S2E9: Madeline Myers
In this episode, Hayley and Amy speak with composer/lyricist Madeline Myers about uplifting the stories of women who have been erased from history, expanding our understanding of women’s relationship with work, finding people who believe in you when you don’t believe in yourself, and being a good person in addition to a good artist. Scroll down for episode notes and transcript!
Episode Notes
Guest: Madeline Myers
Hosts: Hayley Goldenberg and Amy Andrews
Music: Chloe Geller
Episode Resources:
Double Helix - playing at Bay Street Theater May 30-June 18
Guest Bio
Madeline Myers (she/her) is a composer and lyricist for musical theater in New York City. Her musicals include Double Helix (world premiere Bay Street Theater, 2023) Flatbush Avenue (UNC-Greensboro commission, 2021), The Devil’s Apprentice, (world premiere Copenhagen, Denmark, 2018), and Masterpiece (O’Neill Musical Theater Conference 2018 semi-finalist).
Named to the 2022 Broadway Women’s Fund “Women to Watch on Broadway” list, Madeline is a 2023 & 2022 Kleban Prize finalist for lyric writing, a winner of the 2021 Billie Burke Ziegfeld Award presented by New York Stage & Film and the Ziegfeld Club; a 2020, 2019, 2018, and 2017 Jonathan Larson Grant finalist; a 2019 York Theatre Company NEO Writer; a 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, and 2017 ASCAP Plus Award recipient; and a 2016-2017 Dramatists Guild Fellow.
Madeline’s musicals have been developed at Bay Street Theatre, the York Theatre, Goodspeed Musicals (2023 Festival of New Musicals, the Johnny Mercer Writers Grove), the New Dramatists Composer-Librettist Studio, the Fingerlakes Musical Theater Festival, Musical Theater Factory, the NMI Disney Imagineering New Voices Project, the New York Theatre Barn, and the Johnny Mercer Songwriting Project.
When not writing musicals, Madeline enjoys reading, walking in Central Park, and volunteering. She is an active volunteer with Central Synagogue’s unhoused breakfast program and the founder of a 2020 voter registration/Census count initiative for the New York unhoused community. Through the pandemic, Madeline has worked with NYC Test & Trace Corps to bring mobile vaccine buses and PPE to unhoused New Yorkers. In 2018, Madeline created the Blair School of Music Student Citizen Award given to a female student demonstrating excellence in personal character and contributions to the community. Madeline sits on the Alumni Board of the Vanderbilt University Ingram Scholarship Program, of which she is a proud alumna. She is an original member of the music department of the Broadway production of Hamilton.
Madeline is a proud member of ASCAP and the Dramatists Guild. She is represented by Chris Till at Verve Talent & Literary Agency.
Find Madeline Online:
Madeline website: www.madelinemyers.com
Show website: www.doublehelixmusical.com
Madeline Instagram: @madelinesmyers
Show Instagram: @doublehelixmusical
TikTok: @doublehelixmusical
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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)
Amy: In today’s episode, we speak with Madeline Myers, who is a composer and lyricist for musical theatre in New York City. Madeline’s musicals include Double Helix, Flatbush Avenue, The Devil’s Apprentice, and Masterpiece.
Named to the 2022 Broadway Women’s Fund “Women to Watch on Broadway” list, Madeline is a 2023 & 2022 Kleban Prize finalist for lyric writing, a winner of the 2021 Billie Burke Ziegfeld Award presented by New York Stage & Film and the Ziegfeld Club; a multi-year Jonathan Larson Grant finalist; a 2019 York Theatre Company NEO Writer; a multi-year ASCAP Plus Award recipient; and a 2016-2017 Dramatists Guild Fellow.
Madeline’s musicals have been developed at Bay Street Theatre, the York Theatre, Goodspeed Musicals, the New Dramatists Composer-Librettist Studio, the Fingerlakes Musical Theater Festival, Musical Theater Factory, the NMI Disney Imagineering New Voices Project, the New York Theatre Barn, and the Johnny Mercer Songwriting Project.
Amy: Hello listeners, we are here with the fabulous Madeline Myers. Madeline, can you please share your pronouns and tell us a little bit about what you do in the theatre?
Madeline: Absolutely. First of all, thank you so much for having me. I know you all just celebrated a birthday, so happy belated birthday!
Hayley/Amy: Thank you!
