Bringing Broadway’s Macabre Musicals to Nocturne Theatre: Interview with House of Spirits’ Justin Meyer
For over a decade, Meyer2Meyer Entertainment has been haunting hayrides and summoning spirits for Halloween. Now they have a year-round venue where they stage sinister shows like Into the Woods and Jekyll & Hyde: The Musical.
Update: Following their Spring season, Nocturne Theatre is presenting Disney’s musical version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame in August.
Alternately fantastic and magical, bombastic and tragical, Broadway’s most sinister songs have been echoing through the rafters of the Nocturne Theatre this spring. Formerly known as the Glendale Center Theatre, the venue is now the home of Meyer2Meyer Entertainment, the company responsible for the annual House of Spirits immersive Halloween experience. Since taking up residence in the Nocturne, Meyer2Meyer has presented Haunted Soiree (a rebranded version of House of Spirits), Madame Scrooge (a musical adaptation of A Christmas Carol), and R Rated Speakeasy (a horror-themed party), along with less sinister entertainment for Christmas time (Vintage Cocktails and Holiday Jazz for adults and Reindeer Games for kids), followed by standup comedians (Adam Sandler, Hank Green) earlier this year. Their inaugural Spring season of theatrical productions features a quartet of Broadway musicals that lean heavily into horror and fantasy themes: Into the Woods and Jekyll & Hyde: The Musical completed their runs in March and April, respectively; Disney’s Beauty and the Beast is currently on stage; Cabaret is coming in June.
Meyer2Meyer Entertainment launched in 2017, but the company’s roots in the Los Angeles haunt industry extend back to 2009, when husband-and-wife entertainers Justin and Melissa Meyer got a gig working on the debut of Los Angeles Haunted Hayride. The couple became members of Ten Thirty-One, the company run by Hayride-creator Melissa Carbone, and went on to add their surreal spookiness to other Ten Thirty-One events such as Horror Campout and Ghost Ship.
Meyer2Meyer began by crafting promotional events for the entertainment industry and then the marijuana-themed Magic Bus Experience, which naturally made its debut on 4/20/2018. After Ten Thirty-One sold the Haunted Hayride to 13th Floor Entertainment Group in 2018, Melissa and Justin Meyer remained for one more season before leaving to create their own Halloween event, House of Spirits, in 2019. The immersive experience took the basic foundation of Rated R Speakeasy (a horror-themed popup bar which Meyer2Meyer had debuted that March) and expanded it into something much more elaborate: a full-blown cocktail party inside a haunted house, filled with costumed characters, scares, games, and lots of interaction with the ghostly inhabitants.
House of Spirits was such a success that it became Meyer2Meyer’s signature event. After a year off during the Covid pandemic, a new version opened in Los Angeles for Halloween 2021, while the original show was staged in other cities around the country. The pattern has continued since then, with new installments debuting in L.A. while previous iterations move to other cities. (During the 2020 lockdown, Meyer2Meyer offered The Bite LA, one of the most satisfying outdoor drive-through attractions at a time when indoor events were prohibited due to the Covid pandemic.)
Despite numerous off-season events, Meyer2Myer remained most well-known to the public for their Halloween attractions until they transformed the Nocturne Theatre into a permanent home for their own distinctive brand of ethereal entertainment. Now they are working to establish a year-round program of events: some old, some new; most – but not all – infused with the stylish strangeness of their Halloween offerings.
Meyer2Meyer Entertainment’s roster of personnel includes President Melissa Meyer, Creative Director Justin Meyer, Creature Designer Tanya Cyr, and General Manager Randi Stuart. During the run of Jekyll & Hyde, we spoke with Justin Meyer about the company’s history, taking up residence at the Nocturne, staging musicals in the round, and mapping out the future.
The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.
Hitching a wagon to the Haunted Hayride
HOLLYWOOD GOTHIQUE: Let’s start from the beginning: How did you and the team you work with get into the haunt business here in Los Angeles?
