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Serious subjects may not seem like something to sing about, but musical theater has a tradition of tackling difficult subjects, from criticisms of racism in shows like “South Pacific” to more current shows like “Dear Evan Hansen” that explores themes touching on teen mental health, including social anxiety and suicide, and the importance of connection.Â
A new original musical, “Fading In,” takes on eating disorders from an unusual perspective, even urging the performing arts community to take a hard look at itself for how the disorders often affect dancers and actors.
The show was created and written by Stanford University sophomore Jessica Korobkin, and composed by fellow Stanford sophomore Lucy Chen. The Stanford Light Opera Company staged the show for the first time in late February, with Korobkin directing and Chen serving as music director. The show was a student-led production both onstage and behind the scenes.
“Fading In” takes a multi-pronged approach to exploring eating disorders, from the many ways that they can manifest, how they also affect family and friends of the person who has the disorder, and even how one might approach providing support for a loved one with an eating disorder.
Korobkin, a Human Biology student at Stanford, began working on the show during the summer of 2020, when she was in 10th grade. As everyone was isolating during the COVID quarantine, she turned to music for comfort. Although she doesn’t have a technical musical background, she has performed in musicals throughout her life, and has what she called “an ingrained love of musical theater, and during lockdown she just began singing to get herself through.
“Then I found out that my friend was, I thought, going through an eating disorder, and I was lost and unsure what to do. A big thing for me to cope with all that is just to start singing. So I think the first song I wrote of this musical was ‘Silence is a Rarity,’ because I was wanting it all to just be silent, but then it wasn’t,” she said.
This song became a kind of anchor for the middle of the show, opening the second act with a number that portrays various characters’ inner struggles.
“It’s just amazing how that song stayed prevalent throughout the entire process. I don’t think it’s really changed at all melodically or lyrically, because I think I came to that song and then I realized there was kind of a story there,” Korobkin said.
She began to build the musical that would become “Fading In” from the many songs she wrote during the quarantine. Korobkin found herself with over 20 songs for the show, which she initially worked on with musicians she hired online while she was still in high school.
“I had around four or five songs, and then I started kind of connecting them together in some way. I think I wrote a song about body image, and I realized that maybe the story could incorporate topics surrounding eating disorders and how that was an interesting view that hadn’t really been seen that much in popular musical theater, even though it affects so many people who are in musicals, right? It’s a huge problem for actors, for really everyone,” she said.Â
“Fading In” tells of Katie, a young woman who moves to New York City to attend art school. Katie is grieving the loss of her younger sister, Eve, a teenaged ballet dancer, who died of an eating disorder. Eve appears throughout the show as a kind of spirit. The audience sees her both as Katie remembers her and as a kind of presence that urges Katie forward.
Katie realizes that her new roommate, Avery, an actor, is behaving in ways she now recognizes as signs of an eating disorder. She struggles with how best to help her new friend.
Korobkin worked on the songs throughout her junior year of high school. The first version of the music was a piano score that became the basis for a production at her high school during her senior year, where she played Katie.
As she started her freshman year at Stanford, Korobkin realized she wanted to continue developing the show with a more professional score. She met Chen through an email she had circulated looking for a composer, and they have spent roughly the last year working on the musical together.
“I’ve been composing for a while and I am classically trained, but I also really like musicals. I think musicals are a great way of spreading stories in a way that classical music can’t do as directly,” said Chen, who is studying Economics and Music.
“In spring quarter, (Korobkin) introduced me to all of the songs, and I was amazed at how many she wrote. Yeah, I really loved all of them. And then as we played through each song, I would think about how I could incorporate different instruments, and also what themes we want to carry through each song or what theme could represent each character.”
A first-act song called “Butterfly,” which begins to reveal Eve’s story, has a distinctive, delicate motif that appears in some of the musical’s other songs. A butterfly is also a symbol that has larger meaning for the show, “chosen to represent the fragile, elusive nature of the experience of living with an eating disorder,” Korobkin wrote in the director’s notes for the February performances, which also noted that the butterfly is “a symbol often used in the eating disorder community to represent fragility, thinness and beauty. Yet, the butterfly also symbolizes hope, renewal, and recovery.”
“I remember us putting the butterfly motif into the first song, ‘Finally on my Own,’ and it was not something I even thought of, but Lucy put it in when Eve came on stage, and it was just so perfect. Lucy has just been awesome with incorporating those themes throughout the show,” Korobkin recalled.
Korobkin and Chen built a strong partnership over the last year as they developed the show together.
“Jessica and I agree that we both really love ‘Silence is a Rarity.” There was one time where, after I had worked on re-orchestrating the songs, we wanted to practice them together and just see if it matched with Jessica’s vision,” Chen recalled. “I remember we went to the basement of my dorm, and we played the song together and we sang it together. It honestly reminded me of back in the spring last year, when Jessica was showing me all the songs, and it was very new for me. But this time, I think it was much more familiar, because I’ve been working on them all summer, and we we both sang through that song and some other songs, and I think we just both got really moved by the music, because it’s always a really special process, when you finish writing something.”
While “Fading In” focuses on two characters with eating disorders and the prevalence of the diseases in the performing arts, it also highlights how people from all walks of life can be affected, as Katie finds a way to reach out to others and help Avery understand that she’s not alone.
“I watched a lot of personal narrative stories, a lot of YouTube videos. That’s kind of where I started,” Korobkin said of her early research for the show. “What really catapulted me into this research was, ‘how can I better understand my friend and what she’s going through?’ I wasn’t so uneducated that I didn’t know that eating disorders were a disease, but I didn’t really know the extent of the diversity of eating disorders, the extent of the different experiences people go through. So once I started watching these YouTube videos, I was actually just so pulled in by how vulnerable and how brave these people were being on the internet to share what they had gone through.”
Korobkin’ s research drew on expert sources as well. She consulted several doctors who reviewed the script before the production. She also focused on ensuring that she handled the subject with sensitivity and care.
“I think the biggest challenge is being worried that I wasn’t accurately conveying the subject matter, or appropriately conveying the subject matter. I spoke to a journalist who has written about glamorizing eating disorders in the media because I was really concerned. I don’t want to be promoting eating disorders — that was a huge fear of mine. I wanted to be doing it in the right way,” she said.
For February performances of “Fading In,” a representative from South Bay nonprofit Eating Disorders Resource Center was on hand with information and resources available to audiences.
Although there aren’t performances currently in the works, Korobkin said she aims to keep the show going and hopes to find an agent to represent it. She and Chen may be looking at doing a cast recording as well.
“We definitely don’t want it to end here. I think the show at Stanford has shown me that there’s something here that can be really special,” Korobkin said.
For more information visit bit.ly/fadingin
