Rhapsody on the Outlaw Ocean
William Segal wrote the music and lyrics of Rhapsody on the Outlaw Ocean. Also, as the project’s co-executive producer, he recruited and led the project’s seventeen performers, animators, and musical producers. A classically trained musician with undergraduate and graduate degrees from Stanford University, he has been working since 2006 at the intersection of rap and musical theater. His rap opera Outflow, inspired by New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina, was performed at Stanford. His musical Superhero Celebrity Rehab received a number of workshops and full productions spanning 2009-2019 in New York and Washington, DC, including a Best Musical win at the Capitol Fringe Festival in 2012. After Segal met Ian Urbina in 2017, Rhapsody on the Outlaw Ocean began as an idea for a five-song EP and grew gradually to its current incarnation as an hourlong fully animated film. In his work as a composer, and also as an educator, Segal is drawn to exploring new ways that language and insight can make unmanageable problems more manageable.
