Interview with Riley Elton McCarthy & Hope Johansen

Some productions make us laugh because they're absurd, while others make us laugh because they're painfully true. Bachelors of Fine Arts manages to do both, transforming the highs, heartbreaks and hilarious chaos of drama school into a sharp, heartfelt new musical inspired by real experiences. Ahead of bringing the show to this year's Edinburgh Fringe, I caught up with co-creators Riley Elton McCarthy and Hope Litz to talk about turning their own stories into theatre, balancing comedy with emotional honesty, and why every performer will recognise at least a little of themselves in this wonderfully candid production.

I'd love to start at the beginning. What first inspired you to write Bachelors of Fine Arts, and how much of the show comes from your own experiences?

Riley: Our lives after college took very different paths, and before writing Bachelors of Fine Arts, Hope and I hadn’t really been in each other’s orbit for years. I needed a stage directions reader for an industry workshop, and somehow we found our way back into each other’s lives. After the reading, we went out for drinks for the first time in years and caught up. It felt like no time had passed. We started talking about the highs and lows of our college experience, and it was surreal to realize that two people who had started their careers as collaborators were, almost a decade later, creating something together again.Then we started talking every day, sending voice memos back and forth about the strange, hilarious, and sometimes unsettling things we remembered from drama school. A few weeks later, we joked that our next life goal should be “taking a play to the Fringe about it.” That was probably more my idea than Hope’s, but thankfully she was on board. From there, we started shaping a story loosely inspired by our collective experiences. Then, as we were writing, two former college friends ended up in legal situations connected to events that began while we were in school, and suddenly the line between fiction and reality became even blurrier. The script started writing itself in real time. Maybe it’s a documentary now, I don’t know. Legally, we’ll say: come see the show and decide for yourself.

Drama school is almost legendary within the theatre industry. Why did you feel it was the perfect setting for a musical comedy?

Riley: We originally planned for it to be a two-hander play, but I’m getting my MFA in Musical Theatre Writing at NYU, so naturally, some moments started insisting they needed to be sung. I called Hope and said, “Let me make some demos and just trust me,” and thankfully, she did. The songs ended up capturing our experience in a way that words alone couldn’t. There’s something about the score that captures our youth and naivety, but also the heartbreak that comes from looking back at that optimism with a little more perspective. Performing it every night is an emotional rollercoaster because the music lets us access parts of the story that dialogue alone couldn’t reach. I don’t think the play version of this story would have been able to hold the same emotional weight.

Hope: I know it’s corny to say that some things can’t be spoken, and they have to be sung. It’s really true for this show. The comedy of what acting classes look like and the feeling of hitting rock bottom are equally heightened by the music behind them.

Every performer has at least one unforgettable audition story. Did either of you have experiences that directly inspired scenes in the show?

Riley: I’m so glad we had an audience of our peers who were alums of our college for one of our New York previews of Bachelors. They howled with laughter and understood and empathized with our experiences. We all went through it together. Our college no longer exists, so there’s a bit of a collective obituary happening with Bachelors as the death of an entire era of theatre training, and perhaps awareness that this behavior is still continuing into every generation. If you’ve been to a funeral, it’s got as much humor as it does sadness, recounting stories of joy and anguish equally about the deceased. There are so many stories in Bachelors that are directly inspired by our experiences, colleagues’ experiences, and the like. We share the good, and the bad, and the ugly. 

Hope: I have so many insane audition stories that we would need another act of Bachelors of Fine Arts to fit mine in. I did split my pants right before my audition for drama school, so I think the horror and humiliation of being a naive young actor still shine through in the show without explicitly sharing that anecdote onstage.Riley: We keep joking we’re gonna follow up with a sequel called Masters of Fine Arts about everything that came after we got our Bachelors and what happened to the people in our story. So much material we can’t fit in 50 minutes… but you still get a helluva story with Bachelors.

📷India Marin Stachyra

The musical is packed with comedy, but it also explores ambition and self-doubt. How important was it for you to balance the laughs with genuine emotional honesty?

Hope: At the end of the day, it all comes back to the saying that comedy is just truth plus pain. What was incredibly painful at the time is now absolutely hilarious, mostly because of how absurd it was. We’ve used witty dialogue and catchy songs to draw audiences into the bizarre world and culture of drama school, but I think it also speaks to the ways we learn to laugh at things that once hurt us. Comedy invites you in, and emotional honesty is what makes people recognize themselves once they’re already in the thick of it

You wrote this together. What does your creative partnership actually look like? Do you divide responsibilities, or is everything a true collaboration?

