really hitting a chord with a lot of different people who were there for maybe different purposes and that was the fun of it.

I learned a lot about what was working in the storytelling and what maybe could use some tightening up or clarity. And people came back for a second, or even a third, time to watch it so to me that said there was, so-to-speak, replay value to the piece. That was exciting for me because I didn’t want to write something where if people knew the solution to the mystery they would think “Oh, I don’t need to see it again.” Instead, they were excited to come back.

Have you made substantial changes since the New Works Festival readings?

I’d say maybe 10 to 15% of the show is new material. At least one song has been replaced, and maybe a reprise or two has made its way in, but really the changes that were made were small details. The overall arc of the story is still there and it’s pretty much the same journey, but I learned a lot more about what could be clarified just to help move the story along, as well as clue in the audience members to be able to track the different details of the mystery as we’re going along.

The show was eventually commissioned by TheatreWorks, but when you started writing it did you ever wonder if it was too “out there” to actually get produced?

Definitely when I started, before it was a commission. I was part of the Writers Retreat back in 2019 and I got kind of the green light to work on whatever I wanted to. I was like [hesitantly] “Okay, I’ll do this…” But when I shared what the subject matter was gonna be about, Giovanna Sardelli, who is the current artistic director and was the New Works director at the time, was like “That sounds exciting. Go for it!”

So I went for it, and even in that little, like 15-20 minute snippet that I shared, mainly for a by-invitation audience, they responded with such laughter and joy so that was kind of like the first stamp of approval that TheatreWorks would be receptive to this piece. And then of course once it turned into a commission I felt like that was more permission to just keep running with it. I didn’t worry too much about it, and then the festival response was even more affirmation that we were onto something here.  

Can we talk for just a minute about your amazing cast?

Yes!

It’s led by the fabulous Emily Kuroda and stacked with local theater icons who will be very familiar to Bay Area audiences, including Danny Scheie, Lucinda Hitchcock Cone and Cindy Goldfield, just for starters. Did you have any of those actors in mind when you were creating the show?

Honestly, I didn’t. There was a lot of stepping out in faith that we would find these folks. With each workshop process and then with the festival, you get different people to play these roles and they start to help inform them. One of the actors, Lucinda Hitchcock Cone, has been part of the development process for several years now and the way that she reads the part of Vicki definitely – I guess I’m answering yes and no to your question! - then informed how I was going to write that character moving forward.

So I guess it’s once we’d found the actors that were part of the workshops that we were excited to continue developing the piece with, then those actors start to inform it – their abilities and their strengths - and so I started to write towards that. But from the outset I didn’t like map out who was gonna play everything. I started with the characters I wanted to write at first, if that makes sense?

You’ve really intrigued me because Lucinda Hitchcock Cone is an actor who often plays supporting roles and she’s always terrific. I’m excited to hear that you’re really using what she specifically brings to the table.

She’s something! And the same is true for Emily as well. Once we got her, particularly for the festival and we got to see what she was bringing to the role, on its feet in front of an audience, over the past year I’ve definitely been keeping her voice and mannerisms in mind with any adjustments I was making.

I love that you’ve written all these juicy roles for older actors. Was that a goal you originally had in mind, or was that just something that came with the territory?

It started because I needed a strong premise for a murder mystery. A senior living community was a great setting because you have people that are related to each other, interacting with each other on a regular basis and are in this kind of contained environment. Once I’d landed on that, then it became about making sure that I was in conversation with actors who were of the appropriate age and getting their perspectives and thoughts and ideas about how we were going to talk about their sex lives. I didn’t necessarily set out aiming to bring representation to this particular age group, but always like to keep diversity and representation in mind, and so when I landed on this premise, it just was a happy marriage of the two - a great premise as well as being able to bring a representation we don’t often see on stages.  

You’re one of those rare individuals who can write an entire musical all by yourself – the book, the music and the lyrics. In the creative process, does any one of those come first for you? Or do you just attack the whole beast?

