Secret report: Musicals are designed to torture us.

If you’ve ever gone to a Broadway musical, you may have had the creeping feeling that you can’t enjoy it the way the other people in the audience are. You think to yourself, “These songs really suck. And this is super long. So long that it’s almost like they made it that way to fuck with me and make me miserable.” The good news is that your intuition is correct. Musicals are designed to torture us. The bad news is that someone very soon is going to convince you to go to another one.
 
If you’re a regular reader of the Intergalactic Business Report, you know we are the only publication in the world that will actually tackle a subject like this. Too many people are afraid to simply say that “Hamilton” was like having your math teacher sing a history book to you. But we will. 
 
Very recently, the Intergalactic Business Report interviewed a top Broadway Musical insider we named “Marvin,” who revealed to us what really is behind the sing-songy productions that have had their way with us for so many years. You simply will not believe the truth. 
 
 
INTERVIEWER: You’ve been involved with a lot of musicals in your career?
 
MARVIN: Yes, lots of them. 
 
INTERVIEWER: So, can you explain why they all suck so hard? 
 
MARVIN: Well, to begin, they’re designed to suck hard. Very hard. A long time ago, some Vaudeville performers were very upset with the wealthy people they played in front of every night. So a few of them started writing these long, boring, “musicals” and convinced all those rich people that they had to see them or they’d be left out of something big.
 
INTERVIEWER: Left out?
 
MARVIN: Yes, it was a trick. They’d get one person to tell somebody’s wife that this new “musical,” as they started calling them, was a huge cultural event and that if you saw it, you could tell all your friends who hadn’t seen it how great it was and that they really needed to see it. 
 
INTERVIEWER: And then their friends would go see it too?
 
MARVIN: Yes. And they’d all be totally miserable and have to sit there for three hours and watch the actors talk-sing. 
 
INTERVIEWER: Talk-sing?

MARVIN: It’s something they invented where instead of just saying something, the actor would sing it.
 
INTERVIEWER: Which would make the words more interesting or something?
 
MARVIN: Actually it would make the words more annoying to hear and people would think, “Why is he singing that when he could just say it?”
 
INTERVIEWER: Fascinating. So they made all these musicals just to seek revenge on rich people?
 
MARVIN: At first, but then they just decided to take revenge on everyone. New generations of musical theatre people kept writing more and more crappy musicals that reached broader and broader audiences. Their goal today is to see if they can force as many people as possible to sit through their boring and mind-numbing displays of dreck.
 
INTERVIEWER: How do they keep getting people to go to these shows?
 
MARVIN: People’s wives have a lot to do with it. They start out convinced that the musicals are really worth seeing, and when they get there they realize they’ve been led into a trap of watching crappy actors dance and sing bad songs for hours while they have to sit there. That’s when their husbands look over and ask if they can leave at intermission. Which of course causes the wives to double down and say this is the greatest thing they’ve ever seen in their lives.
 
INTERVIEWER: And then an endless cycle of forcing their husbands to go to musicals begins?
 
MARVIN: Exactly.
 
INTERVIEWER: It’s so insidious. So, everyone in the audience hates what they’re seeing?
 
MARVIN: Pretty much.
 
INTERVIEWER: What about gay men? They always talk about how much they love show tunes and musicals.
 
MARVIN: They’ve been in on it for years. They’re just messing with straight people.
 
INTERVIEWER: That’s horrifying. So how do you explain “Hamilton”? Everyone raves about it, but it’s actually just a guy turning a history book into a really lame rap song.
 
MARVIN: That’s right. People have convinced themselves that Hamilton is amazing because a guy in it is rapping. 
 
INTERVIEWER: I remember when I was a kid, the weather man rapped his report one time.
 
MARVIN: Right. Something like, “I’m the weather guy and I’m here to say…”
 
INTERVIEWER: “Cloudy skies followed by some rain today.”
 
MARVIN: That was like 1983, right?
 
INTERVIEWER: Eighty-two or Eighty-three, yes. 
 
MARVIN: And people are excited that someone’s rapping in a musical in 2018. It makes no sense.
 
INTERVIEWER: So it’s like they were trying to get people to act like rapping is this new, cool thing, even though it’s from like forty years ago and totally overdone?
 
MARVIN: Yes, it enhances the creators’ pleasure to see people go nuts over that.
 
INTERVIEWER: Wow. O.K. Last question. I feel like there’s always one song in every musical that I kind of like.
 
MARVIN: Right, but it’s not a song you’d listen to unless you were forced to go to the musical.
 
INTERVIEWER: Exactly. It’s kind of good, but it’s not. It’s bearable. Like it doesn’t drive me totally crazy and make me angry to hear it like the other songs.
 
MARVIN: They do that to hook you in so that you feel semi-good for a few moments till they start sing-talking and everything.
 
INTERVIEWER: It’s just so ghastly. All of it.
 
MARVIN: Sorry. 
 
INTERVIEWER: Yeah. Fuck you, I guess?
 
MARVIN: Sure. I accept that.
 
INTERVIEWER: Thanks for talking with us. I wish you no luck in the future.
 
MARVIN: You’re welcome.