HOW HISTORY, LOVE, AND GHOSTS INSPIRED A NEW MUSICAL

When Thomas Mizer and Curtis Moore first began imagining Triangle, they weren’t setting out to write a musical about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. What caught their attention was something stranger, more haunting, and ultimately more hopeful: the way history lingers in a single place, and how echoes of the past can shape lives in the present.

“It isn’t a show about the fire, like a point-by-point documentary on stage,” Mizer explains. “The musical is really about the way history repeats and how we all face the unknown.”

The seeds of the show reach back further than its authors expected. In 1992, Mizer wrote a song inspired by the Triangle tragedy. At the time, it was just a single piece, and after it was written, it was set aside and not looked at for years. While visiting Broadway Rose the opening weekend of Triangle, Mizer shared a fun fact: that original song is still in the show today.

Years later when Mizer moved to New York, the idea resurfaced in a powerful way. Walking through Union Square, he passed the old Triangle building. Though the fire in 1911 gutted its interior, the exterior still stands, now part of NYU’s science complex. Students of the same age as the factory workers still gather there, striving toward the future.

“The exterior is exactly the same, a hundred years later,” he recalls. “Seeing that shook me. Suddenly the ghosts and the present day felt layered on top of each other.”

Out of that vision came the idea for a show told in parallel: two love stories, separated by a century, unfolding in the same building.

For Mizer and Moore, story is always the foundation. “We always start with story. Always,” says Moore. “Whether writing a show or just a song, we talk about the characters and what they want long before we ever write a note of music.”

The result is a dual narrative: in 1911, Sarah, a Jewish immigrant seamstress, and Vincenzo, her Italian foreman, dream of a future together inside the Triangle factory. In 2011, a graduate student begins to uncover the ghosts of that history while navigating his own uncertainties about love and purpose.

Some of the show’s most powerful imagery came directly from history. Newspaper reports told of a couple seen kissing on the ledge of the Triangle building as the fire raged behind them—never identified, their brief moment of humanity still reverberates more than a century later.

“That image is so moving,” says Mizer. “What it says about love and care, the power of humanity even at the worst moments.”

The writers immersed themselves in research, but avoided creating a strict reenactment. They spoke with professors, rabbis, and students who work in the building today, layering lived experience on top of historical record. What emerged is a show that honors the past without being trapped by it.

At its heart, Triangle is about connection—across time, across tragedy, across uncertainty. Its themes are as resonant now as they were a century ago: workplace safety, immigrant struggles, sudden catastrophe, and the need for love amid it all.

“The thing you absolutely realize,” Moore reflects, “is that a Jewish immigrant seamstress in 1911 and a modern graduate student have a lot more in common than not. We’re all searching for love, safety, and meaning.”

Mizer adds, “Of anything we’ve written, Triangle is the closest to who we are as people.”

Triangle may begin in a fire, but it burns most brightly as a story of love—the kind that survives, even when the world changes in an instant.