Written by ALEC SILBERBLATT
Directed by JACOB JANSSEN
featuring
Kelli Strickland as Marci
Doug Mancheski as Richie
SEPTEMBER 24 – OCTOBER 12, 2025
A World Premiere!
“Ryan’s Pub, Trivia Night” at Third Avenue PlayWorks in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, is a story about trivia night, cheaters in billowy khakis, bosses with big watches, and bartenders in tight t-shirts, and about coming face to face with demons. Marci and Richie are the best trivia team this side of the Monongahela River and have they got a story to tell! So, grab a seat, pop a can of Iron City, and enjoy Alec Silberblatt’s quirky, distinctive storytelling!
Trivia for Tickets! Leading up to the show, TAP partnered with Cherry Lanes Arcade Bar, Stone Harbor Resort, The Thirsty Cow Taphouse, and Buzz Social to give away tickets for Ryan’s Pub, Trivia Night. (all the events have passed)
Design Team
Director – Jacob Janssen
Set Design – Alex Polzin
Costume Design – Kotryna Hilko
Lighting Design – Colin Gawronski
Sound Design, Original Score – Brian Grimm
Production Stage Manager – Kelsey Brennan York
Properties Master – Haley Cranstoun
Guest Artist, Percussion – Nick Lang
TAP’s Community Partner for “Ryan’s Pub, Trivia Night” is JAK’s Place, Lakeshore CAP’s unique local response to the shortage of mental health facilities and practitioners in rural Northeastern Wisconsin. JAK’s Place empowers adults with diagnosed mental illness as well as anyone with a mental health concern by building support and providing the resources to move toward recovery. JAK’s Place doors are open Monday through Thursday 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. and Friday 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Learn More or Contact: (920) 818-0525
Our Pay-What-You-Will Preview is the Wednesday prior to opening night at 7:30 p.m. Those interested in attending the preview to support this organization, may arrive as early as 6:30 p.m. on the evening of the performance for general admission seating. Space is available on a first come, first served basis. Donations may be made in cash or with checks made out to Third Avenue PlayWorks. Half of the proceeds will benefit this show’s Community Partner.
Larry Mohr Photography
Recording Session with our Guest Artist, Nick Lang
For years now, Jacob has been wanting to get his long time friend and fantastic Milwaukee based percussionist Nick Lang to be involved on a project with Third Avenue Playworks. When envisioning the music world and genre of this play, I knew it wanted to live in a rock territory. We’ve got a dive bar jukebox slinging hits from the 80’s, 90’s & today. Heck, just being set in a midwest dive bar made me think of my local dive, which always had metal playing. Plus, the story involves a deal with the devil, I mean come on – it’s gotta be rock’n roll baby. I knew that drums would really come in clutch as a centerpiece to the music sound that transitioned us between scenes. Jacob wanted short, snappy transitions infused with energy, and drums are perfect for that. So we reached out to Nick and he was down! I went over to his home studio in Milwaukee for a day and we had so much fun jamming out together on drums and bass. I really love playing this style of music, getting filthy mc nasty on the jazz bass is such a blast. Really made me want to play this music we created live!
Musically, the main concept for this show was to deconstruct Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin'” into its bits & pieces and rebuild from there. The song is mentioned a number of times in the script, and is a perfect theme tune or mantra for Marci’s journey to sobriety and conquering her demons. We started with having Nick record the main drum groove from the classic 80’s hit in a number of different styles and variations. I also transformed the original Journey song material through augmented chord structures, re-constructing the bass lines to fit my Devil Tonality (more below). We would shift back and forth between the original Journey bass lines, and the modified Devil versions, resulting in new chord progressions and melodic material. Jamming on different feels, tempos changes, cadences, articulations, dynamics, and exploring variations based on the energy of the moment.
