During his time at UChicago, Aaron Alon participated in University Chorus. Aaron continued on with his education to receive two more degrees in composition and is currently the Chair of Visual and Performing Arts at Lone Star College-University Park in The Woodlands, Texas.
What do you miss most about being a student?
As I live in Houston now, I do really miss the changing of the seasons in Chicago.
I learned something really valuable at UChicago that I've carried with me to this day. At UChicago, the music students weren't really separated out from students in other disciplines. I loved being surrounded by people in diverse disciplines, especially as my interests tend to be pretty vast. In my life since UChicago, I've worked hard to make sure that I didn't get lost in the potential insularity of the conservatory environment. Even to this day, most of my friends are not other professional musicians.
Tell us more about your upcoming musical premiere, The Chosen Ones?
The Chosen Ones is my new musical about a group of LGBTQ+ teens in a summer conversion therapy camp. A lot of my work originates in some sort of social activism. To engage others with a social justice issue, our best tool is to approach our fellow humans with how most of us tend to learn best, from storytelling. When I take on a new subject, I spend months to years researching it, and then work to crystallize that research into a compelling story that gets people to really think about the subject. I never want to be didactic and I'm allergic to two-dimensional villains. I always aspire to tell honest stories and let audiences respond to them, rather than asking them to grapple with some abstract notion of a social ill.
When I was looking for my next project, I took an interest in conversion therapy. "Conversion therapy" refers to a broad set of practices that attempts to "cure" or "repair" a person's sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. The practice is legal to use on minors in most of the world and in most US states. This is despite the resounding rejection of its premises and approaches by the major medical, psychological, pediatric, and psychiatric organizations in the US. I read a lot of testimonials and was given an opportunity to interview a few adults who had been subjected to conversion therapy in their teens. After a long period of research, I started crafting a story around six LGBTQ+ teens that are part of the same small group in a larger conversion therapy camp. The musical features only 8 characters: the six teens and two non-singing adult roles, including an "ex-gay" pastor who's the counselor over their small group.
Over the course of the musical, we get to know these eight people and watch what happens to them over the course of one summer at the camp. While this is a serious subject, there is also a certain joy that comes from isolated queer people finally being around others who are like them. The musical spans a broad range from the joyful to the tragic.
In January 2024, we presented the first seven songs from the show at a theatre complex in Houston during a performing arts festival. It was everything I could have hoped for. In that 30-minute preview, the audience laughed and cheered, but they also responded with quiet sadness and tears.
I've been working this year to record the concept cast album with a fantastic group of singers and instrumentalists, and we're on track to wrap that up by the end of the year for a release of the album in late 2024 or early 2025.
In the summer of 2025, Thunderclap Productions, a nonprofit theatre company I helped found in 2010-2011, will present the world premiere of the full musical. This will be the latest work in our John Kellett Memorial Series, which presents an annual production about LGBTQ+ people and the discrimination they face.
I struggled with my sexual orientation at UChicago. Thankfully the school invested robustly in mental healthcare for students and I was able to afford to see a wonderful therapist for all four years.
My therapist helped me discover my authentic sexual orientation and come to grips with being a gay man. Years later, I would volunteer for nearly a decade at HATCH, an LGBTQ+ youth support group in Houston. Hearing young peoples’ stories of their experiences before they made it to HATCH made me keenly grateful that I was able to come out in a place like UChicago and enjoy the help of such a gifted therapist.
UChicago also had an LGBTQ+ mentor program where queer students were paired with queer faculty or staff who could support them in their journey. I was paired with Sam Portaro, an Episcopal priest and former chaplain at UChicago. We're still in touch to this day and, in fact, he read an early draft of this musical and provided me with fantastic feedback.
Readers can learn more about The Chosen Ones at thechosenonesmusical.com and can find out about the upcoming world premiere here: https://thunderclapproductions.com/thechosenones/.
Are there any other projects in the future or past that you'd like to tell us about?
I have two other full-length stage musicals that haven't yet been staged. The first is The Great White Way: the Bert Williams Musical. It tells the mostly forgotten story of Broadway's first Black star, Bert Williams. His life in comedy, set against a time of anti-Black race riots throughout the United States, tells the story of the American actor W.C. Fields called “the funniest man I ever saw and the saddest man I ever knew.” You can stream the songs from that on all major platforms or learn more at bertwilliamsmusical.com.
I also co-wrote a new musical with my friend Russell Sarre titled MAD! It imagines a post-apocalyptic world where the only books to have survived are the first two editions of the DSM (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, sometimes called the "Bible of Psychiatry"). Taking these as holy texts, a world is created where the more diagnoses you have (the madder you are), the higher your caste. We hope to release that concept cast album on all major platforms in 2025. You can learn more at madthemusical.com.
I also have a YouTube channel that has almost 10 million views, thanks primarily to my first video, a humorous short about English pronunciation, which went viral. The channel houses comedic shorts about language, along with samples from my musical theatre work. You can find my channel at youtube.com/c/AaronAlon. I'm currently working on some new humorous shorts, along with a project using music and other arts to talk about chronic illness.
I have some other projects currently in the works, but nothing that's ready to be announced. I encourage those who are interested to follow me on social media. To my students' lament, I'm mainly active on Facebook. Please also visit my site, aaronalon.com.
What do you do to create a healthy work life balance?
I bought my first house in 2021 and since then, I've become an avid gardener. I've planted a pollinator garden. An assortment of butterflies, bees, and hummingbirds keep me company as I garden.
In the last year, I've also taken up bicycling and have become an avid listener to podcasts, especially those from The New York Times. I enjoy reading and have recently started listening to audiobooks as well.
I always find time to talk with and spend time with my friends and my boyfriend. I love to take in the arts, especially plays and musicals, as much as I can. I enjoy hosting game nights and singalongs around the piano.
The most important thing in my life is also the most important part of work-life balance for me, the people I've chosen to be in it. I have put together a family of choice that includes some of the most beautiful, incredible people I could have ever hoped to meet and ultimately, there's nothing more important to me.
What book are you reading right now or have read recently that you would recommend?
I just finished Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me on audiobook, which I highly recommend. The last novel that I read that really floored me was Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, and I can't recommend it enough either. The two writers struck me as having some similarities in their writing styles, because both of them write in ways that feel almost like prose poems. Their use of language is just exquisitely beautiful. I just started Ta-Nehisi Coates' new book, The Message.