Play on!: An interview with Twelfth Night composer Be Steadwell

Blending genres from R&B and pop to folk and house music, DC-based filmmaker, composer, musician, and novelist Be Steadwell creates a sonic landscape in the 13 songs they are composing for Folger Theatre’s production of Twelfth Night. Steadwell’s work—whether composing for a Shakespearean play, crafting earnest love songs that speak to queer experiences, or writing a magical realism novel, Chocolate Chip City, about Black queer women confronting gentrification in Washington, DC—transforms personal narrative into a powerful artistic statement.

Read on to understand how The Cure, Elizabethan traditional ballads, the underground club scene in Berlin, and queer ball culture all inspire the songs for this production.

Twelfth Night is a very musical play and the director Mei Ann Teo has a specific vision for the world of Illyria. How are you bringing this all together? 

I began with Mei Ann’s sense of an underground dance club, maybe in London, and then added a little Berlin into this mix, overlapped that with Detroit house music, and then also added a little bit of a Renaissance traditional music vibe. I’ve been listening to beats from those different spaces and ended up with the sense of this is what the party sounds like.

The play famously begins with Orsino’s call for music: “If music be the food of love, play on.” How does that set up your choices?

Right now, Orsino is my favorite character, and that’s a big surprise because usually it’s Viola-Cesario, but in this production Orsino is kind of this Prince (the rockstar, not the royal) meets Lenny Kravitz figure. He’s a tragic, heartbroken rocker figure. There’s a little bit of 1980’s power ballad in his story, and so there are many different places that we can go with music. I listened a lot to Prince and The Cure and I found Orsino there, somewhere between these musical acts. During the first rehearsal, it felt like a strip tease, a slow two-hour peeling back of layers. That’s kind of the feeling that it gave me, and Alyssa Keegan is killing it as Orsino.

One of the other very musical characters is Feste, who traditionally sings almost all the songs in the play. How have you approached composing for this character? 

Feste is hard because they may be the most layered and maybe the most mysterious character in the play. I asked a lot of questions: What is this person’s vocal style? What are they thinking underneath the lyrics of the songs they sing? What’s the subtext of the melody?  The lyrics for the songs Feste sings all come from older folk ballads that appear in Shakespeare’s play, so these compositions are driven by the melodies and have less of a modern spin than some of the other songs.

Are there other characters who get a musical moment, too?

“Be Not Afraid” is Malvolio’s song that’s reminiscent of a 1980’s queer ball when the emcee talks this delusional confident trashtalk on the mic over a beat, like “Be not afraid of greatness” when Malvolio reads Olivia’s love letter to him. I learned very quickly during rehearsals that Nicholas Yenson (who plays Malvolio) is an incredible dancer. We’ve turned Feste’s solo “Come Away Death” into a song for Feste, Cesario, and Orsino. It’s a moment of falling in love and the music offers a deepening of this desire, and also a moment to really see the relationship between these two. Hearing them harmonize is just really gorgeous. What’s great about this cast is that anyone, at any point, can steal your heart and steal the show.

Do you have a favorite song that appears in the play that you are adapting for this production? 

There are two songs, both versions of “It Raineth Every Day.” I am most excited about these songs because they feature the whole cast, and so they feel thicker and bigger than the rest of the songs. The first version begins as a storm, a sort of ominous grief and the beginning of Viola’s story of loss, but then it ends in the second version as a wedding song. It’s the same song with a different tone and a different spin.

How collaborative is your process? 

Erika Johnson, the music director and percussionist, will do a lot more shaping of the sound, because she is playing live with the cast and working with them throughout the production. She will be drumming live and bringing heat and energy to the live production. Tony Thomas, the choreographer, is shaping the movement while we develop the music, so it’s very connected and layered. The sound designer, Justin Schmitz, has expressed very intentional plans for the sound design with characters stepping up to the mic and being on stage within the play. Altogether, it will be a really creative soundscape for this play.

Can you tell us about your composition process as a queer pop artist and what music influences your work? 

I grew up loving love songs, R&B, pop music, folk music, and any music that felt dreamy and very romantic, but I was also very aware of my queerness and my Blackness and a lot of the mainstream music does not necessarily speak to people like me. I felt compelled to translate a lot of these love songs from my own perspective, and I wanted to write music like that but with my own sort of spin on it. Writing queer love songs—writing love songs, period—just brings me so much joy, and even if it’s a sad song it makes me happy: it feels like a healing practice for myself to write it and then sharing it with others also feels healing. I specialize in earnest, cheesy love songs, which usually kind of fall into a pop and R&B, and I play some guitar, but when I play live I mostly create through vocal looping with a loop pedal and I compose for other instruments. Historically, I’m a big fan of Emily King, and I’ve been pretty excited about Chappell Roan—some of it is just undeniably good, Tierra Whack, Missy Elliot, and Little Dragon. Growing up, I listened to the millennial pop stuff, NSYNC and all those pop queens, while my parents who met in the town of Berkeley in the 1960s, would play Joni Mitchell, Nina Simone, Sarah Vaughn, and artists like that.