[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.
As the show goes on, its focus shifts to the group’s efforts to get produced on Broadway, with all the stress and conflict that entails. In the end, Heidi helps bring the group back to their original intentions with a right-in-the-feels song (“A Way Back To Then”), delivered with full emotional and vocal force by Riggs:
Dancing in the backyard
Kool-aid mustache and butterfly wings
Hearing Andrea McArdle sing from the hi-fi in the den
I've been waiting my whole life
To find a way back to then
Ultimately the four friends decide they’d rather be “nine people’s favorite thing than 100 people’s ninth favorite thing.” [title of show]’s theatre people are people, after all: with “gay skills” that come in extra handy in situations like writing a show, with deep insecurities and day jobs, treading the lines between stability and ambition, friendship and competition. While some of the show’s references feel a little dated (in 2025, no one needs an explanation of what “hangry” means), the realities of living while creating hit home.
The real gift of this production was seeing this tight yet freewheeling cast and crew—some of Tulsa’s most skilled theatre people, who’ve shared local stages many times—play together just like the characters do: a meta meta layer of sorts. I loved Simpson’s brassiness and vulnerability as Susan, Riggs’ low-key Heidi (with karaoke in her soul), Briggs’ earnestness as Jeff, and the whip-sharp, full-out everything of Farnan-Williams’ Hunter. They handled tough harmonies, raunchy asides, and quiet moments with equal panache, and it was easy to see how much they adore this show, this work, and each other.
In an early 2000s New York theatre scene glutted with adaptations and revivals, [title of show] struck it big with audiences desperate for something original. Twenty years later, it’s refreshing to have nationally-recognized but out-of-the-mainstream shows like this on the Tulsa performing arts calendar. Like The Trail to Oregon!, another passion project that Briggs and Theatre Tulsa recently produced at this venue, [title of show] was a euphoric shot of musical theatre in its most concentrated and, for the theatre-kid adjacent, anyway, relatable form.
Will I finally audition for a musical after this? Absolutely not. Will I call up a friend and see if they maybe, possibly, want to make a show with me, and who cares if anyone ever sees it? I already did.
