Jorge Rivera-Herrans is an actor, composer, and musician who describes himself foremost as a storyteller. He is becoming increasingly well known for a new musical he has written and is widely distributing on social media called Epic.
Inevitably, Dorado, Puerto Rico native is being compared with Lin Manuel-Miranda, another multi-talented Puerto Rican composer best known for his musical, Hamilton. Epic is different from Hamilton, though. It is an online-only musical released in a series of nine installments called sagas.
Viewers can download the soundtrack on Amazon or Apple Music for 99 cents a song or listen on Genius, but Rivera-Herrans may be most visible on TikTok and YouTube. He is an example of a new kind of performer starring in the digital space.
The story of Epic is based on The Odyssey, Homer’s classic saga in which Odysseus, a Greek hero, faces many dangers and mythical creatures trying to get home to Ithaca after the Trojan War. After ten years at sea, he must also contend with suitors who threaten his wife Penelope and his kingdom. The strongest influences on the work, Rivera-Herrans explains, are video games and animation. The musical consists of 40 songs in nine “sagas” and the online community of fans is instrumental in spreading the word. Some fans have drawn animations of songs or created their own covers, with the blessings of Rivera-Herrans, who has also posted short-form videos showing the process of creating the work. It’s a new way of developing and distributing a piece of musical theater.
His page on Famous Birthdays describes him as a “TikTok star” and a “social media personality and TikTok content creator.” He auditioned actors and musicians for Epic on TikTok and has used the platform as a primary marketing vehicle for the work, supported by a community of hundreds of thousands of fans. There have been rumors of a staged version in the future, but Epic currently exists only as what the Michigan Daily describes as a “a social media musical.”
Earlier work
Rivera-Herrans planned to become a doctor when he was growing up in Puerto Rico, which suffers from a serious shortage of doctors. He shadowed surgeons during summers in high school, and went to Notre Dame to start his pre-med studies. But he had also enjoyed dabbling in theater in high school.
“It became so apparent because I would get very excited for rehearsals, and then I would go back to my pre-med homework and hate it,” he said to a reporter from his college’s student newspaper. “I had found something I really liked and felt I was good at, and my morale for my science work just kept decreasing. I remember the day I switched from pre-med to theatre. I was so excited — a little terrified, but also super excited.”
His family was shocked. Their reactions inspired Rivera-Herrans’s first publicly produced work, My Heart Says Go, which was performed at Notre Dame in 2023.
Jorge Rivera-Herrans began working on Epic in 2019, and early releases of songs had collected over 60 million views before the musical was completed. The final saga was released on April 26th, 2024.