JUSTIN MEYER: My wife and I started off as performers. I was an actor and a singer; she was a dancer. We did a lot of like regional theater stuff: we did cruise ships for a long time, and special effects makeup was just a fun hobby of mine because I loved horror films growing up. I got super into special effects – Tom Savini stuff [the makeup effects artist for George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead among many others]. There was not a whole lot going on one October when we were living in Seattle, and we said to ourselves, “What’s a place we want to go visit and maybe snag some seasonal work while we’re there?” We tried Florida and Vegas, and we sent out some makeup effects photos to different companies. Ten Thirty-One Productions responded to us and said, “You have a job if you can be here in the next couple days.” So Melissa and I packed up our car and drove from Seattle down to LA. We didn’t realize what we were getting into, but Ten Thirty-One Productions had the Los Angeles Haunted Hayride – their very first season – and they had a huge billboard in the middle of Hollywood. We were like, “This is a lot bigger than we thought.” So we got in on the ground floor with Ten Thirty-One on that very first Los Angeles Haunted Hayride as special effects artists. After the first season, I started chatting with [Ten Thirty One’s owner] Melissa Carbone and Allison Richards, and I said, “I’ve got a few other ideas if you’d be willing to listen to some concepts for different storylines and cool things that we could infuse into this this product. They listened, and Melissa – my Melissa, Melissa Meyer – is a super organized human being, so she quickly became their COO (Chief Operations Officer), and I became their Creative Director.
That’s how we got into the haunt business. It wasn’t something we were necessarily looking to get into or something we’ve done for a long time. It was just something that we really liked. Horror has always been my passion, but it’s been sort of the background of things until it became the foreground of everything.
HOLLYWOOD GOTHIQUE: What would you say was your overall contribution then to the Haunted Hayride in terms of style or story or whatever the case may be?
JUSTIN MEYER: I think it’s all of those things. There was an initial idea of fun horror vignettes, but then I really thought that there could be an idea tying those vignettes together to create a linear narrative – if albeit a little surreal – and at least have some kind of connective tissue between the scenes. That was my goal for every particular season after that point. Then we focused on designing special effects that could be done night after night after night in an outdoor environment. These costumes and creature suits all had to take a beating – quite a generous beating – so it’s different than a film studio or film set where you get to have delicate makeup put on every shot, and it gets touched up between scenes. We don’t have that. This thing has to last all night long with a sweaty actor inside of it and make sure the actor is safe and doesn’t die inside of it. That informed a lot of how we started to design the shows and the characters and creature suits.
HOLLYWOOD GOTHIQUE: 13th Floor Entertainment Group purchased the Haunted Hayride in 2018, and after that season, you struck off on your own.
JUSTIN MEYER: We stayed in what we think of as a transitional season. We decided not to stick around after that. Melissa and I had launched our own company, Meyer2Meyer Entertainment in 2017, actually prior to Ten Thirty-One being bought out. However, we were doing things like film studios were contacting us to do promotional events; we were working with actors and building costumes for those kinds of jobs. Melissa and I also purchased a costume shop prior to that company buying Ten Thirty-One, so we were able to put all these things together, and in that moment we felt that was the perfect time to transition out and start our own thing. So we launched House of Spirits.
HOLLYWOOD GOTHIQUE: If I recall, the first public event out of the gate from Meyer2Meyer was the Rated R Speakeasy that preceded House of Spirits in March of 2019.
JUSTIN MEYER: Actually, our very first big public event was called Kaleidoscope Experience or Magic Bus Experience. It was a whimsical 420 event for adults right at the time when weed became legal in California, so we capitalized on that and threw a very trippy Alice in Wonderland kind of psychedelic experience. People really enjoyed that show. It’s just such a big production and it was so expensive that we put it on hiatus after two seasons so that we could focus on the Halloween attractions. But now that we own the theater, that show might resurface with a different twist on it – less 420 and a little more strange and whimsical. Probably cocktails [will be] more involved this time around just because that’s our M.O. now.
Taking up residence at the Nocturne Theatre
HOLLYWOOD GOTHIQUE: After doing several seasons of House of Spirits, you’ve now moved into a permanent location. What was the process that led you to make the leap into a venue where you need to be doing stuff year round in order to justify the property taxes and other expenses.