Madeline: My name is Madeline Myers, and my pronouns are she/her, and I'm a composer and lyricist. And I say I'm also a musical dramatist because the work that I write is sung through. But I also wouldn't consider myself a book writer, if that makes sense. If someone came to me and asked me to write a book to their musical, I'm not sure that's how I would describe or define myself. But at the same time, I feel like I very much developed the book to my own work. So that's why I call myself a musical dramatist.
Hayley: Amazing. Madeline, can you tell us a little bit about how you came to theatre in the first place?
Madeline: Yes. Well, I grew up in a really small town in the corner of Georgia, about an hour and a half northwest of Atlanta, where there was pretty much no access to arts whatsoever, I would say. There were no artistic institutions, no cultural institutions, but there were a couple of things I think that really brought me to the theatre.
One of them was - my town had a library, and I grew up loving to read. I still, to this day, love to read. I love to read, and the reason why I bring this up in the context of theatre is because I think it developed my love of story. And I think story Is just one really, really big piece of the puzzle. If I have any perspective, and if I'm able to look back and kind of see how I got into the theatre, it feels like story through books is kind of one of the big pieces.
The other things were, I grew up with a piano that my mom had when she was a child. She had started taking piano lessons and she had this spinet piano. And I feel really lucky that I had an instrument in my house because without it, I don't know that I would've come to music quite in the same way. And so I grew up taking piano lessons. I trained as a classical pianist, and that certainly informs my musical style. It's definitely more of the concert music or art music than, you know, say like a pop rock vein, something like that. I fell in love with music through the piano. And the piano still to this day is my happy place. It's one of the great loves of my life, music and piano.
But even as I took piano lessons, I quickly discovered that I liked how my brain felt when I was creating something more so than when I was interpreting something that someone else had written. So in middle school, I kind of started to write songs - your typical angsty middle school girl songs...
Hayley: We all wrote them, Madeline, listen, that's how we got our start.
Madeline: Exactly! So I feel like music came into the picture in that way.
And then the last big part that got me into theatre was - again, I grew up in this really small town. I played the piano. I loved to read. But I, again, did not have access to any sort of theatre, professional or amateur or otherwise. But my mom had an aunt who lived in New York City, and she would send my sister and me for every gift-giving occasion - a holiday or a birthday or something like that - she would send us VHS’s of the old MGM movie musicals.
Hayley: Love it.
Madeline: So we had Oklahoma, we had My Fair Lady, we had The Sound of Music, Singing In the Rain, State Fair, Easter Parade.
Hayley: All the classics, yeah.
Madeline: Exactly. I loved watching these musicals. I just thought they were so special. And I think as I got older, I realized that my love of music and my love of story met in this place of musical theatre, and that it had kind of been there all along, you know, since I was a kid watching these movie musicals. And it would actually be a very long time before I ever went to New York and saw a professional Broadway musical. But those are really the three big things that when I look back on, I feel like that's how I ended up here doing this thing - is loving to read, loving music, and falling in love with musical theatre specifically through these old MGM videos.
Hayley: I love it. So cool.
Amy: I love that so much. I mean, I don't love that you were in this community that was totally bereft of art, but I love that art found its way to you regardless. That's really cool.
Madeline: Yes! That's a lovely way of putting it, Amy.
Amy: Madeline, can you tell us about what you're working on creatively right now? I know you have really exciting stuff coming up.
Madeline: Thank you, yes! Well, in 2019, I started writing a musical called Double Helix. And Double Helix is about the real-life race to secure the discovery of the structure of DNA and a scientist, Rosalind Franklin. And Rosalind Franklin was this really talented, really brilliant X-ray defractioner. She was a scientist and she took these X-ray photographs. And she was working at King's College in London in the early 1950s, and she was tasked with using her X-ray photographs to uncover the structure of DNA. And so she toiled away for a long time taking these pictures, until finally she took a picture that revealed the structure of DNA to be a double helix.
And one of the rival lab mates in her lab, another scientist named Maurice Wilkins, took this photograph without her permission or her knowledge and shared it with another team working on the DNA problem at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge - two scientists by the name of James Watson and Francis Crick. And the three men - Morris Wilkins, James Watson, and Francis Krick - would go on to win the Nobel Prize in 1962 for discovering the structure of DNA, and Rosalind Franklin passed away of ovarian cancer at age 37 in 1958. So Double Helix is Rosalind's story, which has been left out of our dominant cultural narrative about the most significant scientific discovery in modern history.
