S2E10: Julia Riew
In this episode, Hayley and Amy speak with composer/lyricist/writer Julia Riew about opening up the process of musical theatre creation, increasing Asian representation in theatrical spaces, inspiring the next generation to tell their own stories, and indulging in your passions. Scroll down for episode notes and transcript!
Episode Notes
Guest: Julia Riew
Hosts: Hayley Goldenberg and Amy Andrews
Music: Chloe Geller
Episode Resources:
Dive - currently in development at the American Repertory Theater
Julia’s 54 Below debut concert
Asian Student Arts Project (ASAP)
Guest Bio
Julia Riew (she/her) is a Korean-American composer, lyricist, librettist, and writer from St. Louis and currently based in New York City. She is primarily known for her musical Dive (previously known as Shimcheong: A Folktale), which amassed over 100k followers online and over 16 million streams on an animated music video of its titular song in Korea. Julia graduated from Harvard University in May 2022 and is First-Year in the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop. In her first year out of college, she has been named the 2022 Fred Ebb Award winner, Playbill’s Featured Songwriter of the Month, A Woman to Watch on Broadway, and the recipient of the 2022 Harvardwood Artist Launch Fellowship under the mentorship of composer Laurence O’Keefe (Legally Blonde, Heathers). Julia was the inaugural recipient of the Musicians United for Social Equity (MUSE) Linda Twine Scholarship (2021), a member of the first MUSE One-on-One Mentorship Program (2021-22) (mentor: Jeanine Tesori), and a member of the inaugural Maestra Music Mentorship Program (2020-21) (mentor: Deborah Wicks La Puma). Her past works include Alice’s Wonderland, an original musical co-written by J Quinton Johnson (Hamilton), Jack and the Beanstalk: A Musical Adventure (The American Repertory Theater’s 2020 Family Musical), and Thumbelina: A Little Musical (The A.R.T. 2019 Family Musical).
Find Julia Online:
Website: https://juliariew.com
Instagram: @juliariew
TikTok: @juliariew
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Episode Transcript
(Music)
Hayley: Hello, beautiful people, and welcome to the Women & Theatre Podcast! We're your hosts, Hayley Goldenberg…
Amy: …and Amy Andrews. Grab a cup of coffee and join us as we talk to people in the theatre industry about their experiences with womanhood.
Hayley: On the pod, we interview people with different gender identities, from different backgrounds, with varying levels of industry experience and professional roles.
Amy: Our goal is to build community and pool our collective wisdom to break down the barriers we continue to face.
(Music)
Hayley: Julia Riew is a Korean-American composer, lyricist, librettist, and writer from St. Louis and currently based in New York City. She is primarily known for her musical Dive (previously known as Shimcheong: A Folktale), which amassed over 100k followers online and over 16 million streams on an animated music video of its titular song in Korea. Julia graduated from Harvard University in May 2022 and is a First-Year in the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop. In her first year out of college, she has been named the 2022 Fred Ebb Award winner, Playbill’s Featured Songwriter of the Month, A Woman to Watch on Broadway, and the recipient of the 2022 Harvardwood Artist Launch Fellowship under the mentorship of composer. Laurence O'Keefe. Julia was the inaugural recipient of the Musicians United for Social Equity (MUSE) Linda Twine scholarship, a member of the first MUSE One-on-One Mentorship Program, and a member of the inaugural Maestra Music Mentorship Program. Her past works include Alice's Wonderland, an original musical co-written by J Quinton Johnson, Jack and the Beanstalk: A Musical Adventure, and Thumbelina: A Little Musical.
Amy: We are here with the fabulous Julia Riew. Julia, can you please start by introducing yourself - you can share your pronouns and tell us a little bit about what you do in theatre.
Julia: Thank you so much for having me. My name is Julia Riew. My pronouns are she/hers. I am a composer, lyricist, and writer from St. Louis, Missouri. And right now I'm working predominantly in the theatre, film, TV, and literature spaces.
Hayley: Julia, can you tell us a little bit about how you found theatre and your creative work?
