Blaskie & Hochman
Book and Lyrics by Laurie Hochman
Book and Music by Bryan Blaskie
We have been writing together since 2016 after meeting at the NYU Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program. We both have a passion for innovative musical storytelling and finding hidden stories that bend the truth of the human condition. We’re especially drawn to what we’ve taken to calling “fantasia” storytelling, which is where we take a line of an article or a different perspective of an existing story and explode it into something bigger and more relevant than it had been before. Think of Wes Anderson’s Atomic City, James Ortiz’s The Woodsman, and most recently Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary!
Nothing to See Here tells the story of Frank Robinson, the man who orchestrated the 1925 Scopes Evolution Trial as a publicity stunt for his struggling community of Dayton, Tennessee, and his wife May Robinson, who wants to save her family from falling apart amid the chaos. Inspired by the first major anti-evolution case brought against a teacher, the story unfolds within a Vaudeville framework, including commentary through fast-talking double-act comedy numbers and standup comedy to “living tableaus” and ventriloquist acts. Even notoriously acerbic report H.L. Mencken arrives to uncover the reason why the infamous defense attorney Clarence Darrow and failed two-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan have come to this sleepy little town, all at the expense of one John Scopes. Listen to selections from Nothing to See Here.
Nothing to See Here was first conceived at the NYU Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program (2018) and has been featured in the New York Theatre Barn’s New Works Series (2021) and Choreography Lab (2022), as well as a developmental workshop in the Incubator at Rubber City Theatre in Akron, Ohio (2022). The show was also a Semifinalist for the O’Neill Center’s 2019 National Musical Theatre Conference.
Set between the tail-end of World War I and the late 1920s, Ghost Girls: An Undark Musical tells the story of the women who developed radiation sickness while working in an undark watch dial painting factory, exploring their fight through an undark, unforgiving, unravelling of events long-forgotten. Inspired by the story of the real Radium Girls and their harrowing losses and litigation, Ghost Girls is a story of love and hurt, of power and pain, of brother- and sisterhood. “No man is as strong as an army of women who say he’s wrong.”
Listen to selections from Ghost Girls: An Undark Musical.
Ghost Girls: An Undark Musical was featured in The Duplex’s In The Works Series (June and December 2019) before receiving a 29-hour reading in May 2022 and a concert performance at 54 Below in March 2023 for International Women’s Month, and was a Semifinalist for the O’Neill Center’s 2023 National Musical Theatre Conference.
Forty Elephants is a queer, feminist, anti-capitalist, dual-timeline, pop-punk heist musical comedy. Set both in 1789 and 1939, the interwoven timelines explore the capers of the real Forty Elephants gang as the thieves try to make the biggest score from a manor house in a disputed territory. Inspired by the real Forty Elephants gang that operated in London and the surrounding counties for over 200 years, the show follows this group of female pickpockets in a poignant comedy about the power of love, the social diminution of women, and the echoes of legacy.
Listen to selections from Forty Elephants.
Forty Elephants was first featured in the New York Theatre Barn’s Choreography Lab (April 2025) and received its first industry reading in September 2025.
Other Blaskie & Hochman Spotlights:
