“The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals” (part four)

Alright, let's finish this up! Paul is going to go rescue Emma (and also Ted, if he really has to I guess) from the musical zombies. Not yet knowing that Dr. Hidgens has voluntarily switched sides and probably infected all three of them already. Let's see if anyone makes it out of this story alive and not singing.


Emma and Ted wake up in a dark room somewhere in Dr. Hidgens' house, tied together back to back. Ted is badly hungover after having seemingly passed out on his own initiative. Emma, who was disabled by Dr. Hidgens' knockout drug, has fewer lingering effects. As they try to figure out what happened to them and how they got tied up here, Dr. Hidgens comes in. Seeing them awake, he commands Alexa to unlock the doors and turn off the electric fences.

He apparently wanted to wait for them to wake up for this, so he could explain himself to them before they're turned. That's...considerate of him, I guess.

His explanation is pretty much just what was already suggested. He thinks humanity is doomed due to war, climate change, etc, and thinks that rebirth into the alien hive mind might be our best bet for not only survival, but also improvement. Which...is hard to reconcile with him having predicted extinction-by-musical specifically all those years ago, but whatever.

He tells them that he woke them up so that they'd be able to make their final goodbyes to each other in their human state before getting used to their new selves post "apotheosis." He also bids goodbye to Alexa, who he tearfully claims to have loved as much as any flesh-and-blood woman, before ordering her to self destruct. When she fails to do this (and Emma nervously informs him that Alexa can't do that. Which also answers my question about whether Alexa is a normal thing in this world or not, lol), he flies into a rage and violently smashes the device. Then, after ignoring more pleas from Emma and Ted to be released, Dr. Hidgens reveals that biology wasn't his original passion, nor has it ever been his true passion.

Musical theater. Of course.

And he somehow predicted that musical theater would destroy the world, decades ago. Without also having predicted that it would be caused by aliens. And while simultaneously dreading humanity killing itself through environmental destruction.

He explains that the zombies grow a special cochlea-like organ that are highly sensitive to music, so playing some should attract them to this location from a good distance. He sits at an electric keyboard in a weirdly twitchy, semi-effeminate way, and plays the first non-alien song of the show.

"Show Stopping Number" is a blues-y piece whose very vague relevance to the situation at hand suggests that Dr. Hidgens wrote it a long time ago for a now-forgotten purpose. It's called "A Show Stopping Number," and it's about how popular it expects itself to be. I guess he didn't write it that long ago, though, since the lyrics include mention of Tumblr and "Hamilton."

There's one set of lyrics near the end that talks about uniting humanity in a theater with no exits, but the rather stiff way he works those words into the melody make it seem like that part was adlibbed by Dr. Hidgens for this particular performance. Nice touch.

After finishing the song, the professor starts rambling about the play he's been working on for the past several years, and then acting out a section of it. It's very badly written, transparently autobiographical, and about how much Dr. Hidgens misses his old college bros who he used to share a townhouse and have midnight orgies on the football field with.

Ted seems to be legitimately moved by this. Either attempting to humor Dr. Hidgens, or the hangover speaking, or just shit taste. Emma's reactions are more understandably disgusted. As Hidgens' performance moves into another musical segment, a pair of zombies enter the building and start backing him up.

I can't tell if those are supposed to be the Sam and Ted zombies (the former would have to have regenerated his post-transformation gunshot wound, but given the injuries they can heal *during* the transformation process that would hardly be a stretch), or just another random couple. This play really needs extras. Dr. Hidgens totally loses himself to himself, and starts referring to the zombies as his old schoolfriends and/or the characters based on them.

While the zombies and Hidgens are distracted, Paul makes it back to the house (just dumb luck that more zombies weren't attracted by the singing, I guess) and releases Ted and Emma.

This next exchange though, holy shit:

“PAUL: “We gotta get out of here!”

EMMA: “Do we take the chairs?”

PAUL: “Yes!”

TED: “I’ll grab the piano!”

PAUL: “Come on, hurry!””

And then they carry the props off the stage with them as the scene ends, all while continuing to act like this is a terrifying and desperate escape sequence.

Is this just a throwaway meta-joke, or is it part of the show's much bigger, more pervasive meta-joke? If the latter, then maybe it's a sign that they've already been infected by a slow-acting form of the virus that doesn't require you to be dead before turning you.

As they exist stage right, the zombies disembowel Hidgens and drag his body off stage left. Ignoring his pleas for them to just turn him quickly and painlessly. Jerks.

Next scene! Not sure where exactly Paul, Ted, and Emma are supposed to be, but clearly somewhere between Dr. Hidgens' house and the PEIP camp. Ted, visibly out of breath but seemingly unwilling to admit that, tells the other two to stop moving for a minute so that he can tell them something important. Um...okay? He starts blathering about how ashamed he is of having been a colossal jerk all this time, and how he's going to commit to being a better person if they survive the day.

Then a zombie jumps out of nowhere and tries to grapple Paul, and Ted runs away cackling about how he might be a BETTER person than before, but that that's a low bar to clear. Also, he snatched the gun that McNamara gave Paul and runs away with it without even trying to use it to help them.

That's...not very effective as a joke, considering that Ted is the one who knocked out Zombie Sam back in the previous act. He seemed braver and quicker to violent action than the others, aside from being a jerk, so...yeah, this doesn't land with me.

Questionable characterization aside, Ted reaches the PEIP field base just moments later, while Emma and Paul continue struggling with the lone zombie and seem to be slowly coming out ahead. A line of soldiers silently approach Ted, not saying anything, faces obscured by helmets and strategic lighting. Uh oh. I'm not sure how they're supposed to have gotten infected in the twenty minutes since Paul left the camp, but there's not much this could be leading up to besides that. Ted is oblivious, marching up to them and making obsequious declarations of how much he loves the military and how grateful he is to see them.

Anyway, the lights come on to reveal the rictus grin on General McNamara's face as he shoots Ted in the back. As Ted slowly collapses, the former general begins the next song, and the other soldiers join in.

The title of this one is "America Is Great Again." The soldier zombies do a marionette-like parody of a military march. McNamara sings some patriotic-sounding nonsense, including rhetoric about the two party system being a thing of the past now that there's only one way to be, the disposability of others, and the words "final solution." While the others chant and moan in the background in a way that's somehow both energetic and eerie.

...

So, this play came out in 2018, right in the middle of the Trump years. Whether this is just a one-off political dig or part of a major theme, I'm not sure.

Honestly, this play is one of those works that make me second guess my analytical ability. Is it packed full of complex themes and political messaging, or is it just a silly horror-comedy that has nothing to say at all aside from the occasional political gag? I'm having trouble determining.

...

Ted bleeds to death, and - after getting some kind of thing done to his face with McNamara's hand to infect the corpse - gets back up and joins the chorus. Paul and Emma, having seemingly overpowered their own lone attacker, reach the camp mid-song and walk right into the mob of infected.

They just barely manage to escape, thanks to the zombies' compulsion to sing and dance rather than shoot back effectively, with Emma shooting out zombie McNamara's arm to free Paul. The two of them flee to the waiting helicopter, which they probably know is likely not safe either but have no better choice than to board.

The helicopter pilot, of course, has her face hidden in the shadows, and isn't moving or speaking in response to their boarding. Surprise, surprise.

The actors (Emma and Paul's, and also the pilot's) do a really impressive job of pantomiming climbing, standing, and sitting inside a helicopter with its rotors turning, making their bodies vibrate and their faces screw up as if against a shaking engine. When the chopper supposedly takes off, they double down on this in perfect synchrony. Again, it's really convincing, and makes it somewhat less difficult to pretend that the mass of chairs they're sitting on is actually a military chopper. Just as they're saying a final goodbye to Hatchetfield below them and Emma is crowing in victory at not having to die there after all, the pilot starts singing a reprise of the coffee shop song.

Okay, yeah, this reveal would have been a million times more effective if I'd been able to tell by looking that that's Emma's theater bitch coworker in the pilot seat. As it is, you just have to infer it from her reprising the same song, and from Emma exclaiming it out loud a second later. It's especially annoying in this case, because the same actress just a few scenes ago had a really central role as Bill's daughter Alice, so if anything your mind would go to her first.

Latte Hotte (who has climbed into the chopper and put on a uniform in those few minutes since the soldiers all got turned. For some reason. Somehow) turns around in her seat and pulls a gun on them. They do a hilarious slow motion "nooooooo" and slowmow kick her hand upward, making her bullet go wide. Either due to the bullet hitting something or just to the pilot abandoning the controls, the chopper crashes.

When the lights come back on, Paul picks himself out of the wreckage. Emma, who he'd just been trying to get to put on her seatbelt, has paid the price for her reckless seatbelt-less-ness, and won't be picking herself out of much any time soon.

No way in hell is she getting to the mainland in her condition, even if there was any chance they could have to begin with. The only hope for her, and probably also for him, is to trust Dr. Hidgens' hypothesis that there's a central brain housed in the meteorite, and try to destroy it. Though I'm not sure how Paul is supposed to do that, if a military unit couldn't.

Paul picks up a brace of grenades from the helicopter wreckage, and he and Emma have another tender moment before Paul sets off on his desperate mission. Acknowledging his infatuation with her, and it now becoming mutual.

Unspoken is the fact that Paul has progressed a lot from the bland, self-absorbed asshole he was at the beginning of the play. That might have helped with this.

Their kiss is ruined by her coughing up blood, which is both gross and guiltily hilarious in the way it's performed and shot.

Then, we return to where the whole play started, with the zombies singing about Paul, the guy who doesn't like musicals, how much they hate him, and how he's inbound for the ruined theater to play his role as the star of the show. Revealing that the intro song was actually an in media res opening for the story, and everything after that until now was a flashback.

Clever.

Paul reaches the theater. I had to rewatch this part a couple of times before I noticed it, but he comes in through the actual theater main entrance and walks up the aisle, passed the real life audience, onto the stage where the meteorite prop is sitting.

This has to be a shoutout to the floor show scene in Rocky Horror, with the camera lingering over the empty theater seats as if wishing this movie were already the play it would soon become popular as.

This bit also makes me rethink my earlier assessment that The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals would be better as a musical movie than a live show. The meta jokes so far were mostly of the isolated gag variety, but this scene (and, retroactively, the framing device for the entire show) is built around fourth wall breaking. Maybe turning this into a proper movie wouldn't be such a straightforward improvement after all.

...

You know what might have been cool, but possibly too confusing to be worth it?

If they changed the actors for Paul and Emma after this point. Have Paul's actor play the occasional bit role in scenes Paul doesn't appear in (not that there are many of those, to be fair), and then have a brand new actor enter the theater now wearing Paul's outfit, carrying the grenades, and looking much more realistically grimy and beat up. The implication that everything up until now was the zombies putting on a reenactment of the story so far in the empty theater, and that they timed it so it would catch up to the present just as Paul was reaching the theater.

Like I said, maybe too confusing. But it would take the meta-ness up past 11, and also explain away the otherwise immersion-breaking reuse of actors.

...

Paul tiptoes up toward the rock, and is shortly ambushed by the zombified Bill and Ted. Followed quickly by Emma's boss, Paul's boss Mr. Davidson, and Dr. Hidgens. All telling him that he should give up; apotheosis is what everyone should be looking forward to.

“Mister Davidson never wanted to become an alien slave! He wanted to be choked by his wife!”

— Paul

Greenpeace Girl arrives next, challenging Paul about how she thought he didn't care about saving the planet. Oh, snap. Mr. Davidson tells Paul that there's no need for him to kill them and probably die himself in the process; they're sure he has a song in him yet. Once again, we have a "join us, Paul" song, albeit one with more overtly threatening lyrics and eerie music than the previous.

This song, "Let It Out," is musically strong, and the chanting chorus is very reminiscent of the previous military-themed piece. The lyrics are all to the effect of encouraging Paul to find that voice deep inside of him that tells him what he wants to live and be happy for, and then...submitting to it and giving up his free will. Kind of paradoxical.

He tries to use the grenades, but his hands start trembling, and his face flashes into zombielike grinning for a moment at a time before he regains control. He asks what's happening to him, struggling to keep his voice from falling into rhythm with their chanting. Dr. Hidgens explains that the theater is completely suffused with the blue shit's spores at this point, and the moment he entered it they started working their way into his body. Now, their singing and dancing will amplify the hive mind's signal, and stimulate his senses to hasten the infestation process.

I guess that explains how the soldiers got infected. And how the infection first made the jump from meteorite to humans.

It also might support my earlier suspicion that everyone has been *slightly* infected all along, if they breathed in a less concentrated dose of the spores just from being around the zombies all day. It's just being accelerated on Paul now, due to the aforementioned factors.

Finally, Paul begins singing a very Gollum/Smeagol-ish solo that forms the end of "Let It Out." Arguing with himself (or, with the infection that's become part of himself) about whether happiness is worth giving up one's personal integrity. Hmm. Again, this feels paradoxical, but on the other hand...hmm. One line of his "if I let it out, what will I let in?" is worth dissecting, I think.

In the end, though, he just...really, really doesn't like musicals. This last thought gives him the willpower to pull the pin on a grenade and drop it onto the meteorite. There's a white flash, and everyone pantomimes being thrown back by an explosion.

Silence. Darkness. But we still have seven minutes left, which is a bit much for just an outro and end credits.

Final segment starts with another, more modern sounding, radio newscast, this time from the local station of a neighboring city across the river. Another PEIP officer is seeing Emma off. The latter having just regained the ability to walk on her own power, and who is being given a new identity. I guess the late General McNamara wasn't the only one willing to make such merciful exceptions.

She's "Kelly" now. Which she doesn't like, but it's what she's got. Thanks to her role in stopping the infestation, she's being given a plot of land in Colorado she can use to start that pot farm she used to one day dream of running. Sadly, she was also the only survivor of Hatchetfield. Paul died a hero.

In unrelated news, a "Mister Ben Bridges" will be escorting her to Colorado. Uh oh. "Bridges." Helping things get across rivers.

Paul enters the room, looking alive and healthy. Uh oh.

She runs in for a hug, but then he starts singing about how great their new life together is going to be. She tries to run, but he grabs her hands and sings about how their future is "Inevitable."

Other familiar faces (and costumes) then appear. Along with the army nurse, who DOESN'T change costumes back to one of the actress' other selves, indicating that she (and presumably the army officer) were infected all along as well. And didn't just infect Emma during her recovery for...reasons.

They sing a medley as they grapple and chase Emma around the stage. Reprising each of the previous songs for a line or two, but with new, mostly very rapey and body horror filled, lyrics. At one point, she gets away from them and flees backstage...only to reenter on the other side and react in horror when she realizes it was just a loop. As they close in on her one last time, she turns to the audience, acts as if she's just now noticing that they were there all along, and starts begging them for help while the rest of the cast lines up behind her to take a bow.

She's still screaming and begging for someone to help her when they finish bowing and drag her offstage, ending the play for real.

And, that's that.


So. Thoughts.

On a technical level, this was decidedly mixed. The acting and singing were excellent. The choreography...decent, but not nearly as impressive, aside from a few standouts like the helicopter scene. This play REALLY needed better props and more actors, though, and while I get that most of the budget might have gone into renting the venue...well, they were still way overbudget from their original crowdfunding goal for this. Maybe they ran into unexpected costs or something. Still, aside from the limited resources they clearly had to work with for whatever reason, they delivered a good production. My biggest problem with this show is, unfortunately, the music.

There are a few pretty good songs in here. But only a few, and even they - while I was somewhat impressed with them at the time - aren't memorable enough for me to keep humming them after the fact. Most of the musical numbers are just meh. One of my main points of comparison for this show isn't a bigtime cult classic like "Rocky Horror" or "Little Shop of Horrors," but the comparatively obscure "Reefer Madness: the Musical." Similar camp parody, albeit of different source material. Similar over-the-top horror movie setpieces and doomed character arcs. And, my god, the SONGS in that show! They're earworms on a par with any top 100 list or high-attention Broadway show's.

Compared to my prior experiences with the horror-comedy-musical, the songs in "The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals" are pretty lackluster. Which, given the emphasis of this production, is really too bad.

The writing is where this play comes out much further ahead. Not the beats of the story so much, but the quality of the witty banter and verbal gags. Top notch. Almost every single joke landed and landed hard, at least for me, and most of the gags felt really organic coming from the characters' interactions. Which is a sign of very good character writing. None of these characters were especially deep or multifaceted, but they were very distinct and amusing to a man. This helped a LOT when it came to remembering who each actor is supposed to be at the moment.