JUSTIN MEYER: We have been on the road quite a bit with House of Spirits. Trying to find different locations every single season, we realized how difficult that was and how challenging it is to be constantly moving this project from door to door. In some cities we were able to find houses that were happy to have us all year round because they really don’t book anything else in those spaces. But in Los Angeles a place gets booked up years in advance, so every location we found in LA we only had for like one year, and then we would have to move again. We were getting to that point where we really wanted to just kind of hunker down and have our own theatrical space that we could build into and have programming. We almost bought a place in Houston, Texas, and then things just fell through. We decided that we were going to see what else was out there, and when we were looking for locations for last year’s Halloween attraction, we found that this property management company was leasing the old Glendale Center Theatre. We said, “If you’re leasing the space, are you selling the space?” The company was willing to sell, so we took all the finances we were going to use in Houston and put it towards the old Glendale Center Theatre. Ironically, it’s only three or four blocks from the warehouse we’ve been in for several years. That’s totally serendipitous; we weren’t planning for that, so it felt like everything was happening for a reason.
Rebranding and resurrecting House of Spirits
HOLLYWOOD GOTHIQUE: The first event you produced there was basically House of Spirits rebranded Haunted Soiree. Presumably the strategy was to launch with a familiar event that would bring people in and make them aware that you had a new permanent location.
JUSTIN MEYER: Yeah. Our first goal was to say we’ve got this new place. Then we wanted to focus on rebranding the theater itself, because the place was known as the Glendale Center Theatre for so long. Three generations of a family owned this place before us, so the community knew it and knew the content inside of it very well. We wanted to establish that we were a different company, and they were going to be seeing a new and kind of different content than they were used to seeing. One of those productions of course is our Halloween attraction. I don’t know if people really even knew we were open yet, and we kind of weren’t as a theater. There was still more focus on our company’s seasonal content. Madam Scrooge is the show that we ended up doing at Christmas time that really rebranded the theatre as the Nocturne Theatre. That was the big reopening of the space for us.
HOLLYWOOD GOTHIQUE: How did House of Spirits get rebranded as Haunted Soiree?
JUSTIN MEYER: We were in chats with our marketing partner, and we needed to iron some things out, so each of us stepped away from the name and put House of Spirits on hiatus for a season. But we didn’t want to lose any of our steam and all the other markets we were in, so we relabeled it and relaunched it. We came up with new content for it, and we put it into our other markets as Haunted Soiree. We’re hoping that House of Spirits comes back this season. We’re in talks right now, so it seems like we’re getting close on that, and we will most likely be seeing House of Spirits resurface this October.
Singing A Christmas Carol in a different key
HOLLYWOOD GOTHIQUE: Regarding Madame Scrooge, Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is an obvious choice for a Christmas-themed play, but you didn’t present an existing adaptation; you did an original. That must have been a real challenge for your first full-blown musical stage show, with original songs and a gender swap for the lead.
JUSTIN MEYER: It’s funny because I’ve always wanted to do some kind of version of A Christmas Carol. Melissa and I tried to see A Christmas Carol a year or two ago and couldn’t get tickets anywhere. I said to Melissa, “This is such an old production, but every year you can’t even get a ticket, so maybe when we get a theater – if we ever do – we should consider A Christmas Carol because it sells out.” That became our plan; then when we bought the Glendale Center Theatre, we decided that was going to be one of our first things. We came to find out that they had a history of doing their version of A Christmas Carol for 50 or 55 years. We were their 55th year of having a version of A Christmas Carol in that space, so it’s again serendipitous. We were like, “Wow, this is funny that that’s what they were known for and that this is something we want to launch the season with.”
In terms of writing our own, I had taken a look at versions of it that you could license, and licensing fees are very expensive, even for A Christmas Carol. I thought to myself it [the novel] is in public domain. I could easily write my own version, take some classic Christmas carols and infuse them into a play, and it could be very easy for us to do. I work with my composer, Chris Thomas, who is a musical genius. It’s like working with Tanya Cyr on her creature designs. I am surrounding myself with these absolute crazy geniuses in their fields, so I don’t want to do something that is normal; I don’t want to do something that is common, that you can see anywhere else. We want to take it up to this next level, and our reputation for House of Spirits gives us that sort of background. I was like, “I want to make sure that we’re playing at that level for all of our shows,” so Christmas Carol had to come out swinging.
