Life in the Time of COVID-19: A Little Levity is Needed - Musicals for Our Times

-
Graphic by Open-ClipArt Vectors from Pixabay



In these dark and scary times when most of us ﹘ except virus deniers, stubborn individualists, skeptical libertarians, the occasional inebriated Spring Breaker and #CoronaKatie ﹘ are coping with the New Normality of self-quarantines, social distancing, and trying to remember the symptoms of the novel coronavirus known as COVID-19, humor is an excellent and essential coping mechanism.

Now, I know that laughter is not the best medicine to fight the virus itself; avoiding infected persons, washing hands with soap and water, staying away from places where 10 or more people gather, and being mindful of your surroundings are the best preventive measures. But in a world where the reports of more cases and more deaths assail our eyes, ears, and nervous systems on a 24/7 basis, humor ﹘ even gallows humor ﹘ helps keep us sane and a bit less stressed out.


So, without further ado, here are some suggestions for Broadway musicals with a COVID-19 theme:

Note: The first titles are by author Harry Turtledove:
  • Rent Deferred
  • The N95 Mask Producers 
  • The King and I Are Quarantined
  • Anyone Can Whistle As Long As They're Six Feet Away
My Suggestions
  • West Side Virus Story
  • Oklahoma Defies Social Distancing!
  • Cats II: The Only Survivors
  • Movin' Out of the Isolation Ward
  • Robin Hood: Men in Hazmat Suits (a hypothetical musical)
  • Seven Masked Brides for Seven Masked Brothers
  • The Stand: The Musical (hypothetical)
  • (I'm Headed to the) South Pacific
  • How to Succeed in Healthcare Without Really Trying
  • The Infected Music Man
  • Adios, Dolly! 
Dina Schweim's Suggestions
  • Don't Kiss Me, Kate
  • A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Emergency Room
  • Fiddler on the Roof: Because He's Not Italian and He Doesn't Have a Balcony
Denise Longrie's Suggestions:
  • The Sound of Music on Headphones
  • Steppin' Out Around the Block Because Everything Else is Closed
  • Fast and Furious: The Drive Through Days - The Musical

Comments

  1. DeniseMarch 19, 2020 at 1:26 PM

    The Sound of music on headphones
    Steppin' Out Around the Block Because Everything else is Closed
    Fast and Furious the Drive Through Days.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's 'It'?

-
Image
How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's It ? It  has been adapted twice for filmed audio-visual media. The first filmed version of  It was a TV limited series; the second was a duology of theatrically-released movies.  The first adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 doorstop of a novel was a 1990 adaptation made as a two-part ABC miniseries for television. Among the cast members: Tim Reid, Harry Anderson, Annette O’Toole, John Ritter, and Richard Thomas. The miniseries also featured Tim Curry as the evil Pennywise the Clown. Adapted for television by director Tommy Lee Wallace and Lawrence D. Cohen (who also adapted King’s  Carrie  for director Brian De Palma in 1976),  It  was okay but a watered-down take on the scary novel about a group of friends who must face off against a monstrous entity known as “It” twice. Once as kids in 1960, then again as adults in 1990. (Like  11,22.63,  the TV version of It avoids the year ...
Read more

Talking About 'Band of Brothers' (HBO Miniseries): Why were there no black soldiers in the Band of Brothers TV miniseries?

-
Image
Band of Brothers,  sadly, reflects one of the sad realities of American society in the 1940s - racial segregation in the armed forces. Although there  were  a few all-Negro (as blacks were referred to in those days) units in the U.S. Army and the Army Air Forces that served with distinction in the European Theater of Operations, most black servicemen were assigned to non-combat units in Supply of Services and other support forces. Most of these soldiers were truck drivers, anti-aircraft gunners, barrage balloon handlers, engineers, stevedores, clerks, cooks, corpsmen, and so on. Only late in the war (fall of 1944 and winter/spring 1945) did large numbers of black infantrymen see combat against German forces, and even then they served in all-black units commanded by white officers. © 2001 Home Box Office, Dreamworks SKG, and Play-Tone Pictures The 101st Airborne Division was an all-American unit made up of individuals from many different groups - Easy Company’...
Read more

'The Boy in Striped Pajamas' movie review

-
Image
(C) 2008 Miramax, Heyday Films, BBC Films Writer-director Mark Herman’s 2008 film “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” is a faithful but (necessarily) condensed adaptation of John Boyne’s 2007 novel about a German boy, Bruno (Asa Butterfield), who befriends Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), an eight-year-old inmate in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.  Like Boyne’s novel, the film is not a definitive history of the Holocaust. It’s not as graphic or historically accurate as Steven Spielberg’s 1993 classic “Schindler’s List,” nor was it intended to be. (Indeed, Herman says in the behind-the-scenes featurette “Friendship Beyond the Fence” that he doesn’t consider “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” to be a “Holocaust film.”) Set in the early 1940s at the height of Nazi Germany’s power, the film follows Bruno on a journey that takes him and his family from Berlin to German-occupied Poland. His father Ralf (David Thewlis) is a newly-promoted SS officer with a new posting: commandant...
Read more