As a longtime songwriter, artist and musical theater enthusiast, JC Chasez knows the power of a good story that strikes an emotional chord.
That’s why he was floored when his friend and Golden Globe-winning musician Jimmy Harry showed him a theatrical adaptation of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein by his late mother, playwright Barbara Field. “What I found really appealing and very inspiring about the piece is her ability to make it more direct and accessible in terms of the emotion,” the *NSYNC star tells Billboard. “It wasn’t just about a big monster and this kind of, like, growling thing that I initially had the impressions of in films and when reading Frankenstein. I guess I was just young, and just didn’t really have the time to settle in and really dig into the material. Recently, I was able to spend some time with the material and really get a good read and a good understanding of how emotional it was.”
From there, Chasez and Harry took the story’s themes of love, responsibility, loss and the human condition and channeled it into a major creative project: a 16-track musical theater concept album called Playing With Fire, which adds to Fields’ theatrical adaptation that originally written as a play and not a musical. “I was a little bit apprehensive at first. It’s like, you start messing with somebody family,” Chasez says with a laugh of musically building off of Harry’s mother’s project.