Hazel clutches a handful of white fluff, shrouded in blue light and the hum of the band. Behind him, an ensemble mirrors his pose, palms all open to the sky.
This abridged production of the musical “The Cloud Collector” is part of The Rockwell’s Work-in-Progress Showcase, a series that allows artists to workshop pieces for a live audience. The show tells the story of Hazel (Robin Elmer), a young transgender playwright who reconnects with his lost girlhood in a fantasy dreamworld.
June Beiser is the major creative force behind “The Cloud Collector,” writing the show’s book, lyrics and music. Her creation process began in 2020. “I started making these drawings by listening to some of my favorite songs,” Beiser said. “I would draw to the rhythm, to the music, to the beat, and just create these whimsical — and scary, almost — creatures, that all … had this otherworldly quality.”
Out of these artistic experiments came the story of “The Cloud Collector,” which Beiser describes as the “central myth” around which her other ideas would orbit. A boy (i.e., Hazel) carries a purple box up a mountain every day, and when he reaches the top of the mountain, a girl spirit named Nadrie (Megan Mathieu) flies out of the box on his head. One day, he finally decides to look at her.
“I wrote that story right as I was realizing that I was trans,” Beiser said. “Writing that story was really grounding for me because it kind of gave this mythic or storytelling origin to the way I was feeling.”
“The Cloud Collector” was shaped by interplay between visual, aural and narrative elements. “I would do songs based on drawings, and I’d write stories based on songs, and then songs based on stories,” Beiser said. Starting in February 2025, she began the concerted effort to make “The Cloud Collector” a fully-fledged musical. Beiser went back and forth about the story and script with friend Simran Israni, who became the creative producer of the musical and plays the character Willow.
Pulling the show together for this performance at The Rockwell was no simple task. The team was given less than two weeks’ notice for the date of their performance. “We just hit the ground running,” director, choreographer and cast member Katy Harnish said. She explained that they recruited people from all over the greater Boston area to make the show happen.
Meanwhile, music director, arranger and bassist Mark Lang came down from Philadelphia to join the team. “Katy was asking me for musicians to join, and I was like, ‘Well, I’ll come up and play bass,’” Lang said. He became the music director for the show just over a week before it hit the stage.
Stage manager Sequoia Eyzaguirre described the production as a “truly community-driven grassroots effort,” emphasizing the ways that the team supported one another through the show’s tight turnaround and long rehearsals.
The performance itself has a minimalist presentation, which lets the mythical and imaginative nature of the story take center stage. The cast is dressed plainly, and the ensemble is clad in all black. Beiser plays the role of Speckled Friend, a character who acts as both the story’s narrator and Hazel’s guide, wearing a gold jacket that marks her as part of the fantasy — a sort of conduit between worlds.
The music of “The Cloud Collector” is genre-bending, mixing plaintive keyboard with electric beats, the band swinging in unison with the story’s mood. Underpinning all of this music is a constant sense of unreality that is at once light and melancholic. Despite the cyclical nature of the myth presented in “The Cloud Collector,” the whole thing feels very ephemeral — and that’s what makes it such a haunting watch.
Elmer’s portrayal of Hazel is understated but animated by powerful vocals. The passivity of Hazel encourages the audience to project themselves onto him — and so he becomes a stand-in for us. Adding to this are Speckled Friend’s second-person narrations, which are at turns cryptic, funny and soulful. There is definitely the sense that we are on Hazel’s journey up and down a mountain, too — both with him and as him.
Given its avant-garde approach to both the traditional musical and the linear narrative in general, “The Cloud Collector” is not easily decipherable. “It can be interpreted in so many different ways. And I think that’s what’s cool about it. It’s allegorical,” Harnish said. That very allegorical nature allows the story to feel both free from and deeply aware of politics and reality. “This show deserves to have its time right now,” Harnish added.
For Beiser, “The Cloud Collector” looks to the personal as much as it does to the communal. “I want to, like, give it away to other people — trans people, queer people — who resonate with the story and can be healed by that,” she said. “That’s sort of my ultimate goal with the project.”