So I've been working on Double Helix since 2019. I did like a 45-minute, very much for myself, reading of all the material that I had, I think it was September of 2019. Maybe the first songs I shared from it were in March and April 2019. And then in September, I went to the Dramatists Guild with a bunch of friends, rehearsed the music… Just to hear it and just to see: How does this show behave? How does this all work? What do I have? What am I missing? Let's just kind of see what's here. And then I put it away towards the end of the year as I was preparing for a workshop of another show that was scheduled to happen in March of 2020. Obviously, that was very much canceled.
So Double Helix has primarily been developed during the pandemic. I believe it was October or November of 2020, we did the first full-length reading of it on Zoom. October of 2021, we did the first in-person reading of it. May of 2022, we did the second in-person reading of it. And then, it is actually going to have its world premiere at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, running May 30th through June 18th. And I'm just so excited, I am over the moon, I feel like I'm just walking around on air these days because I am just really excited that this show actually gets to have a full production, a real life. And hopefully there will be more productions beyond Bay Street.
Amy: Absolutely. Congratulations!
Hayley: Oh my gosh, that's so exciting. Also, listeners, roll up to the show, you guys. Come check out the show.
Amy: Yeah, we’ll be there!
Madeline: Tickets go on sale April 15th. The run is very short. So get your ticket, come to Bay Street, and see this first production.
Amy: Yay!
Hayley: Yay! So exciting.
(Musical transition)
Hayley: Madeline, do you have a creative mission or something that kind of ties all of the different work that you do together?
Madeline: What a very thoughtful and compelling question. My creative mission - and I don't know that I've articulated this out loud before - when I think about growing up, watching all these MGM movie musicals, I think the kind of art that I would like to make is the art that I love and the art that other people will love. And when I think about the kind of stories and the musical stories that I love the most, they're the ones that are honest and truthful and get at that ineffable human thing. And so I hope that is what my work can do and will do. And I hope that some person - I don't know, VHS’s certainly don't exist anymore - but that it means something to other people in the way that I think about what musicals have meant to me in my own life.
Hayley: Yeah. I really love that. And I have to say I'm so grateful that you are creating this work about this woman who's largely been lost, to your point, to history, to our larger cultural narrative. It's really deeply important work that you're doing, and I'm so excited to see the story of a woman who we haven't had the opportunity to meet yet. It's really, really exciting.
Amy: It's so, so very aligned with the work that Hayley and I do and hope to do both in this project and in our own writing projects. So we're very pleased to be having this conversation with you.
Madeline: Thank you! I feel the same way as a theatregoer, as someone who just loves theatre. When I first heard about Rosalind Franklin, it was kind of in this roundabout way. I had a friend who said, “Do you know anything about the discovery of the structure of DNA?” And it was this really explosive, dramatic, exciting race. And as soon as they told me about it, I was like, “Wow.” I just was dazzled by the idea. I thought it was exciting. The hair on my neck stood up and my heart stopped. I was just like, oh my gosh, this is thrilling. And I wanted to know more about it. And I started to read about it. And it wasn't until I read about it that I learned about Rosalind Franklin and how central she was to this discovery. I, for one, grew up learning in high school that Watson and Crick discovered DNA, that just was part of our cultural understanding. It just feels accepted. That's something also that I'm very interested in, is that very often we think that history is the truth. And sometimes it is, but it's not always.
Hayley: And it's not the whole truth too, right? Like, it's missing lots of stuff.
Madeline: Exactly. I think that's really interesting. And in the case of Rosalind Franklin, I really connected with her when I read about her because we are both women, we are both Jews. I'm around the same age that she was when she was working on this discovery. And the biggest thing that I just really connected with her about was - the way that she felt about her work as a scientist is how I feel about my own work as a writer. Something I say a lot about Double Helix is that it's a love story between a woman and her work, and the choices that she has to make. And I think that really feels like my big connection to her.
Hayley: Yeah. That's beautiful. I love it. We're talking a little bit about womanhood on the fringes of the conversation.
Amy: It’s coming into the conversation.
Hayley: Yes, thank you.
Madeline: I feel like for women, it's always part of the conversation. You can't talk about anything without it being there because it factors into absolutely everything.
Hayley: I'm curious about what womanhood means to you and how it plays into your life now.
Madeline: I don't even know how to define womanhood, if that makes sense. But my being a woman feels like a part of absolutely every single thing. And I think maybe it shows up in the biggest way in my work, because I think the way that women have to think about their work is just different. My husband, the way he is seen in his workspace and the way that his identity plays into his work, it's just different. It's not a judgment, it's just truth.
