Musicals made me do it

 Classroom arrest, is God the one giving the test.  All my fellow IB students know my pain all too well. Exams finish one week, EE due the next, three separate IAs due after, my English oral the week after, and it never ever ends. In between the endless internal assessments, unit tests, homework assignments, and college applications, I often found myself going back to the same lyrics in my head 'High school is killing me'. This is a line from another Starkid musical from the Hatchetfield trilogy (I know you're all sick and tired of me talking about Hatchetfield, but you should be grateful it's not a fourth article about Hamilton). This is the third musical in the series, entitled 'Nerdy Prudes Must Die'. Because I don't hate myself, I will be shortening 'Nerdy Prudes Must Die' to NPMD.  NPMD is something that can only be described as a wild ride. The story follows a bullied boy, Peter Spankoffski falling in love with a popular girl, Stephanie Lauter....

 We can learn how to chill It finally happened! She’s 17! I’ve been excited to turn this age forever given how culturally significant 17 is in musical theatre. Jack Kelly from Newsies  was 17, there’s a song in the musical Tuck Everlasting  called 17, Be More Chills Jeremy Heere is 17, it’s basically the age for all teenager-centric musicals. But today, I’m here to talk about a different, far darker show that touches heavily on the theme of being 17. That show is Heathers: The Musical . Based on the 1989 cult classic film, Heathers: The Musical  is an unapologetically sharp, chaotic, and strangely heartfelt exploration of high school’s social hierarchies. It’s a world where popularity is everything, where cafeteria seating arrangements determine your worth, and where teenage angst can literally turn deadly. The story follows Veronica Sawyer, an ordinary teen who finds herself pulled into the orbit of the Heathers, three impossibly popular girls who rule Westerburg Hi...

Hamilton animatics could honestly apply for partial custody of me, given how pivotal they were in raising me. I already know what you're thinking "PLEASE DON'T TALK ABOUT HAMILTON AGAIN". I'm sorry (I'm really not), but in order to close this trifecta of posts about my addiction to Hamilton, I simply must talk about the thing that started it all. I've previously alluded to the fact that, when I first watched Hamilton, I wasn't very impressed. However, I never really stated how I ended up changing my mind about the musical. The answer is of course, Hamilton Animatics.  If you're unfamiliar with animatics, they are essentially animated music videos over songs. These are very popular in many fandoms, with the Hamilton fandom often prioritizing hand-drawn simplistic characters over songs from the show. But to reduce them to “just fanart with audio” misses the point entirely. Animatics were a lifeline for the Hamilton fandom, and, honestly, for the sho...

 It's just another DAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY As much as I love having interests and passions, my hyper-fixations border on insanity. I've gone through periods where I'm unable to eat, sleep or think about anything other than my current fixation. Well, this morning when I skipped breakfast and thought only about one thing the entire bus ride to school, I knew it had happened again. Dear reader, please save me, for I am diving head first into a new obsession, and it's all thanks to PBS. Yes, you heard that right. The Public Broadcasting Service, or PBS, is the root of this misery, after they released a proshot of the musical Next to Normal . Honestly, the title itself describes how I feel about this show. I am so unable to be normal about it, but at the same time I pretend that I'm not spiraling into madness, because nobody around me knows who the Goodman family are. Okay, now that that's over, let's talk about the show.  Next to Normal is a rock musical ...

Most people’s tenth-grade Personal Projects are things like “building a bookshelf” or “learning how to cook pasta without setting the stove on fire.” Reasonable. Admirable. Tangible. Me? I wrote a musical about quantum physics. Yes. You read that right. A musical. About quantum. physics. I would say “don’t ask,” but actually, please do. Because looking back, it was probably one of the most unhinged and rewarding creative decisions I’ve ever made. At the time, I was neck-deep in two very different but very intense obsessions: particle physics and musical theatre. One was teaching me about probability waves, uncertainty principles, and how absolutely weird reality is at a subatomic level. The other was teaching me how to belt high notes while sobbing dramatically on stage. Naturally, I thought: Why not combine them? Because if Spring Awakening could make teenage repression singable, surely I could make Schrödinger’s cat into a showstopper. The working title was something pa...

Nearly every teenager went through their own emo phase. Unfortunately for me, that emo phase coincided with my (apparently everlasting) musical theatre phase. So instead of listening to My Chemical Romance, I listened to... emo musical songs. Yes, I wish I was joking, but that is in fact, a real genre of music. From blasting expletive-ridden Spring Awakening songs in my ears to angrily screaming along to Rent , it was an interesting era, to say the least. I'm unearthing this deeply awkward and tragically embarrassing part of my life to tell you about a musical that defined most of my personality during this period: Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson . If you’ve never heard of it, don’t worry, you’re not alone. This chaotic little show started off Broadway, had a brief Broadway run in 2010 and then disappeared into the cult musical ether, where it has remained ever since, living on in YouTube bootlegs and the hearts of unhinged theatre kids. It’s a rock musical satire about, wait for it ...