Interview: - Lyndsey Alexander & Lou Armistead - Parking Spot: the musical
Ticket link: https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/parking-spot-the-musical
Venue: Lime Studio at Greenside @ George Street
When: 7th - 22nd August (not performing on 16th)
Could you tell us a bit more about yourselves and what the show is all about?
We're Lyndsey Alexander and Lou Armistead married, and between the two of us the entirety of Blueberry Steamboat, our production company. Lyndsey is the creative producer, Lou wrote the book and lyrics, and the score is by Erick Eiser & Dash Hammerstein. We've built the whole thing from the ground up out of New York with an extremely talented company of six, plus a creative team we still can't quite believe said yes: Director Juju Jaworski, Choreographer Johnny Stellard, music director Ned Paul Ginsburg and stage manager Laney Schwantes.
The show itself: on one small block in Jersey City, the beloved retired mailman's private parking spot suddenly becomes available, and the neighbors lose their minds, politely at first, and then with reckless abandon. At the center is Will, a struggling writer convinced this spot is the one thing that will finally make his life work, and his wife Penny, a part-time art teacher, who's starting to wonder what she'd choose if anyone ever asked her. Fifty-five minutes, a completely original score, and it swings from full-tilt farce to a gut-punch you genuinely won't see coming.
The premise of the show is so wonderfully specific yet universally relatable. Anyone who lives in a city knows that finding a parking spot can feel like winning the lottery. What made you realize that this everyday frustration was the perfect idea for a musical comedy?
It started with a pandemic car. Lou grew up in New York City, which means he skipped the classic suburban rite of passage… the learner's permit, the empty parking lot, the white-knuckled parent in the passenger seat. When he finally got his first car during the pandemic, like half of New York did, he realized you're not just getting behind the wheel. You're entering an entire hidden civilization of motorists, with its own unwritten rules, its own etiquette, its own joys and heartbreaks. And that's the oldest setup in musical theatre: a stranger walks into a new world. Harold Hill arrives in River City. Annie walks into the Warbucks mansion. What if that new world was urban parking?
The other realization was that parking is perfect musical material precisely because the stakes are so small. We play one parking spot with the sincerity of a life-or-death epic, and that gap is
where the comedy lives. Musical theatre is people singing their most ridiculous convictions at full volume, which, if you've ever witnessed a real parking dispute, is already the genre.
You're coming all the way from the United States! Why did you absolutely want to bring the show to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this year?
The Fringe is where new musicals go to find out what they actually are. There's no hiding in a 65-seat studio at 6:30 in the evening. The audience is right there, and they'll tell you the truth by minute four. For a brand-new, fully original American musical comedy, not a jukebox show, not a revue, not one person and a keyboard. That's the most honest test in the world, and we wanted it.
Also, respectfully: Scotland does not get to feel superior about our premise. We've seen what's happening in East Lothian and North Berwick. You know this war. You've lived this war. Bringing a parking-spot musical to a festival that doubles a city's population every August felt less like a risk and more like reporting for duty.
What do you hope audiences will take away from the show?
That it was never about the parking spot. The show is really about what happens when you convince yourself that one thing will finally make you happy, a spot, a novel, a person's approval and what it costs the people standing right next to you while you fight for it. We hope people leave laughing, leave humming, and maybe leave asking themselves a quieter question about who's actually been doing the driving in their life.
Also: there is a man in a van with sock puppets, and he will break your heart. We stand by that promise.
You are a husband-and-wife team who developed this entire musical completely independently from the ground up, bringing a slice of Jersey City all the way to Scotland! What was the spark that made you decide the Edinburgh Festival Fringe was the ultimate place to make your world premiere?
The response to our developmental readings in New York is what convinced us to take it across an ocean. Jesse Eisenberg came to one and told us: "My child and I just roared with laughter throughout Parking Spot: The Musical! It's so charming and hilarious. It's not just a show we walked out humming; it was a show we were literally humming for weeks after."
We wanted Edinburgh to have it first. No audience anywhere will have seen this show fully staged before August 7. The Fringe is getting the true world premiere, which is both terrifying and the best part. If you're going to hand a brand-new musical to the world, you do it at the biggest arts festival on earth.
If you had to describe the show in only three words to make people absolutely eager to see it, what would they be?
Towing is enforced.