It depends on the song and the moment. More often than not, I’ll come up with why a character is singing and try to kind of encapsulate that in a phrase, maybe a hook. That can be musical, it can be I have an idea how I want their energy to feel musically, so it can come in all directions basically. And there are some songs that feel like they spring right out of you, and you just write it. One of the main songs in this show, “Happy Pleasant Valley Seniors,” which is the introduction to the senior living community, has more or less stayed the same since I wrote it in 2019. But then there’s this brand new song I wrote for this production, and that was work, because I was trying to solve a very specific problem and I knew all the elements I needed in the song. It was really a matter of putting the pieces of the puzzle together in a way that felt satisfying. So, for me at least, it runs the gamut as far as how a song or a moment in a musical comes together.

In our previous conversation, you cited both Alan Menken and Stephen Sondheim, two very different writers, as two of your personal heroes. How do you hope their influence might show up in Happy Pleasant Valley?

I admire Alan Menken’s ability to write a melody that you take with you and remember, so I aim with any song I’m writing to really land that hook, the earworm that may stick with an audience. At the same time, what I think Stephen Sondheim did so well was marrying the words of the story to that music – to a point where you can’t necessarily extract a Sondheim song from its show and just put it on the radio. I mean, it’s been done, but that doesn’t mean you’re getting the full context. Like “Not While I’m Around” from Sweeney Todd. When you take it out of context, it’s a great bop but are you really getting the point across of the original premise of Tobias and Mrs. Lovett?

So I aim to do that, that the lyrics of the songs are encapsulated in the melodies that audiences can take with them, but are so important to the story that they are musical theater songs, so to speak. And that may be to my detriment as an artist because then they’re not as easily marketable on the radio or what have you. But that’s just what I’ve kind of listened to and loved about musical theater growing up so I can’t not think like that. Anytime I write a musical, I’m always thinking about how is this elevating the story or giving people insight into the character.

I know what you mean about grasping Sondheim’s songs out of context. My father adored “Send in the Clowns” even though he didn’t understand what it was about. He’d come to me and say, “I love that song, but what do the lyrics mean?” I’d try to explain it to him and he still wouldn’t get it. I remember telling him more than once, “Dad, you need to see A Little Night Music. Then it will make sense to you.”

It’s so true, but that’s the thing with Sondheim’s stuff. Even if you see the show, oftentimes the moment that the song’s occurring is complex, so it’s not easily statable in a simple sentence. That moment that you’re describing in A Little Night Music, there’s so much going on just in that deceptively simple song.

How are things going with Lot, the new musical you’ve been working on with Weston Eric Scott that aims to subvert and have fun with the infamous “clobber verses” from the Bible? Where is that now in its development process?

Still very early on. We are actually in a moment of rethinking the whole concept. It started off as a kind of a parody of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, but as we were working on it we realized that the parody was becoming less and less important. In some ways, the connection to Joseph was getting in the way of just letting us tell this story about Lot from a perspective that we wanted to bring to it. So we’re in the process of de-parodying it and having the story stand on its own. We have maybe a handful of songs that we feel pretty strongly about, that we think will at least stick around for the next few iterations, but we’re still kind of road-mapping the rest of the musical with this new idea in mind.

Getting back to Happy Pleasant Valley, my own mother happens to live in a senior community. How concerned should I be about the shenanigans that might be going on where she lives?

You should respect your mother’s privacy, but if you have some concerns, you can maybe politely send a link to a video about STIs and the available medical resources. The more you can normalize it, the more comfortable you might become speaking about it with your mom. I don’t know if you want to do that! [laughs] And, to be fair, hopefully she’s not living through a heightened murder mystery as well, so…

Honestly, the joy of the show has been that once we kind of get that conversation going in the first 20 minutes, it becomes normal for the rest of the show. Like the initial shock of hearing folks of a certain age singing about their sex lives, we get it out of the way so that we can get on board with this murder mystery ride. And then when other moments of sharing about sexuality come up, the audience is ready to accept it and move forward because we’ve already set that that’s gonna be what the show’s about.

(header image is [clockwise from upper left] Lucinda Hitchcock Cone, Ezra Reaves, Sophie Oda & Emily Kuroda trying to solve murders in Happy Pleasant Valley at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley [photo by Reed Flores]).

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