[title of show]
Theatre Tulsa Studios
March 8, 2025
Growing up, I wasn’t a theatre kid, exactly—too shy, too stuttery—but I’m not ashamed to admit that I wanted to be one. Something about theatre spoke to my introverted yet drama-obsessed child self: the world-building! the meticulous wordplay! the public catharsis! I spent many, many hours in my youth making up Gene Kelly-inspired dances, memorizing songs from musicals, and pretending to be characters from movies and plays.
I did end up onstage later on as a dance and choir fanatic—theatre-adjacent, if you will—and can absolutely perform the entirety of Sunday in the Park with George on demand. (My request hotline is open.) Through it all, even if I stood on the fringes of their world, theatre people were my inspiration. I loved their lack of inhibition and love of precision, soaked up their exuberance by osmosis, respected their obsessiveness, and admired their decision to just not care whether they were cringe in anyone else’s eyes.
I found myself in good company last weekend at [title of show], a Tony-nominated meta-musical about theatre people making the very musical you’re seeing, performed via Theatre Tulsa by four real-life theatre people who are also real-life friends here in Tulsa. The Saturday night audience was full of, you guessed it, theatre people, many taking a break from preparing their own local shows to support the team presenting this one.
[title of show]—sometimes described as “a musical about two guys writing a musical about two guys writing a musical”—is niche even by theatre-kid standards. It’s 90 musically exhilarating minutes of inside-baseball references to the theatre world, inside jokes about genre conventions, and insights into the pratfalls and pitfalls of collaboration, composition, performance, and the quest for success. In the hands of this rock-solid cast—Sam Briggs, Thomas Farnan-Williams, Karlena Riggs, and Kristen Simpson—it was also a moving tribute to the rare and simple gift of putting on a show with your friends.
Facing a three-week deadline to create a musical, composer Jeff and script-writer Hunter decide to turn their process of writing an original show into the show itself, with contributions from their friends Heidi and Susan incorporated into the script as they’re all talking about what they’re going to do. (Jeff, Hunter, Heidi, and Susan are the real names of real people who created [title of show]. There’s also a pianist on stage, i.e. in their apartment, whose name is Larry, performed on Saturday by Jason Sirois, who stepped in for that night’s show with no rehearsal and was brilliant.)
In other words, what everyone says and does in the process of making the musical is the musical. This postmodern gambit fractures into self-referential hilarity immediately—the “Untitled Opening Number” includes lines like “then we’ll cross downstage towards you” and “yell in fortissimo”—and ranges through stages of the creative process that are familiar to any artist. One of the show’s most complex numbers, “Monkeys and Playbills,” sees the group manically free-associating towards a possible song. With clear direction by Robert Young, flawless stage management by Susan Fenrich, and dreamlike shifts of light by Carson Decker, the cast brought out all the layers of how dumb and frustrating and magical writing can be.