We were lucky to catch up with Kit Goldstein Grant recently and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Kit, thanks for joining us today. One deeply underappreciated facet of being an entrepreneur or creative is the kind of crazy stuff that happens from time to time. It could be anything from a disgruntled client attacking an employee or waking up to find out a celebrity gave you a shoutout on TikTok – the sudden, unexpected hits (both positive and negative) make the profession both exhilarating and exhausting. Can you share one of your craziest stories?
When I was straight out of college and living in my hometown of Schenectady, NY, I was commissioned by the Schenectady Theater for Children to write a musical for young audiences for their company to tour to schools. This went well, and so the next year I returned to write another… and then another! I pitched several ideas, including a musical based on a Dutch folktale about a mermaid who washed up on land, and the strict Burgomaster who attempted to teach her to be a good Dutch housewife. The board selected this story, and off I went, researching the folktale, the time and place, and starting to adapt the story and create songs for a 50-minute musical.
Schenectady has a rich Dutch heritage, and I wanted to be true to that heritage, so I sought out help from a friend, Anneke Bull, a native of the Netherlands and founding member of the Colonial Schenectady Project. Imagine my surprise when she told me that the Crown Prince Willem-Alexander and Princess Máxima of the Netherlands would be visiting the nearby city of Albany for that city’s Quadricentennial, and they would like to welcome the royal visitors with a few of my songs from the show!
The show hadn’t even been performed yet! Quickly, I worked together with Anneke and the Schenectady Theater for Children to pick which songs, then pull together a performance, complete with pianist, performers, costumes… and brooms!
I was pretty nervous. Who was I, a little pipsqueak, to be writing songs about the Dutch and then having them *performed* for the Prince and Princess of Orange? The songs were well-received, and everything went off without a hitch. The event is a bit of a blur in my mind now, though when I see pictures I can remember that it really happened. The one part that I will never forget was talking with Prince Willem-Alexander, and chatting about how a mermaid would walk on land. (The answer, of course, is that she’d hop.)
Prince Willem-Alexander and Princess Máxima have gone on to become King and Queen of the Netherlands.. and I’ve gone on to have plenty of crazy times in the artist/entrepreneur life, but this one always sticks out as one of the more unexpected!
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I’m a musical theater composer, lyricist, and librettist with a passion for quirky, off-beat stories, and I’m a teaching artist, helping others to learn the skills to create their own music and theater.
I started writing musicals when I was 13… and I just never stopped. I’ve written over 15 musicals, including for NPR, and for New York City and international productions. I love working on unusual projects, and was thrilled to work on MICRO-FACE, an audio and economics superhero musical based on a character which NPR podcasters Kenny Malone and Robert Smith revived from the 1940s superhero Micro-Face, originally created by Allen Ulmer. The show was recorded live for NPR podcast PLANET MONEY and released on their popular podcast as a bonus episode.
Another favorite project is THE NOSE, a family musical I wrote based on a story by Nikolai Gogol in which a high-ranking official’s nose runs away, and masquerades through St. Petersburg, pretending to be an even HIGHER-ranking official! The show premiered at a festival in NYC, and was later picked up for productions at The Master Theater in Brooklyn and three productions in South Africa.
I work in NYC public schools as a teaching artist with several companies, including the Metropolitan Opera Guild and New York City Children’s Theater, but in 2020, a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic, I saw the need people were feeling for connection and the arts, and decided to start my own company teaching arts classes online. I worked with a wonderful friend, Broadway performer Jillian Louis, for our first offerings of classes, and have continued on building the company as the pandemic has eased up, but people across the country – and the world – have discovered the wonders of Zoom. The world of musical theater writing is very much centered in a few large cities, particularly NYC, and it’s been great to be able to build community and guide musical writers from across the country and abroad!
