“The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals” (part one)

New territory for me! I'm reviewing a full-length live action production! Courtesy of @Vinegrape.

Well, sort of. That's the form I'll be seeing it in.

"The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals" is a 2018 musical theater show written by offbeat musical comedy group StarKid (of "A Very Potter Musical" fame). It's been filmed (I'm not sure how professionally...I guess we'll see!) and made freely available online. That's pretty much all I know about it, except that it supposedly has some kind of inspiration from or shoutout to "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." Unusual combination of elements.

I'm guessing that the titular musical-hating guy is going to have to fight musical mind control aliens, or something? Maybe? Sounds like a Rick and Morty plot. We'll see! Anyway, at almost two hours long this is going to be the longest single video I'll have liveblogged to date, so it'll probably take me a while to get through.


So, starting off, this is very much not a stage-to-movie adaptation. It's a collection of reasonably well positioned cameras arranged around a stage, some of which capture bits of the audience members in view. The editing and post-production work seems to be decent, given what they had to work with, but still, this isn't really a movie. It's just a videorecorded play. I know that, for all the ways that they're similar, film and stage are NOT the same medium, and it often takes some skilled adaptation and inventive changes to adapt a story from one to the other while keeping its quality intact. Even just in the intro song, you can see the actors dancing in a silly zombie-like formation that would probably look a lot funnier up close in person, and there's a little bit of interaction with the audience members nearest them. That stuff is not going to translate well. So, I'll try to keep in mind that I'm not getting the proper viewing experience when I assess the show.

Anyway, the lyrics of the intro song describe our status quo at the beginning. In a small town called Hatchetfield, a shut-in named Paul is disliked by his community because of his disdain for music and dancing. He has a crush on a local barrista, but is too busy wasting his time on web forums and (decidedly nonmusical!) youtube videos to make a proper effort at wooing her.

The singers muse aloud, within the song, if perhaps they should murder Paul for not liking their musical culture, and lavish him with insults including everything from "ass" to "bitch" to ascendant early twenty-first century favorite "cuck."

Dating ourselves a little. At least, I hope we are.

The song ends with a nonchalant, nonmusical request that we all please submit, obey, and allow ourselves to be part of the coming apotheosis. That's the Body Snatchers-esque aylmao talking, I guess. Well, them wanting to murder Paul for not joining their song and dance was also a pretty strong hint.

There's an amusing meta-joke following this, where the alien-infested Greek chorus has to "improvise" an extra bit at the end of the intro when Paul doesn't arrive for his own opening. The implication being that he hates musicals so much that he can't even be assed to show up for the one he's starring in.

Anyway, the music and lyrics are pretty clever so far. The song goes on a little too long for its own good (and the zombie dance moves get repetitive fast due to lack of new additions after the first few), even aside from the extra bit at the end where they're waiting for Paul to come onstage, but still, it's a fairly good opening number.

The chorus eventually clears the stage, leaving the (surprisingly well-dressed, given their description of him) Paul sitting at a monitor, typing away. There are other people sitting at their own screens beside him, giving this the appearance of a workplace rather than Paul's home, but I guess they might just be there to represent his internet buddies or something.

Nope, they're at an office after all! Paul is just the most sharply dressed for whatever reason. He somewhat annoyingly helps his coworker print something properly, has a brief, cordial interaction with his Office Space-ish boss Mr. Davidson, and refuses to sign up for the company sportsball team even when asked to by perky general assistant Melissa. Memorable exchange from the latter:


Melissa: "It might be fun!"

Paul: "Yeah. I don't want to though."


You know what? I'd say that's legit, Paul. Legit.

He also overhears another of his coworkers getting a personal call from her husband, a police officer. From the half of the conversation that Paul (and the audience) can hear, he's telling her that some big new investigation just started, and that he'll likely be late coming home. It probably has to do with singing bodysnatcher aliens. She and him also seem to be having marital issues, that she's way too loose about talking about loudly enough for her coworkers to hear.

After she hangs up, some more office banter proceeds. Paul priggishly reminds unfiltered cop-husband lady, Charlotte, that there's no smoking at work (prompting her to apologize and then shamelessly pull out a hip flask instead). His other coworker, Bill, asks Paul if he wants to come with when he brings his teenage daughter to see a musical show that came to town later today. He's apparently in a custody battle over said daughter, and doing his best to make her like him more, and she (for some reason) likes her dad's coworker Paul and so him coming along might help. Paul refuses, citing his immense dislike of musicals.


Tim: "I'm trying to reconnect with my kid, and you're just gonna leave me hanging?"

Paul: "Yeah. Sorry. I'll get you something from Beanie's though!"

Tim: "I just want my daughter back."

Paul: "How about a caramel frappe!"


Paul's awkwardness and insensitivity are starting to seem less like character flaws and more like him being on the spectrum. Not very far down on the spectrum, I don't think, but still on it.

Also, damn, now I'm having caramel frappe cravings, and there's no nearby place to get one.

On his way out the door for his coffee run, Paul is accosted by Ted, the only guy in the office more socially inept than he is. Ted creepily suggests that the only reason he's going to Beanie's instead of the closer Starbucks is so he can flirt with their barista, who he even more creepily refers to as "the latte hotte."

He follows THAT up with an even cringier Borat reference. We're obviously meant to be cringing at him though, so this isn't a flaw in the show.​

Paul insists that it's just because he doesn't like Starbucks. And, to be fair, he did ask both Tim and Ted if they felt like coming with him, so he clearly isn't just trying to get a chance to strut his stuff. Still, she's heavily implied to be A factor in his choice, even if not THE factor.

Cut to Beanie's! An obnoxious customer who I think is played by the same actor as Paul's boss drops a dollar into the tip jar and expects a song in return, as advertised on the tip jar. The barista who Paul is supposedly crushing on tells the customer that there's a long line right now, and she'd rather not do it even though it's company policy.

He gets petty. She gets vicious. Eventually causing him to take back his tip and leave in a huff without actually ordering.

Coffee girl (now named as Emma)'s coworkers, including her manager who first introduced the sing-for-a-tip policy. The latter seems to take Emma's dislike of it very, very personally. Even though it's existence necessitates the baristas rotating in and out to take tea-with-honey breaks for their throats. Apparently, said manager and coworkers are all high school theater friends, and basically have made the place a stronghold for their stupid clique.

When scolded by the manager, Emma points out that if you have to do extra work for a tip, then that means that it's not actually a tip at all. Emma just tells her to start singing or else she's fired.

Emma didn't exactly cover herself in glory with the way she handled that customer, but with a work environment like this one it's hard to blame her for being short tempered.

After the dressing down, Paul comes up in line and tips generously. Prompting Emma to launch into a halfhearted, coffee-themed rendition of "I've Been Working On the Railroad" that she's grateful when Paul tells her to stop. The two then proceed to have a bit of a bonding moment, as much over their common misanthropy as anything else.

She takes considerable time to chat with him, considering how little time his order of black coffee should have taken. Sort of putting the lie to what she told the previous customer about how much she values each patron's time, even if he was a jerk. She complains about having to split her tips with the theater nerd coworkers, to which Paul responds by handing her five dollars for her own pocket (store policy be damned). He tells her how much he hates musicals, how awkward it is having people dancing and sitting over-the-top-ly right in front of you while you just kind of sit there feeling out of place. I don't think I've heard that particular set of complaints from a real person, but maybe they're true to someone, somewhere. Emma...doesn't seem to necessarily hate musicals inherently, so much as she hates her manager and coworkers. Notably, she saw one of their performances, and says that it sucked due to their mediocrity rather than anything to do with the medium itself.

They get a pretty good rapport going before another irate customer tells them to hurry the fuck up, and Paul takes his coffee and leaves. Seems like this was a good first step in their relationship, after what seem to have just been brief exchanges and hellos up until now.

On his way back to work, Paul is accosted by an obnoxiously pushy Greenpeace canvasser. It takes a lot of work for Paul to come across as more unlikeable than she is, but he puts in the effort and it pays off. Just as it seems like Paul and the Greenpeacer might be about to come to blows, an unnatural thunder crash calls both their attention off toward the fourth wall horizon.

Charlotte really knows how to pick them.

Also, before douchecop shows up, Emma offers Theatergirl a ride, and the latter just cattily tells her she'd rather die than touch her piece of shit car. Okay, yeah, whatever her flaws Emma is one of the most sympathetic (or if nothing else, least unsympathetic) characters thus far. Pretty sure Tim the divorced dad is the only one who hasn't made an ass of himself in some way yet, though.

Speaking of Tim, he drives home while making pickup arrangements with his daughter Alice. They argue over restaurant choices for after the show, and then we see Alice with her friends, who are trying to get her to smoke weed with them in the rain. I don't know if this is just down to incongruent casting choices or if we're supposed to infer that Alice isn't Tim's biological daughter, but she certainly doesn't look much like him.

