New, Maine-Based Podcast Musical Seeks Crowdfunding

(Yarmouth, ME) How do you hold onto someone that you’ve barely touched? That’s the question put forth by Once in a Lifetime, a new podcast musical written and composed by two Maine creatives, Colby Michaud and Linda Hildonen of LinCo Media. Currently in production, Once in a Lifetime is a love story set in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. When the two leading ladies, Faith and Charlie, first meet each other, they are both convinced that this could be something different than either of them had experienced before. But when the stay-at-home orders are enacted shortly after their second date, they are forced to navigate their feelings from a distance during the most uncertain period in modern history.

The project, which features six original songs, is now in production, and an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to help cover the costs is live at Linco.Media. In addition to a campaign video, the website features a music video for one of the production’s most uplifting tracks, “Never Letting Go”, performed by Becca Lewis of Biddeford, who plays Faith, and Sam Dedian of Saco, who plays Charlie. Both videos were produced by Michaud’s video production company, Praxis Motion Pictures, based in Yarmouth.

The first project from the creative duo at LinCo Media to go public, the musical was originally conceived when Hildonen and Michaud’s plans to stage an earlier musical were interrupted by the pandemic. “We had begun negotiations with a local theater to stage Hopeless!, a musical we had written in 2019, and then suddenly everything stopped,” explains Michaud. “We knew we couldn’t sit around and wait for this pandemic to be over.” They began writing in April of 2020, and worked out the story and music as they grappled with which format for release would be the most responsible, in terms of production and public consumption. “We didn’t know when people would be able to go back to the theater, or even when it would be safe for a film crew to all be together,” says Michaud. The team eventually settled on the idea of releasing the musical in an audio format, to be performed like a musical radio play and released in six episodes through a podcast feed.

According to Hildonen, the musical they began was not originally related to Covid. “Colby had given me these melodies, and we were going in another direction. But then I found out a friend of mine had recently matched with a woman on an online dating site, whom he had become convinced was ‘the one’ without ever meeting, because of the pandemic. Everything he was going through really resonated with me, and I felt like it was a really interesting lens through which to write about what was going on in the world at large.”

The crowdfunding campaign will run through August 28th, and the pair expects to release the podcast by early fall. Updates on the project’s progress are regularly posted on LinCo Media’s Facebook page and on Instagram .