Midnight Channel: The Musical
| Fanwork | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Persona 4 Musical, Midnight Channel: The Musical |
| Creator: | Gina and Jake Smith |
| Date(s): | 2012 |
| Medium: | Musical theater |
| Fandom: | Persona 4 |
| External Links: | Midnight Channel: The Musical Soundtrack |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Midnight Channel: The Musical is the musical adaptation of the video game Persona 4, and was created by the brother-and-sister duo of Gina and Jake Smith in late 2012.
Development
The musical started as a joke between Gina and Jake while they first played Persona 4, Jake spoke of the musical's origin on the project's now defunct forums:
I've always been a musician, it's been my passion my entire life, and one day while playing Persona 4, during a loading screen, Gina (my sister) and I started singing random songs about "Adachi The Cabbage Man" and "Bufula being not as great as Mabufula." After joking for awhile, we started to actually talk about how cool a Persona 4 Musical would be, and VOILA!!! 3 Years later, you see what has become of our little joke :D [1]
By 2014, much of the musical was completed, including the script and a vast majority of the songs in the show. Many of these tracks were put onto the project's Tumblr, and a read-through of the first two acts of script were recorded and shared online. The musical itself remained a close adaptation of the game; however, due to the limitations of compressing a 100+ hour game into a three-hour stage performance, as well as to make it more accessible to people who have not played the games before, several major changes were made to the plot.
The show was planned to be performed in Atlanta Georgia, around June of 2014. Unfortunately, these plans for theater performances were halted when Atlus issued a cease and desist order on January 28th, 2014, and they were forced to take all work related to Midnight Channel: The Musical down. This was likely because Persona 4 already had a stage production in Japan at the time. Jake and Gina attempted to discussion a workaround with Atlus, but no such compromise was able to be made.
After months of attempted contact and discussion, Atlus ended talks with us about the Persona 4 Musical. We received an email from their business development team that stated that they refused to authorize the continuation of this project and that they would like to pursue the idea of a musical version of Persona 4 with actual professionals.So that’s that, then. We cannot express how much we have appreciated your kindness and active support of this project. It has been such an impossible joy to share our songs, words, and voices with people who understood our vision and cared about the source material as much as we did. That all being said, the show will go on. It is, however, a slightly different show, and it is going a rather different direction.[2]
The pair then aimed to scrub the songs they had created of any references to Persona so that they could be released as original versions that would not be effected by the cease and desist.[3]
In 2016, after the project had been presumed dead, 31 tracks of the musical's soundtrack were officially released.
Links
- Jake and Gina Smith's music blog
- P4M Updates
- Persona 4 Musical youtube
- Midnight Channel lyrics
- Concept art of Midnight Channel promotional materials.