Julia: I honestly feel like I have been doing theatre my entire life. When I was in elementary school, I was that kid on the playground who was coming up with musicals and plays and directing my friends in them, and we'd perform them for the teachers - truly, since maybe I was five or six years old. And then at school, of course, drama was always my favorite class. And with my cousins, we'd put on plays and musicals during the holidays for our parents. So I really do feel like I've been doing theatre - musical theatre, really - kind of my entire life.
I grew up playing the violin. That was my main instrument, since I was four years old. And when I was around seven or eight, I started kind of plunking around at the piano at home and started composing - just very, very simple melodic things for violin or on piano. And then, I was very lucky to have both parents and teachers that really encouraged that as I got older. And so, I started diving into my passion a bit more when I got into middle school and high school.
And then I also started songwriting and then I also was in love with theatre, and so it all kind of came together - storytelling and theatre and music - my love for all of those different things came together when I was around 16, and that was when I started writing my first musical. Of course, the first musical I ever wrote was very messy and it kind of made no sense, but it was so fun and I knew that I had to do it again.
And so, I continued writing all throughout college. I was pre-med for two years, still was doing theatre. And then I got very lucky again in college and came across some incredible mentors and formed some great communities that gave me the strength and the confidence to decide to pursue my passion professionally. And so, ever since then, I've been doing it.
Hayley: Yeah!
Amy: That’s amazing.
Hayley: Incredible. Julia, I know that you're working on some really exciting things. You've got a 54 Below concert coming up at the end of April. Can you tell us a little bit about all of the different projects that you're working on right now?
Julia: Absolutely. So I think I'm working on maybe seven projects at the moment.
Amy: Geez!
Julia: Not all in theatre, they're all kind of in different spaces. The most pressing thing right now is my 54 Below concert. It's my solo debut concert in New York City…and anywhere. And I am bringing in some amazing friends of mine who are Broadway performers who are coming to sing the music. We have a really, really great band. And it's gonna be my first time ever performing at 54 Below.
So it's gonna be a spread of a couple different projects. We're finishing off with four songs from Dive, which was previously known as Shimcheong: A Folktale online. And then, we are also presenting a couple songs from a song cycle that's recently gone a little bit viral on my TikTok. There's gonna be four songs that are inspired by my friend's graphic novel. And then there's also just gonna be a couple songs that are just songs that I've written over the last couple of years, either inspired by various projects, not attached to projects, inspired by real life… It’s gonna be one hour of original music, and I'm really excited about that.And then Dive is being produced, has been commissioned by the American Repertory Theater. We are being spearheaded by the incredible director Diane Paulus, she's gonna be directing the musical. And I'm going to be working alongside screenwriter/playwright Diana Son, who is amazing and happens to live 15 minutes away from me walking, which is very nice.
Hayley: Yeah, that sounds serendipitous.
Julia: Absolutely. So we've been developing the story. We're actually completely rewriting a new musical, inspired in part by my senior thesis musical, which was the original one that went viral on TikTok, and also by the original folktale. We're sort of going back and re-examining that folktale and saying, “What does this say, and how can we both celebrate and challenge the notions in the original folktale?” And so that's been an exciting project that's been in the works.
It will continue to be in the works, but something that I'm really hoping to do with this musical is to open it up in a way that I haven't really seen previous Broadway musicals or big commercial musicals do before. I'd really like to open the process up to my audience, because we already have this fan base online. I'm really excited about bringing the fan base along with the project. You ordinarily wouldn't announce at this early of a stage. It would be years before we'd make an announcement, but we're really excited to say, “Hey friends, come along and see - this is what it's like to be writing a new musical.” We have to go through workshops, multiple workshops. We have to build our team, we have to go back to the writing board and completely rewrite. I'm just very excited about being able to open up that process and bring our fan base along.
Hayley: Yeah. That's so cool, Julia, especially because your project started on TikTok. I think that something that's underrated is just bringing people into the process, like you said, because people get this sense of personal investment in the piece before it's, you know, even at the point of completion and feel like they've been on the journey with it. So I think that's a really, really cool approach and makes a lot of sense for what you're doing.
