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Theatre producers are always on the lookout for new stories to tell. Yet that still didn't prepare Blair Gallant for the night he rented something called Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog at the urging of the Blockbuster clerk who was watching it the night Gallant checked out a couple of DVDs.
Little known to Gallant, one of the producers behind the recent revival of the Calgary Fringe Festival, was that in taking it home he had stumbled into the world of Joss Whedon, the man who created the cult classic Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Gallant had never seen a single episode of Buffy, but was instantly smitten by Dr. Horrible, a web series that tells the story, largely in song, of a love triangle involving a wannabe evil villain named Dr. Horrible, his nemesis Captain Hammer and their mutual love interest Penny.
The show, starring Neil Patrick Harris, was created by Whedon during the 2008 Hollywood writer's strike, then posted on the Internet.
"I watched (Dr. Horrible) . . . and (then) told Michelle (his wife and Fringe Festival producer), we don't have a choice," Gallant says. "We have to do this show! The writing was subtle and nuanced, and the musical score was amazing!"
The catch was that there was no show. While it sometimes seems every other new Broadway musical is adapted from a hit film (Footloose, Legally Blonde, The Full Monty) or television (The Addams Family), no one had thought to try to turn Dr. Horrible into one -- despite a musical score that begged for a theatrical production.
So Gallant next did what any enterprising producer would: Picked up the phone, called Joss Whedon and asked if he could license the stage musical rights.
"I didn't know who the guy was," Gallant says, "so I was not bright enough to know not to call him up and say, 'Hey, I want to do your show.' "
And while Joss Whedon is a big Hollywood deal -- in addition to the beloved Buffy, he created Angel, last year's Dollhouse and wrote and directed the film Serendipity, among others -- Gallant's query caught him off guard.
"He's just a guy!" Gallant says. "He was with his family. He was like, 'Well, if you want to do it, OK.' (But while) they know how to do royalties for film, they don't know how to do it for stage.
"So I gave them a contract," he adds, "and said, this is the standard royalty contract and they said, 'OK. If you want to do it, we'll give you the professional rights, you go ahead and do it -- but we don't have any script or music for you.' "
Upon securing the rights, Gallant created a script and musical score, booked the Vertigo Studio Theatre for a run beginning this past Thursday (it's also playing the Vancouver Fringe in September and a three-week Edmonton run is being considered), held auditions, cast the show and went about his producers' business.
To promote Dr. Horrible, Gallant did something else he had never done: Started a Facebook fan page dedicated to the live Dr. Horrible production, which gave Gallant the (pleasant) surprise of his producer's life.
"All these Joss Whedon fanatics -- I don't know if that's the word to use -- are coming out of the closet," he says. "The moment we posted online, within three days, we had more fans than we did with the (Calgary) Fringe and it kept growing and growing."
Before any ads or marketing campaign even launched -- apart from the Facebook page, which now has around 2600 fans -- Gallant had sold out tickets to 75 per cent of the entire run.
And even more surprisingly, the demographic buying those tickets is just the sort most theatres these days spend hours brainstorming how to attract: A young, educated audience with money to spend.
Included in that is another elusive, affluent demographic group theatre companies struggle mightily to attract.
"Guys will come and see this," says Gallant.
It's the same sort of audience Ground Zero and Hit and Myth Productions attracted last spring to their production of Evil Dead: The Musical -- a generation raised on electric media discovering live performance through adventurous new adaptations such as Dr. Horrible.
Not that Gallant is staking out any claim to being the sort of youthful, urban hipster his show is attracting.
"I'm old," says the self-confessed suburban father of two young kids. "I'm in my 40s, I don't know any of this stuff."
Truth be told, he wasn't even keen to watch Dr. Horrible on DVD that night.
"I had two other movies with me," he says. "I was heading back to Blockbuster, and I was just going to bring it back without ever looking at it -- right? But I felt guilty, because then she was going to ask me about it. So I watched it.
"Five minutes after watching," he adds, "my comment to Michelle was, 'I don't care -- I'll lose $40,000 if I have to, to do this show.' "
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