Episode One - Setting the Scene

April 19th, around four o'clock, outside Theatre Aquarius in Hamilton. jD is about to sit with the whole creative team, with no idea what's coming.

The first preview is three days out. jD bought a ticket for April 22nd thinking it was the premiere. It wasn't (musicals have previews, it turns out - lesson one of about 400). That's the spirit of It's A Good Life, five episodes, one a day, all week, from The Tragically Hip Podcast Series: one fan, uncool and underqualified, let into the rooms where "It's a Good Life If You Don't Weaken" got made. It's the first musical built from the songs of The Tragically Hip, and it's moving to Kingston.

Setting the Scene starts at the start. Where the idea came from, who said yes, and how a story about a man who can't go home again ended up in Kingston, of all places. But first, the question nobody wants to ask out loud: what is a musical, anyway? Jen Towndrow, Armand, and Autumn McDonald love them, and they make the case. One fan who walked out of a jukebox show wondering what just happened makes the other one.

Then the people who built it. Michael Rubinoff, the producer, knew exactly where he wanted to be if Y2K took the world down at midnight, and he knew one thing about this show before he had the rights to a single song. Jake Gold, manager of The Hip, had two conditions. A month later came a phone call, a radio story out of Afghanistan, and the song that played once the plane was in the air.

Ahmed Moneka shouted his love for an Ontario town off a bridge, and somebody told him which song to go home and play. Jesse LaVercombe found The Hip somewhere "in the ether" and came aboard late, which meant sprinting. Mary Francis Moore offered up the room at Theatre Aquarius partly so she could watch. And Brett Christopher in Kingston had been dreaming about this for fifteen years before anyone else got the rights. That news landed hard, at first.

Somewhere in all of it the story leaves Toronto for a smaller city with prisons on one side and universities on the other. You'll hear why that move mattered. And on April 23rd, at a talk in the theatre, somebody asks for the whole show in one word.

WHAT ELSE IS IN HERE

• What "the book" of a musical is, for anyone who assumed it was a book.

• The Zoom where Michael asked the band for three minutes before getting down to business. And what he told them first.

• Friends whose fathers came from Iran and Peru, and the band they learned Canada through.

• Lindsay Pereira's CBC story, and why Jake told Michael he had to read it.

• Kensington Market, Kingston, and why a small town makes you earn it.

"If I had one kick at the can with this music and there was one way I could use this music to tell the story, I did always believe that this was the story to tell." - Michael Rubinoff, producer

WHO YOU HEAR

• Michael Rubinoff. Producer of "It's a Good Life If You Don't Weaken," and the originating producer of "Come From Away." A fan first.

• Jake Gold. Manager of The Tragically Hip.

• Ahmed Moneka and Jesse LaVercombe. Co-writers of the book, ten years making theatre together, "King Gilgamesh and the Man of the Wild" included. Jesse on moving north: "Sometimes I feel like as an American living up here, it's like living in a really low-stakes Twilight Zone."

• Mary Francis Moore. Director, and artistic director at Theatre Aquarius, the National Centre for the Development of New Musicals.

• Brett Christopher. Managi