Julia: Thank you so much. It's really exciting. I genuinely believe that every single person who reposted or shared or liked or commented has contributed to this project and all the opportunities, so I think it's just such a cool way to get the audience involved, audience participation before the show even exists.
Hayley: Yeah, and even increasing accessibility too, amazing.
Amy: Yeah. Well, and I hear you. I mean, especially as writers early in the process, there's nothing more valuable than people supporting you and saying, “Hey, I like this work. Keep going.” That's great, to make it part of the process from the beginning.
Julia: So that's things that are happening in Dive world. And I'm also developing Dive into a middle-grade novel. Part of my love for storytelling comes from my young - like, when I was a child, and also a teen, and also now - my obsession with fantasy novels. I grew up obsessed with Gail Carson Levine, obviously Harry Potter and Hunger Games. And so, one of the things I'm really excited to do is expand this project into different platforms.
I'm also working on another novel right now. I'm on the final draft, hopefully.
Hayley: So exciting.
Julia: I'm really hoping to finish by this Friday. I'm gonna put that into the universe.
Amy: Wow!
Hayley: Okay, I'm giving the good vibes to you.
Amy: Yeah, it's gonna happen!
Julia: So that's another one of my projects that I've been working on. It's also a YA fantasy novel for a little bit of an older audience, more like high school, inspired by my grandparents' actual love story.
Hayley: That's so sweet!
Julia: Yeah. They have this crazy story. They fell in love during the Japanese occupation of Korea, and then kind of in the midst of, like, the Korean War and getting separated and finding each other again. This is the craziest story. Also, my grandma was rich and my grandpa was poor, and they had a forbidden romance.
Hayley: I can't wait to read it, yeah.
Julia: So my brother and I basically created a novelization of it and have fantasticalized - there's magic and - there's all the love triangle and, you know, everything that you get in a great fantasy novel, but also it's totally rooted in reality. So that's one of my projects right now. So yeah, it's been really exciting.
Hayley: Julia, I feel compelled to ask you - how do you think about balancing all of the different things going on in your life? Because you have, like, 17 different hats on at any given time. It's a lot!
Julia: Totally. I keep a to-do list every single day. At the start of every day, I have a notebook that's literally just to-do lists. First is a list of everything that I need to do, and then it's a list of my schedule for each day. One of the great things about being self-employed is that I get to wake up whenever I want and I get to work whenever I want and take a day off whenever.
But it also means just making sure to hold myself accountable. And the way that works best for me is, I'll say 9-10 AM, this is what I'm doing, 10-11, this is what I'm doing, this is when I'm eating lunch, this is when I'm going on my walk…
Hayley: So you're like building your self-care into this structure of all the things you have to do. Got it. That's really smart.
Julia: Yeah, so it's always making sure I know what needs to be done and when it needs to be done and how I'm gonna do it. For some reason, for me, once it's on the paper, I'm like, “Oh, I can do it.” When it's all in my head, I get very flustered. As soon as I can see it on the paper and I can see the steps, I'm like, “Oh, piece of cake!” I mean, not necessarily piece of cake, but at least I know, oh, okay, this is doable. And it often changes from hour to hour what I'm doing on the list. But as of today, I'm pretty on schedule.
It's just a matter of being flexible and staying on top of the list. And sometimes it'll fall behind, but then I'll catch up, and then I'll have days where I've gotten everything on my list done and start something new or take a break.
Amy: Cool.
(Musical transition)
Amy: Julia, in all of your many projects, creative projects that you're working on, do you feel like there's a creative mission that drives you forward? Like something that you're trying to do or make with your art?
Julia: Absolutely, 100%. A lot of the reason that I work so much in the young adult space is that pretty much all of my art really goes back to when I was a kid. That was the age that I fell in love with art, that I fell in love with movies and musicals. I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. I live in New York now. But back when I was growing up, there was a 0.008% Korean population. For every 1,000 people, there were 8 Korean people. And I probably knew 1,000 people and there were 7 people in my family, and then my best friend and her brother were half-Korean. And so I was like, that's the 8. It was very rare for me to see another Korean person on the street, in the room, let alone on screen or on stage. And up until I was 20 years old, I never saw another Korean person on screen or on stage. And still it's very, very rare, although things are really changing now.