Given how few actors there seem to be and how many roles they're each playing, I suspect it's the former.

As Alice and another friend of hers separate from their more drug-happy peers, they see an object descending from the sky in the middle of the lightning storm, its exact appearance hidden from view by a mass of densely concentrated bolts. Cut to a mad scientist yelling excited nonsense at the descending object. Then, cheap lightning animation covers the screen, and we cut to the following morning's local news.

It's a weirdly 1950's-ish broadcast, despite the explicitly modern setting. As it plays, Paul gets ready for another day's work. As he puts on his jacket and tie, the newscasters report on a local wildlife enthusiast who nursed an injured squirrel back to health, and then about the asteroid that crash landed just outside of town last night. Heh, I knew they were going to do that gag. Much like the newscasters themselves, Paul is enchanted by the squirrel story and completely nonchalant about the meteorite. He can't ignore the weirdness for long, though. As he leaves his apartment and walks to work (I guess he lives closer to the place than most of his coworkers), he can't help but notice the unusually energetic foot traffic around the neighborhood.

Guess a lot of the neighbors are infected, or controlled, or whatever.

As he bemusedly tiptoes his way around one smiling dancer after the next, music starts playing. The foot traffic gets thicker, and things come to a head when he runs into the Greenpeace lady. The music spikes, and she starts accompanying it with her rather impressive vocal range, much to Paul's surprise and disconcertion. Here begins our second musical number, "La De Da De Day," and it's easily better than the intro song.

Part of it is just that it's catchier musically, and that its focus on one lead singer at a time (first Greenpeace girl, and then a homeless man who Paul didn't give change to the day before) gives them more chances to shine as individual vocalists. It's also more visually interesting, as Paul visibly goes from confused to creeped out to existential terror and incomprehension while navigating around the chain of singing, dancing pedestrians.

The lyrics of the song are mostly benign, being about what a nice day it is and how everyone plans to enjoy it. However, there are some sinister undertones. There's repeated mention of how something "happened" to them last night to give them a new perspective on life, and there's more than one occasion where the rhyme scheme and lyrical train seems like it's about to have them threaten violence only for them to avert it at the very last second. Greenpeace Girl's mention of wanting to "save the earth" is emphasized strangely, in a way that suggests a different value of "saving" the planet than the one Greenpeace typically uses.

That said, they don't seem like they're being puppetted, exactly. Greenpeace Girl still wants donations. Homeless Guy is still begging for change. They have the same basic goals and interests that they did before. Just, their attitudes are incongruously happy-go-lucky, and they seem to have a weird kind of empathic link that goes further than just song and dance choreography. More like they're being drugged than outright controlled. Though maybe this is just the first stage of the infection, who knows.

Paul's unease reaches its height as he slowly becomes the focus of their attention, seemingly because they notice that he's not singing and this irritates them.

I guess musically crowding around someone is this invader's version of the iconic point-and-scream from "Body Snatchers."

Paul gives Homeless Guy money, and this seems to mollify him at least partially. He's saved from the others when they all simultaneously stop, shout "lights down," and then go off their separate ways looking haggard and sickly.

Paul takes a long while alone to calm himself down and reconcile what he just experienced with reality before continuing on to work. Given that the closeness and inane movements all around seem to be what unnerves him the most about musicals, that had to have been agoraphobic hell for him.

He gets to work, and finds that Tim, Ted, and Charlotte, at least, still seem to be themselves. Charlotte is out of it to the point where she can hardly be trusted with a coffee cup let alone her computer workstation, but that seems like it might not be unprecedented for her. Tim is just complaining to Ted about how he'd been looking forward to bringing his daughter (and her vegan girlfriend, who she insisted he invite along) to that musical last night, only for the theater to be smashed before the showtime by the meteorite.

Hmm. I wonder if that mishap caused the musical-ness to infect the aliens, prior to the aliens infecting the townsfolk.

Paul joins them, and asks if anyone knows WTF is going on with the outdoor musical number involving people who don't seem like they could have been planning it together ("Maybe it's a Canadian holiday, or something?"). No one has any idea.

However, Charlotte does have something to contribute when Paul asks about musical weirdness and strange behavior.