Nick also put impletments on his drum kit so we could record the groove from Taylor Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do” (also mentioned in the script for a very pivotal moment), but have an industrial, distorted, and literally augmented sort of feel to the drums. Here’s the instrumental version of that remake, with me layering bass, cello, piano, and pipa lute parts on top (plus the bonus demonic version of Taylor singing remix too…)
We also spent time recording new original tunes that explored the devil tonality through a couple of different rock styles: a slow Elliott Smith distorted strummer, a dusty Desert Rock style featuring reverse pipa, some Drum’n Bass industrial glitches, in your face Punk 16th notes, and an open descending bass line with augmented swirlies into hell, you get the picture. Here are a few examples to check out:
Pipa Desert Rock mega mix in 4 parts
Elliott Smith Style, Slow Strum Distorted Version
Long Descending Augmented Devil Line Rock
16th Note Nasty Bass Chuggalug
Moody Dark Tom Exploration
Huge Thanks to Nick Lang for his amazing contributions to this show!!
Set by Alex Polzin, Larry Mohr Photography
Devil Tonality concept (augmented vs diminished)
I started diving into Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’ for note combos & chord progressions we could use. But I knew it would take some work to shift it towards a devilish soundscape or tonality. After some exploration I ended up playing Augmented chords for each chord of the song’s progression – and that is when it started to click for me. Traditionally, in western tonalities, the Devil is represented by the tri-tone. This is a diminished (lowered) 5th. For example, if your perfect 5th is from C to G, and you lowered that G to a Gb (or F#), you would then have a tri-tone, aka a diminished 5th. But as we all know, the Beast is also represented by the number 666. Well… when you stack augmented 5ths (raising the 5th instead of lowering it) on a cello, it sounds enharmonically as a grouping of minor 6ths… meaning that the chord structure is a stack of three minor 6ths, aka 666!! So this augmented chord ended up signifying the Devil for our show, 666 🤘.
Then it came down to which scale would I pair with the augmented chords. You can play a whole tone scale over any augmented chord and it will work. The whole tone scale is 6 notes comprising of all whole steps, or major seconds: 1 2 3 #4 #5/b6 b7 1′ (key of C = C D E F# G#/Ab Bb C). However, this scale tonality did not feel rock enough; sometimes it can sound too ethereal, or mysterious but in a lifted up to the sky sort of way. We needed something dirty and coming down from below. So I focused on a different type of augmented scale, still with 6 notes, but comprising of alternating 1/2 steps and minor 3rds: 1 b3 3 5 b6 7 1′ (key of C = C Eb E G Ab B C) . This version of a 6 note scale (666 🤘😛) unlocked everything I needed to Rock. All half steps and minor thirds just keeps lending itself to nasty patterns. So I spent some time recording ideas and parts on pipa and bass guitar in this scale; using rhythm, tempo, and rock feel inspirations from the Journey song, before coming to jam with Nick. Once we were together for the recording session, everything fell into place and it was a blast to jam out in this world. You can see from my notes here some of the tonal ideas and chord progressions that I was exploring (in the key of E)
The Jukebox!
In the script there is mention of a Jukebox in the bar. Hayley, our Props Master, was able to track down this fantastic vintage Wurlitzer jukebox for our show! (It’s got full stereo music y’all!) When we originally opened up the back panel to look at the insides, it reminded me of the original atomic bombs. A little brother to fat boy, the next machinery in line at the Manhattan project. After assessing the electronics on board (which did conveniently have an RCA input!) we decided to just gut all of the innards and hot-rod the wiring directly to the speakers. Better to pump in signal from a head amp and control that rather than try to rely on this old technology for the run of the show… if we could even get it working in the first place! And guess what, it sounds fantastic! I had a 9 speaker surround design going, but we specifically used the Jukebox on it’s own for 2 specific transition cues in the play. One of those transitions was a big highlight for me, I love how it played. Doug’s character goes over to the jukebox, punches a chunky button and Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” starts playing. The Jukebox it also is utilized as part of the speaker mix in the unsettling devil soundscape, specifically for all of the reverse pipa undulating in unsettling queasy dissonance, whenever the demon is present.
