“I’m at 54 Below right now,” an excited Tiffany Keane Schaefer, founder and artistic director of Chicago’s Otherworld Theatre, said via Zoom.
It was just a week before tech rehearsals for the remount of Otherworld’s hit parody musical Twihard! A Twilight Musical Parody, but Schaefer, also the show’s director, was in New York along with the entire cast of the show. From the lobby of the midtown Manhattan cabaret, affectionately known as Broadway’s living room, Schaefer panned her phone to show a Tony Award mounted next to her.
“This is where musicals get their start,” she said. “We applied and the one time slot they gave us was during our tech week. We were like, ‘Well, if this is our only shot, we gotta take it.’”
So Twihard tech week was pushed back so the cast could head east to perform a cabaret reading of the show in hopes of being picked up for a New York run.
“It’s been crazy,” said Schaefer. “People are flying out from Colorado to come see us here tonight. I just don’t know theatre fans like that—that are like, ‘I’m gonna drop everything and make sure that I can come and support you tonight, because we want Twihard! to go on Broadway.’”
Twihard!, which spoofs the iconic book-to-movie series based on the Twilight novels by Stephenie Meyer, had its world premiere in February at Otherworld Theatre in Wrigleyville. Initially scheduled for a four-week run, the show was extended due to high demand, and sold out 12 weeks of shows. Now the show is being remounted for a run opening on Halloween, with the potential to run through March 2025.
Schaefer originally founded Otherworld in 2012 with aspirations of combining her two passions—theatre and sci-fi—into theatrical experiences that explore the genre in front of live audiences. Schaefer, who graduated from Columbia College Chicago with a major in directing and a minor in science fiction and fantasy, said it took a year of fundraising to launch her company.
“Those first days were cringe-worthy,” Schaefer recalled. “We had a kegger, and we were like, ‘We’re raising money for the theatre, $5 jungle juice for everyone.’”
When Otherworld first created the Juggernaut Film Festival, now an international sci-fi and independent gathering, Schaefer described the event as “a little bit more elevated than a blanket on a wall and watching sci-fi plays with my college friends.” This year, the 10th annual installment of the festival featured more than 90 films from 22 countries.
The very first play Otherworld staged was a theatrical adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Schaefer was a big fan of Bradbury and said that one of his quotes—“Jump off a cliff and build your wings on the way down”—was an inspiration for her to start a theatre company.
Schaefer now describes Otherworld as a “science fiction and fantasy community center with a convention every weekend.” Though it’s not a literal convention every weekend, sci-fi fans often attend shows in costume and hang out in the lobby and bar chatting long after performances of shows like Oops All Bards, a D&D musical improv show, or Medusa Undone, a 2019 dramatization of Medusa’s origin story. “We are celebrating the stories that we love and sharing why these stories matter with each other,” she said.
Back in New York, at 54 Below, Schaefer was seated next to Brian Rasmussen, Twihard!’s composer. Schaefer originally stumbled into the idea of a musical parody of Twilight back in 2008, after the first film was released. A fan of the film, she happened also to be learning about melodrama in school, and thought the story in the movie could be staged as a musical.
“I almost thought that it would be better as a musical,” she said, “because the relationships are so heightened. You have your ingénue, you have your morally gray [character]. So I thought it could be a parody and we can acknowledge some of these more cringe elements.”
Even though she knew it could be a parody, the first song she wrote was “Sacrifice,” which she said is Bella’s “I want” song, and it wasn’t cringe or parody. Instead, it reflected Schaefer’s inner struggles during the time.
“It was so much about how I felt, not being listened to as a woman about what I wanted,” she said. “I’m literally a sacrifice for all these people around me so they can get what they want out of relationships, and not feeling like I can really come into my own or my own terms.”
With the song not at all feeling like a joke, Schaefer shelved the idea of the musical parody for over a decade.
Then, one random night in late summer 2023, years after writing and scrapping “Sacrifice,” after a show at Otherworld, Schaefer overheard a man in the bar saying that no one would ever trust him to write a musical. Schaefer approached the man—Brian Rasmussen—and pitched him the idea of Twihard! Rasmussen, recently out of college, was just getting started as a professional musician and was working as an improv pianist during improv comedy shows at Otherworld.
“Writing a musical has been a lifelong dream of mine,” said Rasmussen over Zoom. He recalled telling Schaefer that he didn’t know how to work his way up to something huge like a musical—he had mostly written smaller classical pieces and string quintets. But Schaefer was so impressed with his work for the improv shows that she still invited him to work on the musical.
Together the duo completed the musical in a three-month sprint, with Schaefer writing the book and lyrics, and Rasmussen composing and arranging the music.
“I’m not super familiar with parody,” said Rasmussen, “but she had such a very specific vision of what type of parody this was. She had her finger right on the pulse of what the fandom and audience would be wanting.”
Schaefer was sure to capture moments from the series that connected with fans in the films, such as the vampire baseball scene, which Rasmussen jokingly refers to as “the goofiest scene in all of cinema.” Rasmussen initially thought of a campy vaudeville-type number with cheesy tap-dancing. Schaefer suggested a different direction. “Tiffany was like, ‘No, the fans are going to be expecting “Supermassive Black Hole,” which is the song in the movie that plays,’” said Rasmussen. The duo didn’t have the rights to music from the film, so they parodied the song from the movie, which Schaefer knew was a pinnacle in the fandom culture.
“And then we ended up just leaning into it,” said Rasmussen, “like, how can we make this as goofy as possible?”
The process of crafting the musical continued with the ping-ponging of ideas between the two creatives. Rasmussen remembers composing music during nearly every moment of his life. When he wrote “Skin of a Killer”—a song based on the oft-memed moment in the film when it’s revealed that the skin of vampires twinkle in the sunlight—he was sitting in the waiting room for jury duty.
“I didn’t even have my sketchbook,” he said. “I felt like I went back to middle school, when I was writing little songs as a teenager, and I drew out the five lines [of the staff] just so I could do my little sketch. And I wrote that first little melody before there were even lyrics.”
The ad hoc workflow continued with Rasmussen sending Schaefer quick melodies via voice notes in his phone or quick recordings of piano. After three months of collaboration, the musical had its world premiere, leaving both critics and audiences impressed.
Kyra Young-Hood, managing director at Otherworld, who plays the role of Rosalie in the musical, admitted they didn’t know what to expect back when the show premiered in Chicago.
“It was so surprising,” she said. “I think we all took a leap of faith. We loved Twilight. I remember watching the movies, and it feels like such a dream to be able to play Rosalie. But I didn’t know what to expect with the show. Then the turnout—every single show, we were selling out. It was crazy.”
Being able to take the show to New York for a performance at 54 Below, she said, was “like a dream. We almost sold it out. It was electric and we really felt the love.”
For Schaefer, the success of the show aligns with what she already believed: “Nerds are the best audience. They’re fans. They’re fanatics.”
Heading back to Chicago for the remount, Schaefer is thankful for the support and the community she’s fostered with Otherworld performers and audiences.
“It’s been a weird journey, but it’s been a beautiful journey,” said Schaefer from the posh lobby of 54 Below. “I’m really blessed to even be standing where I’m at right now. I mean, there’s a Tony Award like two feet away from me. It’s not mine, but it’s crazy that I’m standing here.”
Mike Davis reports on theatre in Chicago for WBEZ.
