From Tuesday, April 28, through Thursday, April 30, St. Olaf College put on the first full premiere of The Odyssey! The Musical!, a musical comedy adaptation of Homer’s epic developed by Carleton Professor and Chair of Philosophy Dan Groll and St. Olaf Professor of Music and Musicology and Chair of Music Louis Epstein. Various sections of the show were previously read and staged at Carleton College and Boston College.
Dale Kruse, Associate Professor of Practice in Music–Voice, directed the production at St. Olaf, and Shari M. Speer, Visiting Instructor in Music, was the conductor. It was performed by the 50 students in “Music 267: Advanced Acting for the Lyric Stage” at St. Olaf.
“I had, funnily enough, started reading the Odyssey before I found out about the musical. So, that kind of seemed like a sign,” said Alden Wright ’26, an English major at St. Olaf in Music 267, who plays Odysseus.
While he is a part of the St. Olaf choir, this musical is Wright’s first St. Olaf theater production. Now in his senior spring, he was interested in trying something new.
“I am in St. Olaf’s choir, and one of the directors came into a rehearsal and pitched it to us,” said Wright. “And I was like, ‘Alright, what the hell.’”
Despite this being his first show — and one whose rehearsals are limited to twice a week during a class block — Wright has enjoyed the process overall.
“My favorite moment in the narrative is when I finally get back to Ithaca, my last big solo piece is called, ‘My Old Friend,’ and it’s about me meeting my dog, Argos,” said Wright. “It’s just a beautiful piece and really melodramatic, bittersweet and it’s really sad because Argos dies at the end of the song. And I just think that it kind of sums up the entire play in this one song.”
Overall, Wright continued, “I think [Groll and Epstein] did a good job of simplifying the story and making it possible for it to be musical-ized. But even still, it’s a very long musical and very complicated.”
Groll and Epstein have been creative collaborators since 2018. Prior to writing “The Odyssey! The Musical!”, they produced four family music albums under the name of “Louis and Dan and the Invisible Band.”
“After the last [album], we were like, ‘This is great, let’s try to do something more ambitious!’ We had the idea of doing a story album, and The Odyssey seemed like a very natural choice because it’s so episodic, and it’s got monsters and whatever; it’s so great,” said Groll.
Groll and Epstein began writing the musical about two years ago, often coming up with song and plot ideas while busy with other parts of their lives, ranging from moments with family to their careers as professors. They sent voice memos back -and-forth to record ideas for melodies before meeting to go through their newly created work.
“The short answer is that we both wrote everything,” said Groll. “We work through what we have, whether one person came up with it, or we came up with it together. Then, it’s just, ‘Improve, improve, improve.’”
“A big difference between [a musical] and what we do as a duo is that, when we want to do something as a duo, it’s like, ‘Let’s do it!’ We find the time, we go to the studio and an album will come out of it,” continued Groll. “But with a musical, it is so collaborative that you need to find other people who want to work with you.”
In addition to the extra human resources needed to develop a musical, the financial need was also far greater.
“The two of us can go make an album for a couple thousand bucks, and we can play shows to earn money to pay for the album,” added Epstein. “But musicals — in the real world — are hundreds of thousands to millions. And so, we just don’t have the autonomy to see the project through in the same way.”
Featuring 33 songs, this show is the most complex project that Groll and Epstein have taken on so far. While in the initial stages of brainstorming, they consulted Classics professors at Carleton, including Professor and Chair of Classics Clara Hardy.
“[Dan and Louis] have this interesting challenge in that there’s some kind of horrifying stuff in the Odyssey, and it wasn’t so much that they would aim it at children, because I think that they aim it at everybody,” said Hardy. “But they didn’t want to have a bunch of the gruesome, nasty stuff in there.”
Part of Hardy’s role was returning to Homer’s Greek and evaluating what interpretations were feasible or related based on the original text yet would also be entertaining and enjoyable to watch in a musical format.
“I deal with the reception of myth a lot, and I can imagine a set of decisions that would alienate someone who really loved a specific myth — even if any given new telling is going to make its own decisions,” continued Hardy. “I think that if you are working from a place of loving the story, then it’s going to be great.”
After Groll and Epstein had written a handful of songs, they took them to Boston College as a part of their interdisciplinary artist residency in April 2025. There, a group of students performed these first eleven songs that came from various points in the plot, allowing Groll and Epstein to gain audience feedback.
Then, a staged reading of the musical was performed at Carleton last Fall Term. Students in “THEA 198: New Play Workshop” prepared the script and songs ahead of time, working under the direction of Associate Professor and Chair of Theatre and Dance Andrew Carlson ’99.
The staged read-through entailed reducing the musical to its most necessary elements in terms of set design, costuming and lighting. The actors prepared the songs beforehand, though they were still able to read scripts during the performance itself.
“The process was first doing some table work — reading through the script, understanding it, asking questions about it,” said Carlson. “Louis and Dan were sometimes in the room, so we could ask questions directly with them about what certain things were. And then, [we] started to develop the scenes and the music.”
From this staged read-though, Groll and Epstein were able to gain more feedback from the actors and audience prior to the St. Olaf performance, and their presence also allowed Carleton students to communicate with and learn from the show’s creators. This production allowed students at Carleton and St. Olaf to aid in developing the same story.
“The opportunity for Carleton students was really to be a part of the process with the creators of a musical that had never really been fully performed before,” said Carlson, “and to be a part of the process of trying to give life to some of these characters.”