In the coming months, I am planning to launch a new offering: Become Your Own Composer – Writing Music for Lyricists & Librettists, an online course designed to help creative theater people stop waiting to find the perfect composer for their project, and become their own perfect composer. I’ve found there is a major need for this kind of program, since many people have great ideas for shows but no way to communicate the music that they can imagine, and so I want to give them the tools!
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
A big lesson I’ve had to unlearn, and then continue to unlearn again and again, is that I’m not “good enough.” Whatever that means. Imposter syndrome is so easy to fall prey to in creative fields and as an entrepreneur. I didn’t go to a conservatory for music or learn to play an instrument very well, and I’m not the best singer, so I can easily think, “so I have a Masters in music, I’m not a great pianist so what do I know?” Or if hear another composer singing their own song at a cabaret with a gorgeous voice I might be thinking, “Why don’t I just quit?” Or just overcoming the worry that, as a mom of a young kid who’s always juggling sixteen different projects at once, I won’t have enough time or energy to devote to my business, so why even try? And yes, there are times when I wind up frustrated that I can’t play the piano for a demo track or struggle to stay up until 2 am to finish a project for a deadline, but in the end it’s not worth worrying about in advance and letting it hold me back. I get to work with some amazing singers and pianists who bring so much more to my work and are great friends, and – except maybe one time during a COVID surge when my two-year-old was home from daycare for two weeks and I pretty well fell apart – I pretty much always manage to keep up with my business and students. So whenever imposter syndrome pops up, I try to remember that. I have to keep learning the lesson over and over!
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
The story of my pivot will feel familiar to a lot of you, since it was a pandemic pivot that got my teaching career into high gear. But it started before that, when I was pregnant with a first kid and trying to figure out how we were going to afford daycare/afford to keep living in NYC. Much as I loved the museum I worked at as a part-time dayjob, it wouldn’t make sense to continue that work considering that we had no family or friends locally who could be our free babysitters, and I’d be spending most of what I made on childcare. I had been working there for several years – it was my first job when I arrived in NYC! – and I had moved between several positions there and was ready to spend more of my time working more closely with my main areas, music and theater. I saw a Facebook ad for an arts-in-education job fair coming up, and went to check it out. I’d done some arts education gigs before, but not through formal institutions, just erratically as they came up, and at the job fair I found out about a teaching artist training program that summer. Off I went to training, super pregnant, and then quickly landed two teaching artist jobs, even more super pregnant. I missed my first training with one of those jobs because that was the day I wound up having a baby! After a little time off for maternity leave (and working on a musical I’d written which opened 3 weeks after my kid was born – but that’s another story!), I started teaching in schools – only to have the pandemic shut it all down shortly after. I wound up teaching multiple classes remotely during the pandemic, but I could see I needed an even bigger pivot, and decided to start my own company teaching online as well. What can I say, I get bored easily! I still do teaching artist work in schools, but focus a lot of my time on my own company and my own writing as well, and spend time with my kid, which means I’m always juggling all the things, but the pivot was totally essential to making the NYC-parent life work, and I’ve never looked back.
Contact Info:
- Website: Creative: www.kitgoldstein.com; Teaching: www.totallyirrelevantproductions.com
- Instagram: Creative: @kitgoldsteingrant Teaching: @PaperKiteArts
- Facebook: Creative: www.facebook.com/kitgoldsteinmusictheater; Teaching: www.facebook.com/PaperKiteArts
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kit-goldstein-grant-0843b047/
- Twitter: @kitgoldstein
- Other: https://soundcloud.com/kit-goldstein-grant
Image Credits
Photo: Kit Goldstein Grant Credit: Nadia Leon Photography Photos: The Giant Hoax Credit: Brian E. Long Production Directed by: Christopher Michaels, Produced by IndieWorks Theatre Company Photos: The Nose Credit: Nick Graci Production Directed by Michael Chase Gosselin, Produced at The Master Theater Photos: The Wrong Box Credit: Photo by Jeremy Daniel Production Directed by Michael Chase Gosselin, Produced at Theater for the New City’s Dreamup Festival