Chris Thomas and I wrote the musical. We didn’t start writing it until probably June; we had launched in December, so that’s a very fast turnaround for a full-blown musical. We think it turned out pretty great. We were able to work so speedily because I’ve worked with him now for more than a decade on Los Angeles Haunted Hayride and Great Horror Camp Out, and then our own projects, so he and I have a language we speak together that is very easy and very fast. When we come to designing things, it’s the same way that I speak with Tanya and all my artists. We develop this shorthand of how we communicate. We all kind of share the same aesthetic already, and so it’s easy to launch into these things.
HOLLYWOOD GOTHIQUE: Regarding music, it’s one thing to write the songs, but then you have the cast singing to recordings. With digital production nowadays that’s not the chore it used to be, but recording backing tracks for a whole musical has still got to take some time and effort.
JUSTIN MEYER: Chris worked very hard on the orchestrations. That’s what he does for a living – a lot of cinematic orchestrations for films. I think he’s got this very extensive and very fancy (for lack of a better term) musical kit – all these really great sounding instruments built into the computer programs. Once he builds sort of a bass track, to give that an authenticity you don’t get from a computer he brings in live musicians to play over certain elements. That’s how we can do these things quickly and a little more cost effectively. Then all the singing is live vocals for the show.
Bringing Broadway Horror Hits to Glendale
HOLLYWOOD GOTHIQUE: Having done A Christmas Carol, you launched your debut spring season with Broadway musicals. I wanted to ask about the selection process. My guess would be you were picking stuff that lent itself to your style – fantasy if not outright horror. Into the Woods, Jekyll & Hyde, and Beauty and the Beast seem like obvious choices.
JUSTIN MEYER: Yeah, we did a lot of research first and foremost about popularity of musicals. We needed this first season to be robust so that we could come out swinging and be able to continue forward with all the renovations and all the little things that we had to do. We needed to make sure that we could have a good season that helped us cover all those initial launch costs. The first and foremost thing was: Are these popular shows? Are these shows that people would want to see? Are they shows people have heard of? And then the second round of thinking was: Are they shows that we would want to do as a company? For example, and no offense to any of these other shows, but I don’t think I would ever want to do Legally Blonde or Mama Mia. It’ll be very long time before you see those productions come to our space, and if you do – boy, they’re going to be really different versions of those show!
But we knew that Into the Woods was a very popular show and that it has those elements that we could utilize: fantasy, creature design, fairy tale design. We could have a lot of fun with it, and it’s kind of a dark story. Then the same thing with Jekyll & Hyde, obviously a Gothic Thriller. In fact, we have taken it up even one more step to, in my opinion, turn it into a bloody horror show while utilizing the beautiful music of Frank Wildhorn. It’s just that our staging is a little more horror than thriller. I would say Beauty and the Beast is going to be the same thing. It’s going to be huge costumes, larger-than-life characters. It’s the Disney version, so we are going to stay true to the Disney show, but it is going to be our take on those big crazy costumes and designs. Cabaret – same thing. It’s going to be a really dark, edgy, fun, strange version.
All these things also need to fit into theater-in-the-round. There are shows and plays that we probably won’t do because of that element. It helps us in most ways; then in some ways it will keep us from being able to do certain shows. Noises Off comes to mind. That’s one of those plays where you need a front stage and a backstage; you’re not really able to do two sides at the same time. Shows like that will be limited, but other than that, you could almost do almost any show in the round, and it makes it a very different experience than anyone’s used to seeing in a proscenium style.
HOLLYWOOD GOTHIQUE: With these Broadway musicals, is your orchestrator doing the musical accompaniment in the same way he did for Madame Scrooge?
JUSTIN MEYER: No, actually, we license these particular productions through MTI [Musical Theatre International] or another company called Concord Theatricals. These companies provide performance tracks just like Madam Scrooge had; therefore, different theaters, who have different capacities and different capabilities – if you can’t do a live orchestra, you can get these production tracks. We learned a lot about the licensing world this season – that was the first time we ever had to really deal with it.
