CFAC Alum Joseph Phillips Reflects Upon His Experience Bringing His Original Musical to the Stage at BYU and Beyond
Joseph Phillips has always loved musicals, but it wasn’t until watching the Disney+ docuseries “Into the Unknown: Making Frozen 2,” that he realized that them himself could be more than just a hobby. “It occurred to me that there are people out there that are actually writing musicals for their careers and that I could do that,” he said.
As a commercial music major and theatre arts studies minor, Phillips had the opportunity to collaborate and make connections with musicians and artists from both the School of Music and the Theatre and Media Arts Department. Phillips graduated from BYU in 2024 and is now preparing for a masters degree in film scoring at the University of North Carolina’s School of the Arts.
During Phillips’ senior year at BYU in the fall of 2023, he took a playwriting class in which students were asked to write three ten-minute plays for an assignment. Phillips, however, expanded upon the assignment by deciding to write a full length musical, which later became “Fed Up!”
“It was a great class because I had never written anything before and had the opportunity to collaborate with other beginning playwrights to figure out what was working and what needed to change,” said Phillips.
The musical stemmed from an idea that Phillips and his brother had come up with several years prior, a silly story (reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet) about a FedEx worker and UPS worker who fall in love. In the summer of 2022, Phillips and his wife worked together as delivery drivers, which provided him with even more source material to draw from as he crafted “Fed Up!”
In the fall of 2024, “Fed Up!” was accepted into Shelley Graham’s WDA workshop, a class in which student writers, dramaturgs and actors come together to dissect the script and develop it even further. “You have the playwrights bring their work, and then the dramaturgs dissect the script and figure out what’s working and what’s not. The actors, who are in the class all the time, read the scripts, but everybody kind of plays the role of all three at once,” explained Phillips. “It’s helpful to get lots of people’s thoughts on it.”
The very next semester, the show was picked up by student director Lydia Cox, who got a production team together and put on the show. At this point, Phillips’ assignment from that initial playwriting class had become a fully-staged musical. “To see your play come alive with lights and costumes and real actors … it was just all really special and magical,” said Phillips.
Phillips had stayed involved with the show even after he had graduated from BYU, but with the collaboration of the production team, there were still some new and pleasantly surprising additions when he saw the show performed for the first time. “It was kind of like it was growing up and leaving me in a way — which is awesome. That’s what plays are meant to do,” said Phillips. “I felt like a parent when a kid goes to college in their own city, you know what I mean? You’re still around, but they’re making their own choices.”
Later, “Fed Up!” was accepted into a stage reading for Harrington Center for the Arts in a festival for new works for theater, where Phillips was able to receive feedback from industry professionals about the piece. “That was a really cool opportunity to get in front of not just BYU people and the people I already know, but people who have never seen it before and don’t know me,” Phillips shared.
As far as how the experience of bringing “Fed Up!” to life changed him as an artist, musician and writer, Phillips said that he has gotten less protective of his work and more open to developing it in collaboration with others. “Going through these classes with Shelley Graham and Alexandra Mackenzie Johns and others has been really helpful in showing me that it can change — and that’s what theater is,” said Phillips. “It’s changing, and adapting, and playwriting especially is just rewriting and rewriting and rewriting.”