The Failure Cabaret: a dark comedy from a real married couple

The Failure Cabaret is a dark comedy from a real married couple with the therapy bills to prove it.

Stephanie Dodd and Justin Badger use original music in The Failure Cabaret to tell their story of meeting in NYC, performing on Broadway and moving to a pretentious mountain town as Mr & Mrs. The show lurches between the silly and the funny, and the dark and the ominous. We spoke to the pair about married life, writing music and touring Tajikistan.

You met playing husband and wife in a play in New York and now you are married. How is real life marriage different to the one you portrayed in the play?

The marriage that we portrayed on stage way back in 2006 was highly dysfunctional and included things like adultery, ancient lies, and a possible secret child. Our real-life marriage can also be dysfunctional, but it's much less interesting. We're way too tired and busy for extra marital affairs. Neither of us is currently interested in having a child, much less a secret one.

We both struggle with our mental health, as did our characters in that play, but in real-life we have therapists to help us. Also, the marriage on stage ended when the play closed, and somehow, we've managed to keep our real-life marriage going for over 10 years.

Is there anything about yourselves that you haven't found a way to work into a song, but want to?

We were recently on tour in Tajikistan with the US State Department. While we were there, we performed for students from a community of people from Afghanistan who were living in a town called Vahdat outside Dushanbe. The audience was mostly teenage girls and meeting them gave me (Steph) this amazing feeling of time traveling because they'll likely be on this planet for much longer than me and they'll see so many things that I'll never see. I'm still trying to process that experience and spin it into a song.

You write your own music but do you write songs together or present them to each other when you've written them?

Our creative song-writing process has really evolved over the years of working together. Earlier in our relationship, we would be more likely to present each other fully formed songs. Over time, we've grown to trust each other more and can share partially finished chord progressions or half-baked lyrical ideas to work on together. It seems like our favourite songs we've written start from a chord structure that Justin has developed that has a specific mood. Then Steph can work out the melody and lyrics with those chords as a foundation. Truly, it just depends on how the song shows up for us. We work with whatever inspiration arrives.

What instruments can you play and how many are you bringing to Fringe?

Justin can play exactly one instrument - the guitar - and he will bring that to the Fringe. Steph can play many instruments quite badly - piano, flute, cello, guitar - but she'll only be bringing her accordion to the Fringe. She'll hope to play it as non-offensively as possible.

Is there a happy ending?

Our show has a hopeful ending. It might not be exactly happy, but it will likely make our audiences feel better about their own dysfunctional romantic relationships. We discuss all kinds of relationship and mental health issues in the show and the darker the material, the more jokes we tell. Our goal is to bring all these dark topics into the light in an entertaining way and have a good time while spilling our guts. We still have a solid marriage after going through all these difficult times, so we'll consider that a happy ending for now.