The plot has its pros and cons. A lot of it worked on rule of funny, and probably isn't going to reward any further analysis than that. The ending was a bridge (hahaha) too far for me even WITH that in mind, though. Is the hive supposed to have devoted significant effort to hiding all evidence of its spread in the surrounding city a secret from Emma while she was in the hospital, just to fuck with her when she thought she was getting out? Sure, that would be in character considering the levels of petty sadism it showed prior to that, but would it even be ABLE to arrange all this? Was Dr. Hidgens' theory about them being dependent on the meteorite just completely wrong, even when all his other inferences were completely right and treated as word of god? Or...is the grenade explosion supposed to have just not been strong enough to damage the central brain? That last one would make sense, but then why were the other zombies bothering to even TRY to stop Paul?

The final fourth wall shattering at the very end was excellent. A real highlight of the show. But the offscreen plot events required to get to there after Paul's heroic sacrifice rub me the wrong way, even for a story that takes itself as non-seriously as this one.

That brings me to the part of this review I'm least sure about. Like I said once or twice before, I can't decide if this play has a lot to say, or if it's not trying to say anything at all besides being silly. Is any attempt at looking past that just overanalysis? It might be. But, just in case it isn't...well, it's not like I typically err on the side of underthinking things, so if I'm going to make a fool of myself here I'll do it in my accustomed way.

The occasional references to police brutality, Trump campaign slogans, and political anti-intellectualism are kind of scattershot, but there's a bunch of them. There's also the documented pattern of American zombie media getting more popular during conservative administrations, and this came out in 2018. What complicates this play's version of that fear of oppressive social conformity is that the zombies are the ones singing, dancing, and expressing themselves liberally. True, zombies are often consumerism and corporatism as much as conservativism, so maybe this is supposed to be about rainbow capitalism and parasocial corporate messaging, but...there's nothing ELSE in the show that links back to that. So, I don't think that's it. It DOES keep getting back to cops, the military, and the media, though.

The mental side of the transformation is repeatedly shown to be realizing a personal desire, and it manifests as an individualistic "I want" song. If anything, it's pre-infection Paul who comes across like a caricature of soulless, oppressive conservativism.

Except...maybe that isn't how it works anymore.

Have a look at the first minute of this video. I'm linking to a reaction instead of giving views to the original vid for reasons that should be obvious:

What weirdly playful, colorful, expressive little nazis we have these days.

It sounds like it should be a contradiction. It IS a contradiction. But, when has authoritarianism ever shied away from embracing cognitive dissonance? The "voice in your heart" that parrots authoritarian dogma, letting you march to the beat of the war drums in your own quirky personalized way...that works for both the alt right, and for a lot of the weirder "listen to your own internal biases to hear the true voice of god" American fundamentalist protestant sects that heavily overlap with it.

The people that these ideologies prey on generally seem to be the bored, the hopeless, and the alienated. People like Paul and Emma. People who think there's no hope for the world, and have a transgressive side to them that wants to dance in the flames, waiting for outside permission to emerge.

Like I said, I'm not at all sure about this. There are probably as many details that contradict this kind of reading as there are ones that support it. It's just a thought.

After finishing my watch, I looked up some other reactions to "The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals." I seem to not be the only one who wondered if Paul was autistic at the beginning, and some people seem to think that the play is about neurotypical society's attempts to "help" people on the spectrum. This world of cues and communications going on between the people around you that you can't get, while they all press in around grinning like they're in on a secret joke at your expense. Again, there are as many details that point away from that reading as there are ones that point toward it, but it's an interesting take even if it's not an accurate one.

Again, maybe it's just a zombie parody play with a few low-effort political "take that's" tossed in here and there. It could just as easily be that and no more.

I've also been told, since finishing my watch, that the creators have since made a couple other plays that are much more politically pointed. I can't testify one way or the other on that yet, since I've just heard it secondhand.

Anyway, overall? I give it a B+. It's good. It could be really, really good with better production values, a bigger cast, and maybe a liiiittle bit of trimming and moving things around here and there. It might come close to greatness, but there are too many really fundamental flaws (the mostly so-so music being the biggest) for it to get all the way there in my opinion.