People R Ready – The Musical
Takes the Stage
If there was a unified mindset that emerged from the pandemic’s long quarantine, it was that people were ready to resume their lives. A return to normalcy, or whatever the new normal might be, was what everyone craved. The next challenge was adjusting to changes in a post-pandemic world.
If there was a unified mindset that emerged from the pandemic’s long quarantine, it was that people were ready to resume their lives. A return to normalcy, or whatever the new normal might be, was what everyone craved. The next challenge was adjusting to changes in a post-pandemic world.
Drama during COVID
During the quarantine, several theater companies presented short plays with a Covid theme. One group, the Flushing Meadows-based Queens Theater in the Park hosted the web-based Coronavirus Microplay Festival featuring over one hundred one-minute plays whose theme was COVID isolation. This year, in collaboration with the Queens Memory Project, they launched the film I See You and You See Me featuring stories of borough residents’ “fear, resilience, and hope amid COVID-19.” But there have not been many COVID-based plays produced so far. It took a year or more after 9/11 for related plays to surface. The most prominent was Anne Nelson’s The Guys about a New York City journalist who helps a local fire captain write memorial speeches for his men who died in the World Trade Center.
David Hare’s monologue play, Beat the Devil, dealing with his COVID-19 illness, was produced at the Bridge Theater in London. Ralph Fiennes starred in the production and reprised the role in the 2021 film release. Novelist and playwright Germaine Shames’ play Love in the Time of COVID and Pulitzer Prize winner Suzi Lori-Parks’ Plays for the Plague Year, round out the list of COVID-themed theatre.
The Musical Scene
Musical productions are even more scarce. It took 12 years for the 9/11-themed Come from Away to be first produced.
The Off-Broadway Notes from Now: Songs of Resilience and Renewal, and Breathe, the collaboration between novelist Jodi Picoult and playwright Timothy Allen McDonald, are the only two musicals to register a presence. There are more COVID-related online parodies of existing musicals populating YouTube than original books and lyrics being produced.
However, People R Ready – The Musical is positioned to take the stage and add itself to the list of COVID-themed productions.
The book by Tom David Barna, with lyrics and music by Alex Twum, Ray Evangelista, and James Gutzman, provides a glimpse into the experiences and new awakenings of a group of college students returning to their post-pandemic campus.
The musical is a romantic comedy focusing on relationships—old and new, troubled and unrequited—as a group of college students emerge from 18 months of quarantine, social isolation, and online classes. The story follows these young students, including a core group of three foreign exchange students, as they audition for the university’s drama club production featuring zombies, dancing, and music.
The combined musical talents of Twum, Evangelista, and Gutzman, each a composer/lyricist, and the book by Barna form a fun and engaging frolic through the tentative re-opening of college classes after the pandemic. Barna’s storyline captures the uncertainty of the students’ return, the loss of a chunk of the best period in their young lives, and the hopefulness in moving forward. Catchy songs like Eye Candy, Heart Soul and Mind, and the ballad No One Understands are a sample of the wide range of musical numbers throughout the show.
People R Ready – The Musical has already opened at Minnesota Fringe Festival in 2022 where it had a successful trial run. This is a script and musical score that is bound to become a winner for high school and college productions, community and regional theater, and anyone else looking for an entertaining and upbeat musical production.
Go to People R Ready – The Musical to hear the entire score and review a portion of the script.
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Produce the play without the need for even a piano.
Hear excerpts from songs HERE.
Listen to the entire score HERE.
Watch Sizzle Reel HERE
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