Music Producing Team Stewart St John & Michael Plahuta Drop Lyric Music Video From THE GRIEVING PROJECT MUSICAL

2 • 06 • 24

Los Angeles, CA., February 6, 2024 – Songwriting and producing team Stewart St John & Michael Plahuta have dropped the lyric music video “Let’s Make A Deal To Heal”, one of the new songs from their work on The Grieving Project, a proof-of-concept multimedia musical rooted in “radical accessibility” from singer/playwright Lisa Sniderman. The video, conceived and directed by St John, was produced as part of an effort to help raise awareness for Sniderman’s online fundraising campaign for the project, which recently lost a major grant. The video can be viewed at the music team’s website StJohnPlahutaMusic.com

The Grieving Project Musical is a spoken word musical exploring mental health, transformation, identity, grieving and thriving in fourteen stages with a unique concept at its core:  the four lead characters only speak during songs until each finds her/his voice and sings. Playwright Sniderman has been working with Open Circle Theater, a professional theater in D.C. dedicated to promoting the careers of disabled artists, to turn The Grieving Project into a multimedia musical that simultaneously serves people in the audience and people who can’t physically enter a theater.

St John & Plahuta, composers on the Tara Tremendous feature musical with producer Marc Plat’s company, were approached by Sniderman to work on The Grieving Project in August 2023 and agreed to come on board as the show’s main musical composers. They were tasked with re-writing existing material and composing and producing entirely new songs selected for Sniderman’s “proof of concept” live event which is being directed by Suzanne Richard as part of an artists residency program at the Voxtel in Baltimore, Maryland beginning February 26th.

They also composed, arranged and produced the final demo tracks, hired and directed singers in recording sessions around the country, and prepared the instrumental tracks to be used in the upcoming live performance.

“Lisa’s vision to create a true community experience through the multimedia aspects of the show has never been done like this before,” said St John. “It’s an important, ambitious and complex project that can change the way people experience theater.”

“When Stewart and I heard the project had lost a $50,000 grant at the 11th hour, we wanted to do something to contribute to bringing attention to Lisa’s newly formed indiegogo campaign,” shared Plahuta.

St John, also a director/filmmaker, decided the way to do that was by producing a second music video from one of the songs they wrote.  “It’s a way to hopefully bring some more attention to this most deserving project,” he said.

The team settled on ‘Let’s Make A Deal To Heal’, a whimsical, 1950s-style musical number where Brandon – one of the four main characters in the musical – imagines himself and the other characters as contestants on a 1950s-era game show competing for a chance to ‘win a way to make the pain go away’.

“In the script, there’s this fantasy sequence where Brandon, who is grieving the loss of his brother, is flipping through channels and comes upon this television ad and it evolves into a song,” said Plahuta. “Stewart and I immediately thought the song should have a 1950s-gameshow feeling to really sell it.”

“The song depicts the absurd depths each of the characters will go to in order to win a chance to heal their bodies,” explained St John.  “The lyric video expands on the song’s game show theme with its retro feel and visuals.”

St John, whose mother has been bedridden with health issues and several failed knee replacement surgeries for nearly a decade, understands how important something like The Grieving Project Musical is for the world.  “We’ve all been touched in some way or another by grief, pain, loss and disability,” said St John. “That’s why I think it’s incredibly beneficial to be able to address it through a multimedia project like The Grieving Project, because music is like an invisible force that touches everyone everywhere… and often heals.”

Visit St StjohnPlahutaMusic.com to watch the video and get more information about St John & Plahuta, and visit TheGrievingProject.com for more information about The Grieving Project.