The upcoming genre-blending “musical Lovecraftian renovation” game There Are No Ghosts at the Grand has announced Broadway actor and singer Alex Brightman as the voice of its lead character, Chris. Brightman has been nominated twice for Best Actor in a Musical at the Tonys — in 2016 for School of Rock and 2019 for Beetlejuice. He’s currently starring in Schmigadoon! on Broadway and voices multiple characters on the animated series Hazbin Hotel.
The reveal comes on the heels of the game taking the top prize among 12 submissions at the 25th anniversary of the Tribeca Games Festival in New York City. There Are No Ghosts at the Grand is the debut from British studio Friday Sundae, and I had the chance to play a 30-ish minute demo and speak with Anil Glendinning, Friday Sundae’s co-founder and managing director, at the Tribeca Festival ahead of their win.
Glendinning emphasized just how bootstrapped the studio is, which has allowed for a highly nontraditional but collaborative development process especially in casting. For the main player character, “we wanted someone who’s able to be sinister, but also funny and sincere, but also shady and a little bit of a liar,” Glendinning said. “By pure chance, we came across a clip of Beetlejuice on Broadway, and just on the off chance I thought, THAT guy would be really funny in the game. By pure luck, we were able to make a connection with him through some of the other video game people that we knew, but it was just pure chance. We’re big believers in providence.”
That scrappy approach applied to how they found most of their actors, some of whom are musicians and singers first. Glendinning said they’d adapt the game’s characters to the performers themselves, including each of the leitmotifs. “It actually comes from the style of music they naturally perform,” he said. “We would alter characters based on the actors and musicians we were working with. There’s a lot of different influences that come into making this unique collaborative blend we created, rather than coming from the auteur perspective where there’s a singular genesis and a unified vision. It’s very much a collective effort with a small group of artists, musicians, developers, and writers to put something together, and I think that’s why it feels so eclectic.
Friday Sundae didn’t set out to make a musical-forward game, but the songs “spoke so much about the characters as well as our multicultural cast,” Glendinning said. “Lots of games have lyrical soundtracks. There’s only a short leap from what South of Midnight did to what we’re doing.“
Glendinning said they treated this process “like a band.” They’d give their voice actors scripts as they were coming into the studio and encouraged them to improvise against Glendinning. “It feels smarter than it is in part because we are so flexible because we do use some of the lines they say when they think they’re not being recorded [laughs]. [Brightman] said, ‘If you want to use that then use that, that’s just me being me.’ We were like, ‘You just be you.’”
“The only thing we’re not allowed to use is when they start swearing because we’re aiming for a teen rating,” Glendinning said.
There Are No Ghost at the Grand is available to play as a demo on Steam now and is expected to come out later this year on PC and Xbox.
Leanne Butkovic (she/they) is an Editorial Project Manager at IGN, where they’ve also written about TV, movies, and games.