When I was growing up, I always had this sort of sense that I was not the main character, even of my own story. I had embraced my self-identity as a quirky, ethnic best friend, because that was the only way I'd ever seen people of color portrayed on screen. Especially because it wasn't like I had a friend group that was all Asian girls. I was the Asian girl in the friend group, and I was the Asian girl in the class, and whenever I was in the theatre, I was the only one. And so I think for kids, what we see is what we believe is possible, and what we see is how we understand how the world works.
And so as a kid, because I never saw myself represented in any of these stories, I believed that that was what was possible for me. The best that I could ever be was the quirky best friend. I think this drive to be able to see my own kind of story on stage and on screen was something that slowly started creeping up, especially when I got into college. At first, I thought it was just never even possible, I never considered it.
And then when I got to college, I was really surprised. Because when I got to Boston, I looked around and saw Asian people on the street constantly, and I remember being like, “Wow, there's so many of us here!” And there were so many Korean people in my class, we had a whole group chat. Me and my best friend growing up, we were the Koreans of the class. And so, to have a whole group dedicated to Koreans and Asian Americans was something that was blowing my mind. But what I found my freshman year, I was still the only Asian person in the room in the theatre my freshman year, and that really led me to question everything.
I had applied to college wanting to be a theatre major, wanting to write musicals, and my freshman year, I had a total identity crisis. ‘Cause not only did I find that I was the only Korean person in the room, I found that when I was in a room full of Asian people, I was the only one in music and theatre. And so I felt, just, honestly like a weirdo. At the time, all I wanted was to fit in with the other Asian kids. I had been so used to being the Asian kid, and then when I came to college - a lot of my friends from Missouri that are people of color and I shared this experience of going away to college and having our friends say, “Oh, are you adopted? Why do you act so white?” It's actually a question that I was asked a lot.
And so I started learning a lot more about my culture, I started taking Korean classes in college. But what I mostly did to run away from the truth of that I wanted to study theatre is that I switched into pre-med. So I think it was kind of in part due to two things: the lack of seeing people like me in those theatre spaces, and then also my lack of understanding of what it takes to have a theatre career. Because I didn't know anybody working in theatre, I didn't know anybody working in the entertainment industry. And so I just didn't even think it was possible.
So I switched out, and then, my freshman year, I wrote the first-year musical, which is this tradition. And I had so much fun with it that I was like, “This cannot be the last musical that I write.” It was the second musical that I'd written. It was the first one I'd ever seen on a stage, and I was like, “I just have to do it one more time, and this time I'm going to try to write a musical about an Asian American family. That's gonna be my goal. And my goal simultaneously is going to be to recruit all of my friends and turn them into theatre people.”
And so I got together with the two other Asian theatre kids on campus. The three of us got together over the summer, and we had this conversation where we talked about - there are two minority student theatre groups on cameras. There's Black CAST and there's Teatro, but there's no Asian American group, maybe because there aren't enough Asian Americans. But we said, “Well, what if we make a group? And then what if we make more Asian American theatre people?” So that summer, we started planning the Asian Student Arts Project, also known as ASAP, which became the sister group of Black CAST and Teatro.
And at the same time, I went on Facebook and I said, “I'm looking for some collaborators to write a musical about “the Asian American experience.” I don't really know what I meant by that, but I said “the Asian American experience, is anyone interested?” So then I found two friends, Jared and John, and we ended up writing ASAP’s inaugural production, which was a musical called The East Side. And the whole purpose of East Side was to get Asian Americans excited about participating in live theatre and to make it as accessible as possible.
And so I said, Harvard students are busy. They're not gonna come to a 2.5-hour show. Let's make it a one act, hour and a half. We're gonna make it a comedy. It's gonna be packed with jokes, pop music, and it's going to be a pop musical comedy about an Asian American teenager.
And so that's what we did, and we ended up that year expanding our membership from three people to over a hundred members. We sold out all five of our shows with standing room only. Word started spreading around campus, so by the time we got to our last two shows, people were like, standing in the back of the theatre.
Amy: Oh my gosh!
