Once upon a time...

In February of 2014, Kyle Acheson, Sam De Roest, and Jonathan Foster met at a bar on 46th street and Broadway - the heart of the NYC theatre district - to discuss creating a new brand of musical theatre: actors collaborating with one another to create musical stories with verve, wit, and a dash of theatre magic, all while playing the instruments themselves. Soon after, they brought on Corley Pillsbury, and the group immediately began working on What’s Your Wish?, gathering in apartments to brainstorm, write, and laugh late into the night. 

We have grown over the course of 3 years into a 7-member ensemble of artists who all share in every aspect and responsibility of the creative process – from writing the book and music, to directing and performing in the show, to crafting the props and puppets, to handling the administrative duties of a theatre company. 
 

As a group, we have written and designed 2 original shows, What's Your Wish? and Cruisical! The Murder Mystery Musical. Each project has a peculiar life of its own, and we try to honor that through a deeply immersive writing process. By working and re-working the script and songs, we investigate the boundaries and intricacies of our shows at each stage of development, whether a rehearsal, staged reading or full performance. Close and honest collaboration provides the insights we need to make the best show possible. Our multidisciplinary storytelling fuses the traditional mediums of theatre and music in nontraditional ways to create original performance pieces.
 

We are in love with the sense of play that we all inhabit so easily as children, but sometimes forget to access as adults. We built Thicket & Thistle on the idea that theatre is a place of shared imagination. We want everyone to feel that sense of play and excitement – we want to be magical permission-givers, reminding the inner child in all of us that it is not foolish, but truly necessary, to greet the world with a sense of wonder.