I can’t say strongly enough that what I am about to tell you just … never … happens.

And yet it … just … happened.

Back in 2017, a married Longmont couple with two babes in arms and many songs in their hearts – but no affiliation to any big-time national theater contacts – started writing their own musical comedy about the joyful foibles of parenting. (And get this: One of them is a lawyer.)

Fast forward to Thursday night, when Graham and Kristina Fuller were sitting in the largest off-Broadway house on Theatre Row alongside their two parenting prototypes (their children), watching their creative progeny, “That Parenting Musical,” enjoy its sold-out opening night in New York City.

Did I mention? This … never … happens.

“People write a ton of fantastic original plays that sometimes never get seen – and musicals are even harder because they are much more expensive,” said Town Hall Arts Center CEO Robert Michael Sanders, the developing musical’s original director. “It is truly such a unicorn to have any piece that was developed here in Colorado be picked up by a team of New York producers and then open off-Broadway.”

“That Parenting Musical” is a series of songs and scenes based on the Fullers’ own parenting experiences. It will be running in New York at least through Jan. 19, and eventually it will be made available for theater companies across the world to produce themselves.

“It’s very crazy and surreal – and both of us are big old balls of emotion right now,” Graham Fuller said just hours before the milestone opening. “We will be bursting into tears here at any moment.”

Peanut Butter beginnings

The love story of Graham and Kristina Fuller is as sappy as any Broadway musical. They met as students at Centennial Middle School in Boulder. Graham was already a performer with the Peanut Butter Players – a longtime professional children’s theater company in Boulder.

“I met Graham when I was 11, which is how old my son Daniel is now,” said Kristina. The pair sang together in the jazz choir at Boulder High School and remained “just friends” at CU Boulder. But when they both ended up at New York University for grad school, it was like … come on.

“The fates were no longer willing to be put on hold,” Graham said.

First came love. (They started flirting through the texting love magnet that was AOL Messenger.) Then came marriage. (They got engaged on the Brooklyn Promenade and wed in 2009.) Then came the baby carriage – first for Daniel, then for Sophia, now 8.

Graham went on to Brooklyn Law School and is now a civil-law attorney with Kottke & Brantz in Boulder. His wife started the Kristina Fuller Studio for the Performing Arts. And in 2017, they co-founded 19K Productions to develop and produce new musicals – which is also when they started writing their own.

“This began when we realized there weren’t really any musicals out there about this specific stage of life that we thought would be fun and entertaining – and that people would actually want to see,” Kristina said. “I mean, there are so many young parents at any given time. We thought, ‘How does this not exist?’ It felt like such a missed opportunity.”

Graham, a proud, self-described musical-theater nerd from age 5, was now nine years into his career as a practicing attorney in Boulder, and he was missing having a creative outlet.

“At some point, I was like, ‘Kristina, I think we should try to write this’ – and she literally laughed at me,” he said. Songwriting was not something they had ever done together before. “Right off the bat,” he said, “we had no idea if we were going to be any good at this.”

While they started with no expectations, they did have a dream – and it was an audacious one. “We wondered, ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing if one day this became an off-Broadway musical and just ran for years and years?’” Kristina said. “That was always a thing in our head. Like, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if it would pay for our kids’ college someday?’”

It just might.

The couple hooked up with Musical Director Dan Graeber, wrote a few songs and soon realized they might have the makings of the next “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change.” That’s a now 28-year-old musical comedy that shows relationships from first date to death. And when it bowed off-Broadway, it ran for more than 5,000 performances.

Birth at a distillery

The story of this musical, until recently titled “In the Trenches,” is one of creative perseverance. Sanders was brought on as director to oversee the musical’s growth chart while noted choreographer Jessica Hindsley joined a growing team of Colorado actors, musicians and crew.

Eight development readings were held around metro Denver from 2017-19. By then, the show had a 22-song score with titles like “Second Child Blues.” Workshop performances were presented at CenterStage Theater in Louisville and the Mizel Arts and Cultural Center in Denver. And the Fullers were absorbing feedback and making improvements along the way.

The big break happened when the Fullers were invited to present a concert version of the show at New York’s famed Broadway supper club 54 Below so that deep-pocketed national producers and scouts could take a look. That COVID-delayed concert, which came off in July 2022 with the all-Colorado team in full New York flower, made evident that the Fullers now had an accessible and easily marketable (and a bit potty-mouthed) musical that was shaping up to be a great date night or moms’ night out.