Her husband didn't get home until 6 AM this morning (she has to angrily shut Ted up when he indicates that he knows firsthand that her husband didn't come back anytime before early morning, lol). When he did come home, he took a shower, and he's normally a terrible singer but this time she was horrified to hear him singing a perfectly on-key, melodic shower song that he carried perfectly.

"La de da de day," she and Paul repeat together, with an atmosphere of mounting dread and horror. Her husband is a bad singer, and she wants her husband back. Despite their very, very advanced state of marital strife.

The actors do a great job playing a horror movie realization scene about the lyrics "la de da de day." It doesn't sound like an especially funny joke on paper, but their delivery makes it one of the funniest moments of the show so far. The camera zoom-ins are also really well chosen and manipulated in post-production to amplify it.

The general assistant lady interrupts the conversation, telling Paul that bossman Mr. Davidson wants to talk to him about something. Realizing that he must have forgotten to print out some reports that he was supposed to hand over yesterday, Paul hurries off to apologize and rectify his mistake. However, when he enters Mr. Davidson's office, Mr. Davidson takes 15 seconds before dramatically lowering the newspaper from in front of his face, and when he does it reveals an opiated, glassy-eyed grin.

Cue song numero tres. It's a hard one to follow. It's also not as catchy musically, but the actors' deliveries are good at least. The song largely consists of Mr. Davidson asking Paul what he "wants." What his driving, aspirational desire is. Apparently, he needs to have one in order to make him a sympathetic and relatable character.

Is that supposed to be a critique of musical characters? I...don't thiiiiiiink most of them are that one dimensional? At least, not moreso than in other media?

Halfway through the song, Mr. Davidson makes a lyrical detour into talking about how his own desire is for his wife to choke him. Paul's discomfort in this is shrugged off at first, and then violently retaliated against when Mr. Davidson threatens to fire him if he leaves the room while he calls his wife to tell her about his unconfessed kink. Only to then lose his nerve and hang up on her before saying anything, and returning his attention and lyrical preoccupation to sussing out Paul's desire.

With the not-so-subtle threat of what might happen to Paul if he doesn't start making an effort to fit in with the new paradigm.

Paul finally escapes by saying he needs to make a coffee run, and that he'll get Mr. Davidson something as well.

Wonder what the rhyme or reason is behind who got infected and who didn't? It couldn't just be a matter of who was out last night, since Tim is unaffected. It can't be a question of who had a singular desire to work with, because, again, Tim. Anyway, that's the first 30 minutes of the show.


Entertaining so far. As an office sitcom, it's better than most of what I've seen on TV, before going into any of the musical alien stuff. The characters mostly being jerks is balanced by them either having sympathetic traits to balance it, being funny, or getting repeatedly hit by karma, if not all three.

On a more mixed note, I'm kind of worn out on the subgenre of "let's make a show in genre X that's all about the issues with genre X" at this point. It CAN be done well. I'd point to "Cabin in the Woods" as a recent good example, and 1992's "The Player" as an older and more medium-focused one. But, on the other end of the spectrum, you have stuff like "So Romantic" or...

...okay, this is going to get me in a lot of shit with my audience, but. I think "Galaxy Quest" kind of sucked, at least at doing what it seemed like it was trying to do.

Basically, there are ways of doing this well, and I feel like the premise of "character who hates or is ambivalent about Genre X suddenly gets it thrown at them irl" has a pretty meh track record. So, I'm a bit reserved about "The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals" purely on those grounds.

I also feel like the surrealism of a musical happening at a character who doesn't know what to make of it was done better in the original "Wicker Man" film. It's kind of hard to top that, when it comes to this.

But, that said, the jokes have generally been funny. The musical numbers have ranged from okay to very good. The performances are awesome. And, with 3/4th's of the show still to go, it has plenty of time to surprise me on the thematic and story levels as well. So, I'm not pessimistic about the rest, just a bit reserved for now.

One other thing I'd like to comment on is how the sparsity of the set isn't doing the show many favors. The props on the stage are very minimalistic, and the multiple roles for each actor seem more like a budgetary issue than a stylistic choice. This show needs a higher budget production to do it justice, I think. It feels like its WRITTEN with the assumption of more props and people. Really, I think the best medium for "The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals" would be a musical film. Think along the lines of the 1986 "Little Shop of Horrors" film adaptation (which it almost certainly takes some influence from) and 2005's "Reefer Madness: the Movie Musical." That kind of musical camp comedy/horror does really well when shot as a proper movie, and this one probably would too.

So, that's part one of probably four.