Julia: We performed on one of Harvard's biggest main stages. Truly everyone involved was doing it for the first time, so it was…
Hayley: Wow!
Julia: Even like our director, it was our director's first time directing a musical. Every single actor, Asian American actor in the production, it was their first production at Harvard or ever. Our pit orchestra…it was like, literally the set designer, the costume designer, the tech director - every single person was doing it for the first time.
Hayley: That's so special, Julia. Wow.
Julia: It was so exciting, and it was very nerve-wracking, but it ended up just going over so, so well. And it's truly one of my fondest memories looking back in college.
People would always say, “Oh, East Side is Julia's baby.” But I'm like, no! I'm The East Side's baby! Like, I was born out of that project. That's the moment where everything changed for me because… I remember looking out, there's this dumpling making scene where the mother is teaching her son how to make dumplings before he goes off to college. So I remember just looking out, and we would always cry, but we'd love hearing the audience cry too during that.
But there was one day where we had invited 60 kids from this program called Chinatown After School that I volunteered with, and the whole row was just these 6–10 year old kids and seeing them watching the musical, because I was peeking out from behind the curtain. Seeing them watching the musical, and the way that their faces lit up when they saw people that looked like them on stage and they saw the dumpling making on stage, or when they heard words in their language… It just really changed something for me. I realized I have to do this for my life, because this is an experience that I never had as a kid, and that's an experience that I want to give to the next generation. And so, that was one of the really big things that changed for me.
The other thing was that I had always been afraid of, ‘cause I had no community. And suddenly, I had over 100 people on our email list in our club, and people were going to our meetings. Forty people were involved in the making of The East Side, and we all became so close during that production. My best friends were involved, and I made new best friends during that process. And so, that was just such a change, I think, in the way that the Harvard theatre scene looked from my freshman year to my senior year, when we put on an all-Asian cast of Legally Blonde, which was something I never could have even conceived my freshman year.
And then when we had put on that musical, Diane Borger, who was at the time the artistic producer at the A.R.T., the American Repertory Theater, came to see our dress rehearsal. She gave me my first professional writing project, and I was writing the A.R.T. family musical. And so I did that for the next two years, and now Dive is gonna be going up there, and it's totally become like my home. A.R.T. is like my theatre family, my home. And so yeah, it was like everything changed at The East End.
That's why yes, everything is geared towards that mission of giving the next generation what I feel like I didn't have and what I hope that everyone can have, which is the experience of seeing themselves, seeing their story represented, and then being inspired to tell their own stories.
Amy: That's so beautiful, Julia. And so remarkable, the change that you were able to make in that community, just bringing people together. That's really, really, really special.
Hayley: Yeah. And inspiring, absolutely.
(Musical transition)
Hayley: We've been talking a lot about identity, and Julia, I wanna ask you about womanhood and how you feel that that intersects with your identity.
Julia: Oh my gosh. Last night, I was at Maestra's Amplify concert. So Maestra is this incredible organization that supports women and nonbinary folks in the musical theatre industry. Last night was their annual fundraiser concert, Amplify. And I was honored to have a song performed as part of the concert. And I was getting really emotional, just hearing the other music and thinking, wow, it actually blows my mind how underrepresented women are in the musical theatre industry. Because when most people think of musical theatre, they conjure the image of a 16-year-old girl in, like, her high school musical.
Hayley: Yes, totally!
Julia: Women rule the stage of musical theatre, and yet, the roles that are available for women are so different than the roles that are available for men. That have been available for men over the last years and years and years, hundreds of years.
And I really believe that comes down to the fact that women, we're so underrepresented backstage - in director positions, music director, pit musicians, and writers. Because of course, everyone wants to tell their own stories. So of course, men are gonna tell stories about men. But that just shows why there need to be more female writers, there need to be more female directors and producers.
But it is just so mind-boggling how, when you do work with a team steered by women, how different the process is. Just this feeling of comfort and this feeling of never having to censor yourself and apologize or change the way that you speak when you're working with other women. And of course, the goal would be to create spaces of equity so that nobody has to censor themselves and everyone can be free to speak the way that they want to.