I certainly think about that, and I think about that as well from an age perspective. Being kind of early-career and being younger and being a woman, I just feel like getting visibility in the industry is super challenging. Which is one reason why I was so moved and thrilled that you all asked me to be on this podcast, because this is a very big deal to me to be able to talk about my work and about myself with your listeners. But I just think these things are so deeply connected to the work itself. You know, obviously, Double Helix is a piece that is so expressly about being a woman and the challenges that this one woman in particular faced in a very specific moment in time and in a very specific context. So not only content-wise, but how I interface with the business.
But you know, I think I love being a woman. And by that I mean, I've always been kind of like a girl's girl. I've always had girlfriends. That was always kind of my thing. And so I think there are some expectations that it's kind of cool to subvert. A lot of times, women are taught - to be taken seriously in a man's world, you've gotta be extra professional…
Hayley: …and wear the button-downs and the glasses, so you look smart, and blah, blah, blah.
Amy: Yeah, pretend you're a man.
Madeline: Exactly. And I think it's kind of cool to actually show up and be like, maybe I can do this on my own terms. And a man doesn't have to think about that necessarily. At least I don't think that's the case. So why do I have to? I want to endeavor to be as good at my work as possible and for my work and craft and art to be as excellent as I can make it. And the other things - can I behave the way I would like to behave? You know, I don't have to be cold in order to be taken seriously because that's not really my nature. I don't know the answer to all these questions, ‘cause you know, also I'm very early in my career. And I think, with Double Helix in particular, I'm having a lot of first times, and I'm kind of learning as I go, and I'm grateful to be able to learn.
Hayley: One of the things that Amy and I are really passionate about is talking to folks at every step of their journey because, as I'm sure you can relate to Madeline, early on in the career, you see these huge, lofty, big giants to look up to, but it's hard when there aren't mid-career people that you can look up to. Those steps along the way are not as clear or as visible. And so it's really fun for Amy and I to talk to people at every level of the industry and get a sense of like, what are different groups of people dealing with at what moments? And I think it's really valuable for our listeners too.
Amy: Madeline, kind of jumping off of that, because you're describing yourself as an early-career artist, I would love to hear from you about what your vision of success looks like in your work. What does success mean to you?
Madeline: Well, I do feel very early in my career because I have not had a commercial production, which is certainly my goal in my work. Because I want as many people to see it as possible, I want it to have the biggest reach as possible. I want everyone in the world to know about Rosalind Franklin. I want everyone in the world to see the other shows that I'm working on. But I would be remiss to think that that is the only thing that matters. And I think the older I get, and the closer I come to achieving those goals, the more I realize that who I am as a woman matters to me more than who I am as a composer. I hope that my work is excellent. And I want to have my work reach as many people as possible on the biggest stages possible. But I also want to be someone in our community that can open doors for other people in the way that people have opened doors for me.
I've been so generously mentored and helped by so many people. People who I think of as the top of the top. And so that is something else that, if I am ever lucky enough to have the kind of career I would hope to have, that I can help other early writers and young writers the way that so many people have helped me, and I sometimes can't even believe how lucky I am.
Amy: Yeah. Do you want to tell us about some of those experiences of mentorship that you've had that have been meaningful to you?
Madeline: Absolutely. The first person that comes to mind is the producer Stacey Mindich, who was the lead producer on Dear Evan Hansen and is such a visionary in terms of commissioning that show and shaping it through its journey to Broadway and beyond. She is someone who has just been so generous to me, sometimes I just, I can't even believe it. She gives me such smart advice. She has connected me with so many people. She believes in my work, and I think that is just the most important thing. Some days when I am despairing in my work and in my career, I feel buoyed by her belief, and that means more to me than I could possibly say. Just knowing that she believes that what I'm doing in my work is important and deserves to be heard. Again, I've had so many people who have been so generous to me, and Stacey certainly has just [been], and continues to be, this guiding light in my career and in my work.
Hayley: That's beautiful. I love, also, women supporting women in that mentorship too, like that's extremely special.
Madeline: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that is a value to Stacey, for sure.
Hayley: Yeah. Amazing.
(Musical transition)
Hayley: Madeline, if you could make one change to the theatre industry, what would it be?
Madeline: Only one??
Hayley: Give us two or three! Wave your magic wand for us then if you've got…
Madeline: I think the biggest thing that comes to mind is how prohibitively expensive it is to see a show and it is to produce a show.
Hayley: Yep, you said it.