HOLLYWOOD GOTHIQUE: Were you surprised at the talent pool available in Los Angeles available for live musicals?
JUSTIN MEYER: Yeah, I was in New York City for many years; I’m from Vermont originally, but I lived in New York City for over 10 years. I auditioned and sang in the New York talent pool. Obviously, it’s the home of Broadway, so your competition out there was very stiff, and the talent pool was crazy good. Here in L.A. I hadn’t much experience with the musical universe; I only worked in the haunt industry, so that’s a different group who show up to your auditions. We weren’t really certain who was going to show up, and what I was expecting were maybe some haunt dudes who were pretty good singers with their local band, but I was shocked to find that actually we had over 400 people audition for just these four shows, and everyone – I mean almost every single person that came out – was phenomenally talented. We had probably 18 different people per role that could do the role. So many people are fit for these roles, but we only have so many spots to hand out. We really wanted to take that opportunity this season, casting a whole new crop of people that we’ve never worked with before. We’ve been trying to expand our troop, if you will, to this bigger demographic of new, talented performers – it’s great.
Taking the lead in Jekyll & Hyde
HOLLYWOOD GOTHIQUE: I have to ask you about playing the lead in Jekyll & Hyde. What’s interesting about that for me as an audience member is, obviously, every time an audience sees a show, they should fall under the spell it casts, but sometimes other things intrude. In this case, at first glance it’s like, “The guy that runs the theater has cast himself in the lead; this is a vanity project.” Consequently, there is an extra level of expectation* that has to be overcome by proving you have the acting skills and singing voice to pull off the roles, so the audience will realize that you were a great casting choice. In the process of casting Jekyll & Hyde, were you ever in any way at all leery of the possibility that people would look at the credits, roll their eyes, and say, “Dear god, I hope this isn’t a disaster”?
JUSTIN MEYER: Yeah, sure, and that’s my favorite thing. I hope that people do that and then show up, and I hope that I can live up to that standard to surprise them. I mean, this is what I did. My background was in vocal performance and acting for a long time. I worked on Off-Broadway shows; I worked in regional theaters, and I did a lot of cruise ships for years. So, when we got this theater, one of the first things I said was, “Well, I’m going to do shows that I also want to be in, but I’m not going to cast myself in every single production.” In fact, I’m only in Jekyll & Hyde this season, and that’s by choice. I did a small role in Madam Scrooge to kick it off, because being in your own projects is fun, but I also wanted to have the ability to watch these shows as a director and designer of the programs. That’s something I didn’t get as much of from Madame Scrooge, and I don’t get as much from Jekyll & Hyde. I don’t get to sit back and enjoy the whole thing, but Jekyll‘s one of those shows I’ve been in three productions of and never got to play Jekyll and Hyde, so this is a good chance for me to do it. I’m the right age now, and it’s a really good, challenging musical. It’s one of those that I’m excited to do it, so I hope people like it. But as far as casting goes, if someone walks in and blows me out of the water for whatever role I was thinking I would do, I would obviously give it to that person. I can happily step back and put myself where I feel like I’m needed. But this one in particular I was excited to do, so I’m glad it was a good surprise for you.
Footnote:
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For the record, we did not have this expectation. Before seeing the show, we had not examined the cast list or done any research about the musical, because we wanted to experience the production with no preconceptions. Only after the show began did we recognize Justin Meyer in the lead, and by then it was obvious he could sing.
Resurrecting Rated R Speakeasy
HOLLYWOOD GOTHIQUE: Since moving into the Nocturne Theatre, you resurrected the Rated R Speakeasy in January, then did a Valentine’s Day version in February. Is this going to be a recurring event there?
JUSTIN MEYER: Yeah. That’s a project we do with our good friend Graham Skipper. That’s a show that we use what we have when we have it to do it. It used to be at our warehouse back when we did it the first couple times. Now obviously with this space we wanted to bring it into the theater, and we amped it up, but we wanted to maintain that same vibe: still do all the vendors, still do all the aerialist performers and that kind of thing, as well as the horror movie elements and the wandering creatures. That is something we will continue to do for sure. Graham lives in Texas, so we have to coordinate a lot of schedules to make Rated R Speakeasy work. It also has to fit in with our scheduling of the theater, which is booking out quite a bit these days.