I feel super, super lucky to have grown up in a theatre space that was just ruled by women. The Dianes, my director was Emma Watt the first year and then it was Rebecca Aparicio the second year. The producers were all women.
Hayley: It's amazing.
Julia: I just felt so, so lucky to be in that space and to be able to look up to these women and say, “Oh, you're doing that. That's something that's possible.” Back in November, I was honored to have won the Fred Ebb Award, and looking at the past recipients of these sorts of prizes - there's the Kleban, there's the Jonathan Larson Award... And a lot of these awards for rising musical theatre makers, when you go really far back, it's like all of them are men.
But then, more recently now it's been changing, and it's been really, really exciting to see that representation is not only something that's allowed, but it's exciting for people. And there are people that are willing to stand with us and stand behind us. It's so, so exciting. So I'm very hopeful for the future. There's still a long way to go, but we're, I think, in a very exciting place right now.
Hayley: Totally.
Amy: Yeah, I agree with you. Julia, since you're talking about changes that are happening in the industry as a whole, I'd love to hear about changes that you would like to see happen or be a part of in the theatre industry.
Julia: So I think we've covered a lot of the first part of it, which is representation of underrepresented voices. What actually excites me the most about theatre is not even really telling my own story. Like, absolutely telling my own stories, but my favorite part of the musical theatre process is auditions. Because I love seeing all the different ways that people can bring a voice to a piece that's already been written. Hearing the things for the first time always blows my mind. And I think it's because that collaborative aspect is what I'm most excited about. That's what I love the most about theatre. And so, so much of what I do is to give opportunities to people like me in different spaces.
And so it's like, if you are a music director or if you are an aspiring actress or you're an aspiring producer, the opportunity to work with those people is really exciting. It's just like, the creative bonds that form. And so it's not just necessarily the underrepresented voices and the underrepresented stories, but it's also - the underrepresented connections is something I'm really excited about, and bridging those connections with other people in the theatre industry with different disciplines. That's something I'm really excited about.
I just think there needs to be a change in the way that we market shows and the way that we bring our audience into shows. My aunt is a Korean-American woman, avid theatregoer, who had never heard of K-Pop until it closed. And of course, I know some of the producers involved in K-Pop and they're fantastic people. This is not like anything about “They did it wrong,” but it's more like an overall comment on the theatre industry sort of needing to rethink the way that we cultivate fan bases.
A lot of shows are really starting to do this now, I wholeheartedly believe in releasing the soundtrack online before the show even opens. I think that all shows should do it. Of course, there's a lot of money and time that goes into it, but even releasing, like, demos online, fans get so excited for it. The demos that I recorded in my dorm room and then released on TikTok, those sorts of things, people will get really excited about that. People are just fascinated in the process and they wanna be part of it.
And so I think bringing fans into the whole process - that's why you get so many revivals and so many adaptations of big franchises on Broadway, because they do so well ‘cause their fan bases already exist. I think every original musical can make their fan base exist before the show actually comes out. And I think a lot of that has to do with what you do online before the show, and a lot of it has to do with the soundtrack and developing that before the show comes out.
And of course, shows are always changing up to the last minute, but even that could be part of it. Like, showing your audience, “Oh, I wrote this whole song. You guys love this song. Sorry, it's not going in the show, but you can listen to it whenever you want. There's gonna be a new one.” I think just being so transparent will help. I also think that filming Broadway shows - in a really high-tech, nice way, like the Legally Blonde pro shot.
Amy: I love that pro shot.
Hayley: Yeah, that's a great pro shot.
Julia: I think things like that really do help. There's this big fear that, oh, theatre is meant to be experienced live. And oh, people aren't gonna come if they see it online, but it's not true. So I think just more transparency, bringing people in more, building an audience… Of course, I am by no means a marketing expert…
Amy: I mean, you're not not a marketing expert, Julia! In the stories you've been telling, it's really clear that one of your strengths is figuring out who the audience is and how you can reach that audience. And that's marketing. And that's, that would've been really helpful for a lot of shows that haven't quite found their audience.