Madeline: If the cost of seeing a show was lower, I think that that's like the umbrella change. If it were not so expensive, I think so many other incredibly positive changes would come from that. More audiences - we would certainly get more people! Think about all the times that you've been like, “I just can't afford to go see that show.” Highway robbery. I say that to myself all the time. I'm like, I can't go see that show. Are you crazy? This is so expensive! Not only would we have more people coming to see theatre, but we would have different types of people coming to see theatre. People who maybe think that theatre is not for them in some way would say, “Well, I can take a chance. Maybe it's not for me, but I can take a chance and go see it, because the cost of this ticket is not prohibitively expensive.”
I think that people would produce more daring work if it were less expensive to produce. You know, it's such a financially driven space, and those things are very much connected. So if there's like one thing I could change, it would be that, because so many other things would change from that. The work being produced would be more daring, it would be more exciting, it would be stylistically, artistically more diverse. And I think the people coming to see theatre, you know - there would just be greater access to that. I think that's the most important thing.
Amy: That's a really, that's a great answer. Madeline, how do you think about balancing your creative work with the rest of being a human being?
Madeline: Amy, I think about this truly all the time. And this is actually a big theme in Double Helix, the choices that women uniquely have to make between their personal life and their professional life. You know, those are, at least for Rosalind Franklin, the two strands of her own double helix, which is, you know, the heart and the mind.
Amy: Ooh!
Hayley: Love it.
Madeline: And one of my hopes for the show is that people will leave thinking about - what are those two conflicting strands that are competing for their time in their own lives? And I certainly think about this all the time. It's something I'm trying to do a better job of, taking breaks from my work.
Hayley: Rest is hard. I say it all the time, taking a break is actually the hardest thing to do sometimes.
Madeline: It's hard. It's so hard. And, you know, I think intellectually, I understand that it is good and it is right and it is what we should do.
Hayley: And healthy!
Amy: And necessary!
Madeline: And yet, why is it so hard to step away from this constant - at least for me, it feels like just always trying to be heard and trying to get my work produced. My goal at this moment is getting produced, getting produced. And so it feels like any time spent away from that is difficult.
But I know in my gut that having a more balanced life is when I'm the best version of myself and certainly when I'm doing my best work. I think it's more difficult for women because I think the social expectations placed on women are so different. And, you know, it certainly is a big factor in my family planning. I very much want to be a mother and I would be lying if I told you that, you know, how my career figures into that is a huge part of that calculus. So I think it's very much an ongoing process.
But I think about it all the time and I do think, you know, kind of goes back to when we were talking about what success is - I think of my art as so important, but I do think at the end of the day, it's our eulogy qualities more so than our resume qualities that are what matter. And at the end of the day, I guess it doesn't matter how many shows you've written or how many Tony awards you have or don't. Those are the values that I certainly try to live by, but it's very much an ongoing project.
Hayley: It's hard though!
Amy: Yeah! But a worthy one.
Madeline: A worthy one, indeed.
Hayley: Madeline, if you could go back to the very beginning and tell little Madeline something, what's something that you wish you had known when you first started out in theatre?
Madeline: I think I would say keep advancing your craft. That's something that I am really committed to, is always working on craft. Maybe seven years ago or something, I was like, okay, here's the Madeline Myers way that I write, and that's all good and well, and I can just keep writing the Madeline Myers way. Or I can really commit to score study and listening and reading and expanding and growing what I'm doing as a writer. That has been a big part of my work. I hope my work has gotten much better as a result. I would tell little Madeline for sure to keep at that. And I hope that, in five or ten years and 15 or 20 years or however long I'm lucky enough to be doing this work, that it's still a kind of daily practice of mine, trying to just expand and grow my craft.
I also think I would tell little Madeline - who I very much still feel that I am that person - just to keep believing in the work that I'm doing, because that is the thing that always pushes it forward. And my lowest days in my work are when I don't have that belief. I think my best writing happens when I feel deep in my spirit and soul that what I'm doing is important and special and worth hearing and worth telling. And I think staying connected to that is everything. And I'm not sure that it gets easier as I get older, but I would look back at a younger version of myself and encourage her to just cling to that as tightly as possible.
Hayley: Yeah. And probably, too, to surround yourself with the people who also champion you. Like, to your point about mentorship too. I find at least for myself, when I lose sight and I lose confidence in what I'm doing, having those people around you who can be like, “No, you're really good at this.” Just to remind you.
Amy: Having people who believe in you when you don't believe in yourself, it's everything.
Madeline: It is everything. It is everything, I agree.
Amy: Is there some topic that is not being talked about in theatrical spaces that you wish was?
Madeline: I think financial literacy could be a much…
Hayley: That's a great one.
