I wasn’t sure exactly what I was expecting when I walked into the Waterford High School auditorium on May 5th. It was 7 o’clock, and I had gone to see “The Worst Show in the History of the Theater (A Musical Thing).” By the time the show was over, I was absolutely delighted. Chalk full of beautiful singing, famous songs, and funny jokes and jabs- it was something the audience will remember for a long time. 

The two songs that stuck out to me the most were “Coffee Break” and “Magic to Do.” These songs represent the duality of modern life. “Coffee Break” is about a group of office workers who begin their coffee break only to find, to their anguished surprise, that there is no coffee:. “If I can’t take my coffee break / something within me dies.” The modern worker is kept motivated and alive not by a love of their work, but rather, by caffeinated stimulants (alongside a series of psychiatric drugs). This reflects the fact that we don’t live in a labor economy; we live in what has been described by cultural theorists as a “prozac economy.”

The song locates divinity in the most banal place, the coffee maker itself. “If I can’t make three daily trips / where shining shrine benignly drips / and taste cardboard between my lips / something within me dies.” The shrines of modernity, where God gifts sustenance to his believers, is not unlike the manna that mysteriously appears with the morning dew; only this time, it is produced by a coffee machine.

Another memorable song was “Magic to Do,” lead by Mikayla Senkewitcz. It incorporates themes of magic and mystery, but in a way that fully identifies them with the world, while also representing the constant crises that rock the modern world as being a necessary part of its functioning: “We got parts to perform / Kings and things to take by storm / As we go along our way.” The dancing that accompanied this song was quite good, and Senkewitcz’s costume gave off a very neo-gothic vibe, with an eye-catching combination of red and black.

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The production is called “The Worst Show in the History of the Theater (a musical thing).”  It contains “songs from West Side Story, Grease, Anything Goes, Mamma Mia, Gypsy, Cinderella, Come From Away, The King and I, My Fair Lady, and Pippin, to name a few.” The cast were Katlyn Brown, Phoebe Brown, Tighe Burridge, Nina Fioravanti, Madison Gates, Bella Geer, Avital Goldberg-Curran, Holly Gray, Isabela Haque, John Morgan, Julie Morrison, Madison Seifert, Mikayla Senkewitcz, and Suhana Sharma.