Riley: I’m so glad you asked this, because Hope and I were actually working on revisions together today. She might joke that our collaboration style is that she “yaps” and I “write it down,” but the reality is that everything is a conversation. Whether we’re on Zoom or on the phone, we workshop every line, every word, and every musical choice together.We take our collaboration seriously, even with all the fun we’re having along the way. We’re very intentional about deadlines, sharing the workload, and making sure every piece of the show is the strongest version it can be. Before Bachelors of Fine Arts, I had a career as a playwright, so I wasn’t sure collaborative writing would come naturally to me. With Hope, it really does. We had so many strange, hilarious, and unforgettable stories from college that we wanted to explore, and those voice memos we sent back and forth eventually became a piece of verbatim-inspired theatre with a musical twist. We’ve had a lot of “we could have been doing this together the whole time?!” moments throughout this process.

Hope: I am incredibly grateful to have a creative partner in Riley. I’m very much a big-ideas person who can get lost in my own thoughts without a clear path out. Most of my “yapping” ends in, “Do you get what I mean?” And Riley does every single time, and we zhuzh the text from there. Riley: I’m also grateful to have Hope. I don’t think I could have written this with anyone else, or had anyone more fearless on my side to do this together. We’re tackling some really painful material… and we do it with a lot of grace.

Was there one song that arrived almost effortlessly, and another that took far longer than expected?

Riley: The songs about our college boyfriends were actually some of the first things we wrote. “Milk Crate” and “Texas” let us poke fun at our questionable taste in men… and we’ll leave it at that.

A few weeks before rehearsals, we went into the studio to record demos for half of the score. There was one scene built around a ridiculous acting class “lesson” that I just couldn’t quite crack in the script. The next day, I wrote “Viewpoints,” which might be our favorite song in the show. We’re obviously biased, but we think it’s one of the strongest moments in the piece. The funny thing is, we don’t even have a demo of it because it took us the longest to write, and we’re still kicking ourselves about that. But maybe that’s fitting, because we think it’s a song that deserves to be experienced for the first time in the theatre.

Theatre students often put enormous pressure on themselves. What conversations do you hope to start around perfectionism and success?

Hope: As a recovering perfectionist, what I’ve learned is that being imperfect is way cooler and will take you to far more interesting places. Being perfect is actually incredibly boring. It doesn’t start conversations, it doesn’t take you down interesting paths in life, and certainly doesn’t give you good stories like the ones we share in Bachelors. The most valuable experiences I’ve had come from moments when things go wrong or when I’ve had no idea what I was doing. I hope the show, in its own strange way, can show that success and perfection don’t need to go hand-in-hand. A lot of being an artist is trying and failing, and pressure to be perfect isn’t helping anyone.

Riley: It’s not just theatre students putting enormous pressure on themselves. A lot of that pressure also comes from the institutions and mentors they trust to guide them through the industry. I think some of the expectations placed on young artists can be extreme and, at times, outdated. I’d be a rich person if I had a dollar for every “truth” I was told about working in theatre that later turned out to be inaccurate, exaggerated, or rooted more in fear than in preparation.Those kinds of messages can create a culture of people-pleasing, where artists feel they have to accept everything put in front of them rather than developing the confidence to advocate for themselves, set boundaries, and trust their own instincts. I hope Bachelors of Fine Arts starts conversations about redefining success: not just as achievement or external validation, but as having the courage to remain an individual artist in an industry that often asks people to conform.

I imagine audiences working in theatre will recognise a lot of themselves in these characters. Were there moments you almost removed because they felt a little too real?

Riley: I think some of that is inevitable with a story that is so personal and emotionally honest. What I didn’t expect was how deeply it would affect me to revisit these experiences night after night. Performing the show eight times a week requires a lot of emotional care and self-awareness, because we’re sharing stories I genuinely thought I would take to my grave. Hope and I have always believed in this story and in what we’re trying to say, so there was never a question of whether we would stand behind the work. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. I believe the emotional labor is worthwhile if the show helps even one young artist feel heard, seen, or less alone. I only wish I had found the courage to share these stories sooner. It’s never too late to start a conversation.

Every generation experiences drama school differently. What aspects do you think have changed most over the years, and what never changes?

Riley: Every generation experiences drama school differently, but I’m not sure the fundamental experience has changed as much as we think. I’m currently pursuing my second MFA, and my first MFA in Playwriting often felt like “BFA Acting 2.0”: a smaller cohort, but many of the same pressures and structures. I was a student before, during, and after the pandemic, and the biggest shift I noticed was that conflict and community moved online. Social media created new ways to connect, but it also made it easier to avoid difficult conversations and complicated the way artists navigate collaboration and accountability.

I recently spoke with one of my NYU professors, who also attended a “cut program” BFA in Acting in New York City. Despite nearly a six-decade difference between our experiences, we were struck by how many aspects of elite arts training remained the same. The biggest thing that has not changed is the power dynamic between institutions and students. Arts schools are built around mentorship, but they are also institutions with their own priorities, and without ongoing reflection, certain problems can persist across generations. The challenge is finding ways to preserve rigorous artistic training while creating healthier environments for the artists being developed. The institution is always going to choose to protect itself over a vulnerable student.