HOLLYWOOD GOTHIQUE: For people who haven’t experienced Rated R Speakeasy, if you describe it quickly, it sounds a lot like House of Spirits even though it’s really not except in a superficial way. So what would you say to somebody asking what’s the difference.
JUSTIN MEYER: We think of that show more like a giant industry party. It’s definitely geared towards the horror film industry crowd, though anyone can get a kick out of it. We design it to be essentially a celebration of horror movies, so you’ll get a lot less original content in that particular program and see more things that you love celebrated – from classic horror films all the way to very weird B movies that you’ve probably never even heard of. We have a screening room where films are playing all night long. We do cocktails. We have local horror artists selling their artwork, stickers, earrings and all sorts of cool stuff. We don’t take a dime for it; everything is for them. We don’t charge for the booth space; if we have space, we’ll bring you in. It’s just us giving back to the horror movie community and having a big giant party that celebrates that in all its glory.
Future of the Nocturne Theatre
HOLLYWOOD GOTHIQUE: After wrapping up your first Spring season with Cabaret, what are the long-term plans for Nocturne Theatre. I assume you will do more musicals, but there are only so many Broadway shows that fall into your wheelhouse. Will there be more originals or a mix of originals and other stuff?
JUSTIN MEYER: We’re still developing what our long-term plan is going to be for the theater. This first season is going to be a big test for us just to see what’s working, what’s not working, but I feel like we’ll always have a spring musical series. We will definitely always have House of Spirits and Madam Scrooge, so what happens in that middle time, the summertime, we’re still developing. I have ideas for summer concert series with bands and different things coming in. Maybe it will become comedy for the summer, maybe another immersive event outside of Haunted Soiree or House of Spirits. We might incorporate that Kaleidoscope Experience again. We’re still seeing what’s coming down the pike, but it’ll be theatrical productions, and in terms of a mix of original versus classic musicals, Chris Thomas and I are already talking about wanting to write another show. It takes a while as you guess to write these musicals and make them good and get them off their feet, and we got very fortunate with Madam Scrooge, which was a pretty good success right away. We’re hoping that we can do the same thing again, but we do have plans for original musicals peppering into this space. As soon as we get a solid footing, I’d like to see us do more original and almost experimental theater at times, as well as try new things and be a testing ground for new musicals and shows that could potentially be coming out. So, lots of goals for this place.
HOLLYWOOD GOTHIQUE: In between Haunted Soiree and the musicals, Nocturne Theatre has hosted other events, including standup comedians like Hank Green and Adam Sandler. Will there be other surprises in store for us in terms of what kind of things you’ll be presenting?
JUSTIN MEYER: We get a lot of bookings for the theater space, and a lot of those have nothing to do with our company or Nocturne Theatre, other than that they’re renting the facility. Adam Sandler did film his new Netflix special there, so we had a ton of really amazing A-list comedian celebrities coming in and doing some standup. We’ve also had Evan+Zane, Evan Rachel Wood’s band, play with a full orchestra. We had John C. Riley dancing around on the stage at one point for someone’s event. Adam Conover, Hank Green – it’s interesting that comedy is also becoming a big thing for the space. We’re hoping that we can continue to book out some fun big projects like that. Actually, one of the things I enjoyed the most that came through here was Japanese women’s wrestling. Believe it or not, it fits theater-in-the-round absolutely perfectly. They are super cool, really fun, very respectful; it’s a really great crowd, and it’s a really highly entertaining thing to see. We’ll be booking out some more of that stuff, too, so you never know what you’re going to see at the Nocturne Theatre.
Events discussed in the interview
Learn more about Meyer2Meyer & Nocturne Theatre at the links below
Hunchback of Notre Dame runs on select dates at the Nocturne Theatre from August 9 through 25. The address is 324 North Orange Street in Glendale. For more information, call (818) 839-0984; email info@meyer2meyer.com,or visit the official website: thenocturnetheatre.com.