Madeline: …bigger part of this work, because it is really hard to make money in theatre. So much of theatre is not commercial, and writers in particular need to advocate for their work in a really specific way. The resources available, I think, to learn about how to advocate for your work, how to know when you're being paid fairly, I just think there are not a ton of resources about it. And I think for women in particular, learning how to advocate for your work is so important. So I think financial literacy is something that I would love to see as a bigger part of the conversation.
Amy: That's terrific.
Hayley: Madeline, I wanna ask you about what you're most proud of in your life and in your work.
Madeline: I'm so proud of Double Helix, I could burst. I cannot even tell you. I don't know how I am a contained human being. I think the show is going to be something really meaningful. One of the things - and I call this my side passion project, and my husband thinks I'm crazy ‘cause he's like, “Madeline, your whole life is a passion project! You don't need a side passion project on top of your passion project.” He's not wrong, but…
One of the things that I have always dreamed of doing with this show is using Rosalind Franklin's story to shine a light on women and girls in STEM today. We are working to partner with a couple of organizations that will allow this show to open doors and shine a light on the work that young women in STEM are doing, and I'm so excited about it. You would think I wrote this musical just to do that, and maybe I did. But it is really something that I hope to expand as the show develops on its journey to a commercial production. We're trying to have a science fair in the lobby of Bay Street.
Hayley: Oh my gosh, that's amazing!
Madeline: I think it's so cool.
Amy: That is so cool.
Madeline: I'm really, really, really, really proud of it. And I hope that there will be some other things to come out of that. But the show itself I'm so proud of, and then this side passion project of mine - it's something that I'm just so excited about. I'm very, very proud of this.
Hayley: It's amazing. And also just in terms of how you're innovating, in the way that we can partner - like, theatre can partner with other industries. I love the way that you're bridging this gap between these two industries that could really help each other in a way. So it's beautiful.
Madeline: Yeah! One of the things we're trying to do - we've had a couple of scientific advisors on the team, and one of the things that we're kind of in the process of dreaming up is doing some sort of celebration for what would be Rosalind Franklin's 103rd birthday on July 25th of this year. That would involve the show and it would involve a couple of women in STEM organizations. It would involve the scientific community that these advisors come from. That is not my community, and that's not my world at all. But these women who have been our advisors are able to bring their network, and it's something they care about in the same way. The same way we're talking about all the challenges that we face in theatre, they have also experienced in their own ways, and to really make it a celebration of work.
When we were talking about - what do these talkbacks look like? - I didn't want it to be like, “Oh, here are all the incredible roadblocks and obstacles that I've faced as a woman in science.” I want it to be, “Look at this incredible research that these women in science have done. Look at the breakthroughs that they've made. Look at the doors they've opened for other people.” So I believe it's Saturday, June 10th, we're having one of our talk backs, and then we hope to do another one in New York on July 25th, which would be Rosalind Franklin's 103rd birthday.
And, you know, Rosalind Franklin had a mentor in her life, a woman named Adrienne Weill, who was this French Jewish refugee. She fled France when Paris was occupied, and she came and was teaching at Cambridge when Rosalind was a student. There were two women's colleges at Cambridge at the time. One of them was Newnham College, and that's where Rosalind was a student. And she encountered Adrienne, who was just this dazzling woman. She'd never seen someone who was doing science the way Adrienne was. And it was like this major turning point for her in her life. And Adrienne was able to help Rosalind get her first job after she graduated, and connected her with the lab that she worked on in Paris. So when I think about that actual relationship and the show and how it can maybe play out in the real world, that's something I'm very proud of.
Amy: That's so exciting.
Hayley: It really is. Well, Madeline, is there anything else you wanna share with us, with our listeners?
Madeline: I just wanna say thank you so much for having me. It means so much to be able to talk to you all. I feel honored and thrilled. I'm very, very, very glad to be here, thank you.
Hayley: Thank you for your time and your energy. Madeline, is there anywhere on the internet that our listeners can find you?
Madeline: Absolutely! MadelineMyers.com. Single tickets will go on sale to see Double Helix at Bay Street on April 15th. So you can actually go to the Bay Street website. And you can follow @DoubleHelixMusical on Instagram or TikTok. And you can go to DoubleHelixMusical.com as well to sign up for all of the future things in the life of the show.
Hayley/Amy: Amazing.
Amy: Thank you so much, Madeline. It's such a pleasure to talk with you.
Madeline: Thank you both so much. I am really, really grateful to be here and to speak with you all.
(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!