Musical theatre has such a passionate community. What do you hope audiences working in the industry will take away from seeing the show?

Riley: It’s really great you ask this, as neither of us have a Bachelors in Musical Theatre. That degree is an adjacent beast to our BFA in Acting backgrounds, but we both started as children doing choir and musical theatre, so we know just how passionate the craft of musicals is to so many people as well as ourselves. The problems in drama school training overlap no matter the specific path you take, be it you’re training as a stage manager, a director, an actor, or a choreographer… everyone has a story like this, or knows someone who’s been through this.The best musicals connect to you emotionally no matter the subject matter, so writing a musical about the theatre industry– and specifically, drama training– meant a lot of care went into the “why” and the “how” we present it. I hope that others in the industry will see parts of themselves in this story and know that they’re going to be okay. We are in an industry where shame, competition, and spite are motivators as much as they are destructive. Making art together shouldn’t have to be so painful.

📷India Marin Stachyra

If someone has never set foot inside a rehearsal room before, what do you hope surprises them most about life as a performer?

Riley: I think the biggest surprise is the amount of physical and emotional labor that goes into every aspect of performing. The arts are often dismissed as a “hobby” despite the enormous amount of work required to create the shows, films, and performances people love. A rehearsal isn’t just stepping into a room, saying lines, and pretending for a few hours. It’s building a character, developing stamina, finding emotional truth, and preparing your body to do the same demanding work over and over again. For performers who make this their career, the physical demands are often comparable to those of an athlete. The training, conditioning, and recovery are all part of the job. Don’t ask Hope and me about our pre-show routines or gym schedules, because we’re already exhausted just thinking about everything we do to keep our little musical running.

Writing a new musical is no small task. What has been the biggest lesson you have learned throughout this process?

Riley: Hire a music director sooner. That’s probably the biggest lesson we learned. We went into this thinking we could handle the music ourselves, but it quickly became a much bigger task than we anticipated. To be fair, this was our first time writing a musical together. Our backgrounds are primarily in playwriting and performance, and neither of us had been onstage in a musical in nearly a decade. We were definitely ambitious, deciding to take on a musical almost on a whim. The biggest thing we learned is that great theatre is collaborative, and knowing when to invite another artist into the process only makes the work stronger. A huge thank you to my MFA classmate and collaborator Jacob Richter, who stepped in halfway through rehearsals, music directed the production, and helped us refine harmonies and arrangements. He absolutely saved the day and elevated the show in ways we couldn’t have done alone.

If you could give one piece of advice to anyone about to begin drama school this September, what would it be?

Hope: Always bring a water bottle and know where the nearest bathroom to your classroom is, so you know where to cry safely once class is done. Jokes aside, my genuine advice is to try not to let drama school convince you that you are just one thing and don’t let a few adults’ hot takes define you as an artist. Take the feedback that you find helpful to heart and leave the rest at the door. Your career will be shaped by far more than the opinions of those grading you.

Looking back over the entire creative journey, what has made you proudest?

Hope: We tackle a lot of really sensitive material. I’m proudest of the fact that we can stand on stage each night and talk about these hard truths of life that once crushed us. These experiences could have stayed painful and private, but we’ve turned them into something communal and honest in hopes that someone recognizes a piece of their own story in us and leaves feeling a little less alone. It’s not easy by any means, even though we wrote the material, but I do think there’s a greater good in talking about the bad and the messy.

Beyond Edinburgh, what do you hope the future looks like for Bachelors of Fine Arts?

Riley: I hope we’ll be telling this story again very soon. I think we both want to write a longer version of the show and put in some of the cut music that didn’t make it in the 50-minute Fringe show. It’s impressive what we cover in 50 minutes, but there’s more stories we’re itching to share. And we hope audiences will want to hear them.

Finally, if I asked each of you to sum up the show in one sentence, what would you say?

Hope: Bachelors is a musical about drama school, bad boyfriends and even worse authority figures, and the radical act of still becoming the person and artist you always knew you could be in spite of it all.Riley: Bachelors of Fine Arts is a brutally honest love letter to every young person making theatre who dreamed of creating something great with their college friends; without censoring all the pitfalls, heartache, police reports, and emotional reunions that come along with it. 

Whether you've trained at drama school, dream of a career on stage, or simply enjoy smart, character-driven musicals, Bachelors of Fine Arts promises plenty of laughs alongside moments that hit surprisingly close to home. Beneath the comedy lies an honest exploration of ambition, friendship and finding your own voice in an industry that often asks people to fit a mould. Bachelors of Fine Arts is at the Edinburgh Fringe at theSpace @ Surgeon’s Hall, Theatre 3, 7 – 29 Aug (not 16, 23 & 30), 20.05 (20.55)