Julia: I'm excited. I think that Gen Z is gonna shake up the theatre world. Now that we're starting to get jobs and infiltrate the real world, things are gonna be different. Hopefully for the better.
Hayley: Totally. Julia, I wanna ask you - you talk a lot about how your work is for your younger self and for what you wish you had. Is there something that you wish that you had known when you started falling in love with storytelling?
Julia: Oh, there's so much. At the same time, I feel like all those experiences of things I didn't know were really important to who I am today. That being said, it's a different world. So if I were young today, I think I would have advice for myself, which is very different.
If you're a child, don't get on social media until you're like, at least 16. I didn't get Instagram until I was 16, and that's when I stopped reading books. Okay, I read books now again, but…
Hayley: But I hear you. We were all reading more before social media.
Julia: Absolutely. But I would say just the number one thing - and this is something that my mom taught me - is to indulge in exploring your passions. I was really lucky in that my mom basically signed me up for every possible thing there was to sign you up for and then just see whatever stuck and then really indulge whatever stuck.
There's a lot of parents, I think, who are very hesitant to let their kids get involved in certain things like theatre, because they think, “Oh, it's a waste of time. Why not do something higher class like ballet or like classical music?” Which of course, ballet and classical music are amazing, but if your kid wants to audition for the school play - like, I had friends that were not allowed to audition for the school play because their parents thought it would take away from homework time. You never know! It might not lead to a creative career, but you just never know where your passions will lead you.
I even think that, like, indulging in being pre-med…I always looked back, and I was like, “Ah, it's such a waste of time. I wish I didn't take LS1b Genetics.” But I talk about LS1b all the time now. I still talk about that class, that genetics class. I hated lab because I'm really bad at following directions. But I think about those labs all the time. I think just indulging in your passions, even if you think they're not gonna lead anywhere - anything you're curious about, just do it. Don't stop yourself because you think no one else like you has done it before, because you think it's impossible. Maybe you have to be the first person to do it. If there's no Asian American theatre troupe on campus, maybe you have to just make one.
And so I think just all of those, those are lessons that I learned that I had to go through lots of trials and tribulations. I just remember every day my freshman summer, and kind of my sophomore summer, like, having just a meltdown. ‘Cause I was like, “What am I doing with my life?” The daily crisis was so real. Even now, the daily crisis is real. But just like realizing - daily crisis or monthly, yearly crisis - it happens and it passes, and then you find yourself somewhere where you never expected yourself to be.
Amy: Yeah, it's all part of the journey.
Julia: Exactly.
Amy: And I bet you'll take that genetics class and put it in your art one day.
Julia: Yeah, maybe I will. It'll always come back in some shape or form.
Hayley: Well, Julia, we just have one more question for you, which is - what are you most proud of in your life and in your work so far?
Julia: I think it's definitely the communities and the connections that I've made along the way. Pretty much all of my best, best friends right now are friends that I made making art together. And at the end of the day, that's what I live for, is just making those connections and having those people in my life and having those communities.
So I think no matter what happens, it's great to know that those communities exist and that I have people to be with. I think that's definitely what I'm most proud of.
Hayley: That's beautiful. I love it.
Amy: Yay. Well, we're proud of all that you're doing too. We think it's awesome and can't wait to hear more. Thank you so much for being on the podcast!
Julia: Yeah, thanks so much for having me!
Hayley: Before you go, can you tell our listeners where they can find you on the internet?
Julia: Yes. You can find me on TikTok @JuliaRiew. You can also - at the same username on Instagram. And then I have a website that's also juliariew.com.
Hayley: Julia, thank you so much for your time and your inspiring storytelling today and in your work. Good luck with everything.
Julia: Thank you guys so much.
(Music)
Hayley: Thank you for listening to the Women & Theatre Podcast. We’re your hosts, Hayley Goldenberg…
Amy: And Amy Andrews. If you like what you heard, subscribe and give us a 5-star review wherever you listen.
Hayley: You can also follow us on social @womenandtheatreproject to make sure you never miss an episode.
Amy: The music for this show is written by talented Women & Theatre community member Chloe Geller.
Hayley: Thanks for listening, everyone. See you next time!
Amy: Bye!
