Orphan Black co-creator Graeme Manson reveals the odd origins of Blood Ties: The Musical and where Alison’s downward spiral leads next.
BBC America
Orphan Black has always been able to mine comedy from uptight clone Alison Hendrix (Tatiana Maslany), but the high-strung hilarity that dominated her Season 1 storylines paled in comparison to the insanely comical series of events that transpired when she was cast in a musical at her community theater at the start of Season 2. The idea had been swirling around the writers room since last year, but co-creator John Fawcett's initial concept was incredibly different.
"We originally conceived it as Grease and wanted Alison to play the role of Sandra Dee," co-creator Graeme Manson told BuzzFeed. "That gave us all in the writers room endless fits of laughter, but Grease was prohibitively expensive. We kept looking for other musicals, but the large ones just made no sense. It was coming down to the wire and it looked like we might have to write an entire musical when our assistant, MacKenzie Donaldson, said we should check out this little musical she was involved in producing and had taken on the road to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival."
Enter Blood Ties , a darkly comedic chamber musical about a group of women in a bachelorette party forced to cover up a suicide, written by Anika Johnson and Barbara Johnston. "It was a real jaw-dropping moment," Manson recalled of discovering just how perfectly Blood Ties echoed the struggle Alison was already facing in the aftermath of letting her presumed monitor, Aynsley (Natalie Lisinska), die in the Season 1 finale. "We worried a little bit at first that it might be too on the nose, but ended up deciding this twisted little show was on the nose in the right way," he said.
The decision to have Alison take over Aynsley's role, however, was a late addition. "Having Aynsley originally in the musical was a great way to doubly up the stakes because it meant that her murder is literally on stage," Manson said. "That's the fortuitous thing going on with this musical that eerily paralleled the storyline. It added this other layer of psychological complexity to Alison's slow unwinding."
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