The Skimm
- A great musical to watch with your kids! Added benefit? Parents will laugh about different things and get some of the references that Gen Z likely will not understand. Still there key themes that can be discussed at the dinner table – integrity, honesty, teamwork, taking responsibility, feeling safe at home and peer influences – all in the fun context of a stage show with catchy music.
- Catchy, modern tunes. “Michael In The Bathroom” is my daughter’s favorite by a long shot, perfectly illustrating how kids may feel out of place at a party (not that it doesn’t happen to us adults too). My personal favorites is the perfectly hummable “Voices In My Head” with which the show ends. Both lyrics and music perfectly represent all the different influences especially young adults are exposed to day to day. That said, they have never stopped talking for me personally since I finished school 🙂
- Great acting. We totally lucked out seeing on stage George Salazar as Michael and Will Roland as Jeremy. The cast overall was outstanding!
The Details
I am definitely guilty of having turned my teenage daughter into a bit of a musical geek. During a trip to New York in the summer of 2019 she ended up choosing the stage productions that we were going to watch. One of her favorites – just from listening on Spotify and her own research on the internet was “Be More Chill”. I ended up getting tickets to literally the last show of its run at Broadway, after all she had talked about it a lot. Fun, we lucked out.
The show’s overall premise is summarized in the title and will be missed but the intended target audience as they often neither know “The Matrix” or “Little Shop of Horrors”. In his quest to see how far he would go to become cool and to get close to his love interest Christine, Jeremy takes a “some top-secret-can’t-even-look-it-up-on-the-internet shit” pill that literally teaches him how to behave cool, blocks his real friend Michael from his vision … and eventually upgrades, goes mad and tries to talk over the world. Simple. Audrey II anybody? The “Squip” looks like Neo in the Matrix – its default setting apparently – and the Keanu Reeves references throughout are likely to be missed by the Gen Z part of the audience. Fun for us parents and perceived as cool, by everybody especially as the Squip upgrades from scene to scene with always changing costumes.
For Parents
I must admit that I had not done much research on the show in advance – contrary to “Dear Evan Hansen” and “Come from Away”, both of which we had seen the previous day. So when the first sentences in this mostly sung-through musical were “C-c-c c’mon, c-c-c- c’mon – Go, go – C-c-c c’mon, c-c-c- c’mon – Go, go – I’m waiting for my porno to load – My brain is gonna freakin’ explode“, my parental eye-rolls and concerns immediately kicked into high gear. Oops. Some explaining to do later? Oh well, my 14 year old teen was definitely not the youngest audience member sitting in my immediate vicinity. So I calmed down. Kids are definitely more resilient than we often give them credit for.
As a parent volunteer for Project Cornerstone here in Santa Clara County I have been a fan of the development asset framework they are using, which originated from the Search Institute.
A lot of the 41 developmental assets are touched on during this show, and are with discussing within a family after the show. Here are my highlights:
- Asset #1 – Family Support – Starting with us parents, the song “When you love somebody you put your pants on for them” is a perfect reminder to be present as per asset #1 “Family Support”. Doing it daily requires attention. while not been caught literally, there have been times when I could have had the pants on earlier, or worn different ones. Happens to all of us.
- Asset #28 – Integrity – Michael is probably the best example here standing up for his beliefs, committing to his friendship to Jeremy despite his behavior(and being actually blocked out by the Squip). He is wavering at one point, but together with Jeremy’s Dad, both realizing their wavering at the same time.
- Asset #40 – Positive View of Personal Future – After all is done and Michael and Jeremy teamed up to fight the Sqip (“It’s a Two-Player Game”), Jeremy is facing what he has done (Asset #29 – Honesty, and Asset #30 – Responsibility), and most importantly makes changes (“Voices In My Head)
In Closing …
If you have a chance to visit the Musical live – do so! There are lots of YouTube resources as well. After New York, I had a chance to visit the London production in March 2020 and will write about that at a later point.
Some Resources
StageAficionado 