Try to run! Try to hide! Someone lurks in the night tide…
Night Tide, a new musical inspired by the 1961 mystery-thriller B movie, tells the kitschy and compelling tale of Johnny Drake, a lonely Naval sailor. As he enjoys his first shore leave exploring the boardwalks, tiki bars, and beach parties of a spooky seaside town, Johnny meets Mora, a seductive and mysterious young woman who works in the sideshow as a mermaid. Johnny immediately becomes smitten with Mora, but he soon discovers that she may in fact be a real siren of the sea, and she may have lured her previous boyfriends to their watery graves…
Running time: 2 hours

The 2017 New York Musical Festival, which runs July 10 through August 6, will bring audiences four full weeks of new musicals, concerts, readings, and panel discussions. We spoke with Taylor Tash (book/lyrics) and Nathania Wibowo (music) about their musical Night Tide. What was the first musical that made you want to make musicals? Nia’s was Beauty and the Beast and Taylor’s was Sweeney Todd. Night Tide is about a mysterious young woman who might be a mermaid but also might be a total sociopath, so we were lucky to find source material that lent itself well to our combined aesthetic of technicolor whimsy through a sort of Grand Guignol lens. Describe the sound of your musical, it’s like _______ meets _________ The B-52s meets Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin: candy-colored and a little trashy on the surface but with moments of sweeping complexity and pathos. What about the movie made you want to turn it into a musical? Initially, we knew we wanted to do something kitschy with some kind of spooky, dramatic edge to it. We thought there was some fun potential in the story’s settings of beach parties, boardwalks, and tiki bars, and in spite of the ridiculousness of the situation the charact …Read more