“We think it’s really relatable and funny, and will make you feel the feels as well,” Graham said.

One New York producing team that watched the 54 Below performance reached out, leading to a coffee date that forever changed the Fullers’ lives. Maxwell Haddad and Amber Coates of Ember Entertainment were interested. What sealed the deal was Town Hall Arts Center’s decision to give the musical its full, world-premiere staging in January 2023, directed by Sanders.

“When our producers flew out for the Littleton run and finally got to see a fully staged version with all the instrumentation, they saw what this really could be,” Graham said. “I think that’s when they fully bought in.”

That’s also when the New York producers do what New York producers do: They brought in their own cast and creative team – which was hard, but everyone knew it was coming. They also gave the show a new name, which the Fullers were cool about.

“We’ve always known the show needed a better title,” Kristina said. “‘In the Trenches’ makes people think of World War I.” Haddad suggested “That Parenting Musical” as an alternative, and Kristina thought that sounded more fun. “It reminded me of how they named the ‘Friends’ episodes,” she said.

But one thing hasn’t changed since the musical’s earliest days. A dozen Colorado actors have now played its six roles at various times – including both of the Fullers. But one local actor overcame all the odds and won a spot in the New York cast beating out hundreds of national hopefuls. Her name is Vidushi Goyal, who a decade before had joined Graham’s CU Boulder acapella group, called Mile 21. Now she’s making her off-Broadway debut alongside seasoned Broadway pros.

“We had just started writing ‘In the Trenches,’ and we came across a video of Vidushi singing her face off at an afterparty,” Kristina said. “We were like, ‘How do we get her to sing everything we write?’ She’s been with every single iteration of our show since.”

How unusual is all this?

The New York production, Graham said, is easily “a seven-figure” endeavor. The Fullers estimate they have staked about $40,000 of their own resources along the way – and made it back. Now, just hours from the culmination of all their creativity, perseverance and risk, it’s still hard to put into perspective just how unlikely all of this is.

The Denver Center has delivered many new plays for the American theater, but it has both a mission and the financial apparatus to fund that development work. Musicals are a much more difficult dream to realize. Colorado’s runaway success story is composer David Nehls, who broke big off-Broadway in 2005. His “The Great American Trailer Park Musical” has not only been produced all over the country since, it now has a holiday sequel.

Nehls has a new creation with New York aspirations called “Miss Rhythm: The Legend of Ruth Brown,” a solo musical that had a developmental run at the Denver Center’s Galleria Theatre and is now running through Oct. 13 at Stages Houston. It features Denver actor Sheryl McCallum and director Kenny Moten. Colorado composer Denise Gentilini created a massive Armenian genocide musical called “I Am Alive” that was fully staged at the University of Denver in 2015, but that it never made it to New York just shows how capricious the industry can be.

The startlingly modest Fullers fully appreciate how lucky they are. When I essentially goaded Graham into taking a verbal victory lap over all this success, he merely said, “it took an immense amount of work, luck and perseverance, and there are so many other people who deserve all the credit.” before starting to rattle off the names of the 100 or so Coloradans who played some part in all of this.

“But don’t you want to do a quick Snoopy dance?” I asked Graham. He just laughed.

“We are,” as he puts it, “just very much ‘one foot in front of the next’ kind of people.” The kids started back to school in August. Fuller has a law firm to tend to. They will soon be back to their everyday lives in Colorado, while their stage baby lives on in New York.

“I feel like I very much have two separate lives right now,” Kristina said. “It’s pretty surreal to think that this thing is going to be here and running on its own while I have my Colorado life picking the kids up from school.”

But they will always have opening night. “There was just a great buzz,” Sanders said. “People received it really well.” And if they did, he added, it’s because of all the Colorado artists who helped bring it to life.

“What the New York producers first saw was all of the Colorado creative talent that helped support this story along the way,” Sanders said. “That is what sold it. And as for the actors, any one of our original cast members could have stepped on that stage last night and more than held their own.”

As for their musical baby, Sanders predicts a very quick growth spurt.

“People were leaving saying, ‘That was the most relatable thing I have ever seen,’” Sanders said. “I can see it doing really well at theaters all over the country.

“In the open market, I think this thing is going to be a juggernaut.”