“I’m at 54 Below right now,” an excited Tiffany Keane Schaefer, founder and artistic director of Chicago’s Otherworld Theatre, said via Zoom.
It was just a week before tech rehearsals for the remount of Otherworld’s hit parody musical Twihard! A Twilight Musical Parody, but Schaefer, also the show’s director, was in New York along with the entire cast of the show. From the lobby of the midtown Manhattan cabaret, affectionately known as Broadway’s living room, Schaefer panned her phone to show a Tony Award mounted next to her.
“This is where musicals get their start,” she said. “We applied and the one time slot they gave us was during our tech week. We were like, ‘Well, if this is our only shot, we gotta take it.’”
So Twihard tech week was pushed back so the cast could head east to perform a cabaret reading of the show in hopes of being picked up for a New York run.
“It’s been crazy,” said Schaefer. “People are flying out from Colorado to come see us here tonight. I just don’t know theatre fans like that—that are like, ‘I’m gonna drop everything and make sure that I can come and support you tonight, because we want Twihard! to go on Broadway.’”
Twihard!, which spoofs the iconic book-to-movie series based on the Twilight novels by Stephenie Meyer, had its world premiere in February at Otherworld Theatre in Wrigleyville. Initially scheduled for a four-week run, the show was extended due to high demand, and sold out 12 weeks of shows. Now the show is being remounted for a run opening on Halloween, with the potential to run through March 2025.
Schaefer originally founded Otherworld in 2012 with aspirations of combining her two passions—theatre and sci-fi—into theatrical experiences that explore the genre in front of live audiences. Schaefer, who graduated from Columbia College Chicago with a major in directing and a minor in science fiction and fantasy, said it took a year of fundraising to launch her company.
“Those first days were cringe-worthy,” Schaefer recalled. “We had a kegger, and we were like, ‘We’re raising money for the theatre, $5 jungle juice for everyone.’”
When Otherworld first created the Juggernaut Film Festival, now an international sci-fi and independent gathering, Schaefer described the event as “a little bit more elevated than a blanket on a wall and watching sci-fi plays with my college friends.” This year, the 10th annual installment of the festival featured more than 90 films from 22 countries.
The very first play Otherworld staged was a theatrical adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Schaefer was a big fan of Bradbury and said that one of his quotes—“Jump off a cliff and build your wings on the way down”—was an inspiration for her to start a theatre company.
Schaefer now describes Otherworld as a “science fiction and fantasy community center with a convention every weekend.” Though it’s not a literal convention every weekend, sci-fi fans often attend shows in costume and hang out in the lobby and bar chatting long after performances of shows like Oops All Bards, a D&D musical improv show, or Medusa Undone, a 2019 dramatization of Medusa’s origin story. “We are celebrating the stories that we love and sharing why these stories matter with each other,” she said.
Back in New York, at 54 Below, Schaefer was seated next to Brian Rasmussen, Twihard!’s composer. Schaefer originally stumbled into the idea of a musical parody of Twilight back in 2008, after the first film was released. A fan of the film, she happened also to be learning about melodrama in school, and thought the story in the movie could be staged as a musical.
“I almost thought that it would be better as a musical,” she said, “because the relationships are so heightened. You have your ingénue, you have your morally gray [character]. So I thought it could be a parody and we can acknowledge some of these more cringe elements.”
Even though she knew it could be a parody, the first song she wrote was “Sacrifice,” which she said is Bella’s “I want” song, and it wasn’t cringe or parody. Instead, it reflected Schaefer’s inner struggles during the time.
