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Daniel Durston is a young, hungry musician with the passion of music theatre. Currently, he’s on tour with Flashdance the Musical. When I first met Daniel, he was working with Max Schneider, and now he has co-written a new musical called 1996.
Daniel, how’s it going?
Great! I’ve been super busy working on getting this new musical up on its feet. All the while learning new music in 10 hour rehearsals for this Flashdance tour! It’s been crazy. 1996, your project, tell me what got you interested in writing a play?
Well I’ve always had ideas for musicals, usually I’d start to write one and then I’d get super busy and caught up working on some other project or touring with other artists & musicals. I’ve written songs my entire life, so I thought I’d take my story telling from a 3 minute song to a full blown 2 hour staged musical. Which saying that now, sounds totally crazy. Can you give us a brief description of the story line?
1996 is a musical about a rock band who had a ‘one hit wonder’ song thanks to a commercial about custom made condoms for ‘guys who are not so well endowed’. In this story you follow their journey back to the top while they experience personal trials & tragedies. Which in turn, inspires the band to write & record an album that’s already a familiar sound to our ears; thanks to the amazing songs Blink-182 has given to our generation over the past 20 years.
What is your ultimate goal with this production?
I want to see this musical go to Broadway. I want it to tour the country, the world even. There is no end to where I believe this story can end up.
I’ve got to ask this. I’ve tried numerous times to sit down and even just write a book and get frustrated with the process…how difficult was it to write this entire musical?
Haha, it took a couple years of trial and error! My creative partner Jonathan is a director of a reality TV show in Florida, and I’m constantly touring the country so it’s very hard to find time together to hash out our ideas now days. So we would constantly email each other back and forth figuring out the best possible way to tell our story. Still to this day we are constantly talking about how to make the musical even better than it already is. But to answer your question, it’s extremely difficult to write an entire musical story/script. But this story is everything to me, a lot of the characters and trials are based off of my life, so no matter how difficult it may get, I will never stop.
Haha! Ruben Jay hosting the premier doesn’t sound like a bad idea!! We’ll talk 😉 As I mentioned earlier, I would want to see this musical travel across our country to perform in cities close to those who are donating to make this vision a reality. Not everyone can make it out to NYC to see a professional Broadway show, so I’d be stoked to take this on the road. Especially seeing that my background is touring with Broadway musicals.
Easy! Just visit our website (1996musical.com) and click on the kickstarter link and donate ANY amount. I’m talking even $1! Sometimes we forget the power of a community, an army of people wanting to see a dream come to life. By donating even just $1, you can literally say you made this show a reality. That’s huge. Especially when we get to Broadway. KickStarter is a well known and safe to use fundraising website that pulls people together to help make a dream a reality. What’s really cool about KickStarter is, it works on an all or nothing basis. Meaning, if you donate money but we don’t reach our funding goal, you get your money back! And you can also chose a reward in return for your generous donation. So you don’t go empty handed!
Official Website:
KickStarter Link:
Instagram/Twitter: @1996musical
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Daniel Durston talks about 1996
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