How To Say Goodbye Every Day is an original play with music. It is a meditation on loss, art, & moving forward, told through the story of the members of the fictional Totality Productions theater company, reunited 10 years after their artistic zenith and subsequent disbandment. hey attempt to stage an unfinished work as an in memoriam to a former company member & friend, who has recently passed away. 

 

We follow their struggles with love, reconnection, and grief during the pressure cooker of a condensed rehearsal process, as a mysterious narrator guides us through their journey, and our own. 

 

Suffused with memory, music, laughter, and heart, How To Say Goodbye Every Day is a semi-autobiographical journey.  This show-within-a-show is based on writer Johnny Castro's own experience with the loss of a friend and mentor in August of 2023, and a reflection of what the loss stirred up, brought back, and stripped away. 

 

The show includes a colorful pastiche of artistic and theatrical conventions. It includes gymnastic and daring movement sequences, a faux found-film footage component, a live band performing original songs written by Johnny Castro & their songwriting partner Angela Buencamino Phung, choral interludes, and a roller skating narrator. 

 

The original music is an ode to the time period in the show, the early 2010's, with indie folk arrangements lending a dreamlike quality to the show when combined with the movement set pieces and film components. Castro and Phung have crafted heartbreaking earworms with their brand of pop americana songwriting.