Summer Schlock is a seven-chacacter, ensemble-driven, backstage musical comedy set during one wild week at a summer stock theatre in that glorious year – 1977. Wow!

Kevin Carter has led an outstanding crowdfunding campaign to bring Summer Schlock to an NYC staged reading. We caught up with him and chatted about his partnership with director Andy Sandberg (Tony Award: HAIR) and the journey that's brought them to RocketHub.

What was the inspiration behind the musical theatre project you are currently running on RocketHub?  Why is it important to you?

Summer Schlock is important to me because it is the first show where I’m writing the whole thing from scratch. There is no source material, it’s not based on a movie, so it will all succeed or fail on my shoulders. This is also the first time I’m doing a reading without a theatre company (Ergo Theatre company produced the readings of my first two shows.) and I want to prove I can do it on my own and get the right people in to see it. It’s amazing when I’m the one putting the money together, I’m so much more gung-ho about making sure this reading succeeds and leads to the next step! Of course, I also have the talented (and Tony-winning) Andy Sandberg on board as director and he has such an amazing eye and gets the feel of the piece (even though I do have to explain some of the 70’s references from time to time…which doesn’t make me feel old at all!).

The inspiration behind the show was severalfold (if that’s even a word). After my last show, which was a big 19 actor, full orchestra, lots of sets, lots of kids, flying, etc, after all that, I wanted to scale it back. I’ve always loved backstage comedies. Noises Off, the first time I saw it, literally exhausted me from laughing so hard.  So I wanted to do something like that. I love and grew up musically in the 70’s (my first concert was Captain & Tennille) and a cast member once coined a word to describe my ‘sound’, “Kevinties”. And I love big, brassy broads and hunky shirtless men. So, put that all together and, voila!

That sounds like a wild ride. How has your experience been as a crowdfunding pioneer in the world of theatre - how are your supporters responding?

This is my first time ever doing anything like this and I’m really amazed at the response. The people from my distant past that just see it on Facebook and donate, people I didn’t even reach out to personally! And the size of the donations floors me. I was expecting lots of $20 and $50, but those are in the minority. I had to get over feeling like I was ‘begging’, and as you say on your site, make it feel like it’s giving people the opportunity to be part of something fun.

Crowdfunding is a very powerful mechanism. You've built a lot of momentum quickly. Any advice for Creatives looking to crowdfund a similar project?

Well, I have to give credit to my amazing friends and family first. And a big shout-out to my former co-workers and employers, they make up about half the contributors. But to start, I just followed the advice on your site. I reached out to the most likely supporters first and broke the emails up into groups; ‘co-workers’, ‘former co-workers’, ‘family’, ‘former cast members’, ‘friends’ and sent out tailored emails to each group gradually over the course of about 5 days. Then I’d thank the contributors on Facebook with a link to the site. Then about a week in, I sent a ‘progress report’ to all those groups, not asking for more money, just saying ‘hey look where we are’. I also changed the song link on the site so there’d be something new to come to the site for.

Thank you Kevin! We can't wait to see this hit the stage - get involved here.

-Vlad