The Who Didn’t Like Musicals: Part one to talking about the Hatchetfield Trilogy

Starkid’s Hatchetfield trilogy!!!

 

The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals

PREPARE TO BE SICK OF ME!! 

This may be well known to anyone who has talked to me about media for over 15 minutes but Starkid Productions itself has plagued my brain since the end of the first semester of junior year. Now they have done much more than Hatchetfield-related work and were well established for the musical they put on in college by the name of “A Very Potter Musical”. Youtube and virality and the time being basically unheard especially by a couple of theatre majors at the University of Michigan. So when this launched them into success it took them by quite a surprise. They went on to release two more of these musicals which were equally as beloved by their increasingly blossoming fanbase. Starkid also played a role in launching Glee’s Darren Criss into stardom. 

 

But that’s a whole other blog, we’re here to specifically discuss the Hatchetfield trilogy starting with the first Musical in the trilogy. 

 

Spoiler Warning Ahead. Also this is going to be a long one. 

 

This trilogy was started by the 2018 show, “The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals”. The show follows Paul Matthews a run-of-the-meal tech worker at a company named “CCRP”. Paul is gloriously boring, and he likes it that way. We meet some of his co-workers Ted Spankoffski, the office sleaze-ball, Bill Woodworth, a divorced father yearning for his daughter’s approval, Charlotte Sweetly, a woman having an affair with the aforementioned Ted Spankoffski and stuck in a loveless marriage with her husband who is also not the most admirable. Paul is enamored with a barista by the name of Emma Perkins at the local coffee shop “Beanies”. Emma is very snarky and sarcastic, Paul witnesses her get into an altercation with a customer when she refuses to sing after she tipped him. After the man barges off and Emma is scolded by her manager, Paul walks up to the counter asks for his usual, black coffee then drops a five-dollar bill in the tip jar. Much to Emma’s chagrin she starts singing to which he quickly stops her informing her of his hatred for watching people sing and dance. They engage in brief pleasant conversation before a young boy with low blood sugar has an outburst about his delayed hot chocolate.  

 

Paul rushes off with a smile, and heads in for the night. The next morning, there’s a news announcement about a meteor that hit the Hatchetfield theatre, much to Bill’s dismay he had planned to take his daughter there to see Mamma Mia with her girlfriend. Paul turns off the tv ignoring it completely. He goes outside and sees the Greenpeace girl, a climate-concerned protester he’d run into the day prior but instead of carrying on their snippy conversation from yesterday she is singing, joined by an entourage of other citizens including kids from Hatchetfield High’s smoke club and the local Homeless man. This freaks Paul out he rushes to work where he tries to explain what happened but sees a distraught Charolette struggling to pour herself coffee. He asks her what’s wrong and she recounts her morning to him listening to her usually pitchy husband sing the same song Paul had heard from the protester except with perfect pitch. 

 

Paul is called into the office by his boss who has a song of his own, which serves as a kind of fourth wall-break where he enquires about Paul’s wants as the main character must have something to motivate him. Once the song is over he rushes over to Beanies where after a brief scare he sees Emma is still normal. He tries to explain to her what is going on but she obviously has a hard time believing him, they are then interrupted by Emma’s co-workers who pull Emma into this elaborate dance, and she half-heartedly dances along with them as Paul watches mortified. Emma meets her breaking part when there is an entire other eight-count added to the dance. She quits dramatically throwing off her apron in the process it is then revealed to her the gravity of the situation Paul was trying to warn her about. Here it is revealed that a blue substance put into the coffee of the customers causes them to cough and sputter before joining Emma’s coworkers in song and dance.  

 

Paul and Emma make a run for it and meet Ted, Charlotte, and Bill in an alleyway where they are hiding from the commotion. It is there they inform Paul that their boss has been turning their other coworkers into singing zombies. After a moment of banter, Charlotte’s husband shows up after she calls him for help but unfortunately for them, he has already been turned. Amidst his musical performance, Ted cracks him over the head with a trash can lid and his brain falls out, completely blue and covered in the same blue goo that was in the customer’s coffee. Charlotte seldom leaves her husband in the alley until Emma mentions her professor who has a panic room using his doctorate to convince Charlotte to come along with them, taking Sam along. Once they arrive at Professor Hidgen’s house which is behind the gates, he allows them in disgusted they dared bring “one of them” into his home. He has them tie Sam down and he runs experiments on the blue goo he pulls from Sam’s brain. We also find out that Hidgens theorized this exact scenario twenty years ago. 

 

Sam and Charolette are left alone for a period of time in which he wakes up and sings a ballad convincing her to untie him. Once she uncuffs him from the chair he picks her up, plunges his hand into her abdomen, and rips out her guts.

 

 Cut to Paul and Emma getting to know each other better, finding out they went to opposing high schools and Emma’s high school’s showing of Brigadoon’s head started his hate for musicals. Emma confides in Paul about her sister who passed away in a car accident and was the reason she returned to Hatchetfield after leaving to backpack in Guatemala. We learn more about Emma’s upbringing, always having to live in her “perfect” sister’s shadow and having her life be put on display for the first time after her death. We learn about Paul that he loves Hatchetfield and never dreamed of living and in spite of recent events still doesn’t.

 

This heartfelt moment is interrupted by a singing Charolette who busts into the room guts hanging from her abdomen now the same blue as Sam’s brain. She performs a song, detailing how she’ll make them join her if they won’t do it willingly. Which she’ll do by puking goo into their mouths, causing their organs to renew and be enhanced. Her and Sam’s performance is cut short by Hidgens who saves the dead killing both Sam and Charolette with a shotgun. He reveals to the survivors that the Charlotte they knew was gone the minute she sang her first note, this goo which was connected to the meteorite that hit the Hatchetfield theatre earlier that day. This goo had genetically constructed its victims from the inside out. 

 

Bill gets a call from his daughter revealing that she had never actually got on the bus to Clivesdale she was supposed to this morning and was trapped in Hatchetfield High surrounded by the singing doubles. He talks off to save her with the help of Paul and the shortcut Emma used to use back in high school. The two men leave but when they find Alice it is too late she is one of them and Bill meets his demise at his daughter’s hands. Paul is almost killed before a man by the name of General McNamera and his army break in and rescue him before also knocking him unconscious. 

Back in the panic room, Emma forms a theory that the musical doubles are all controlled by the meteor and by destroying this hivemind it could destroy the clones too. But Hidgens, enraptured by the idea of a new musical race knocks her and Ted unconscious. 

 

Cut back to Paul and General McNamara who gives the opportunity to leave the island which Paul refuses to do without Emma. The General gives Paul his gun and tells him to go save Emma. 

 

He finds Emma and Ted being serenaded by Professor Hidgens performing a song and dance from the musical he spent his years in solitude writing along with musical doubles he let in by opening the gates. These doubles soon turned Hidgens into one of them, but in the distraction Paul, Emma, and Ted were able to escape. At least till the doubles appear out of nowhere to which Ted throws Paul in their direction, and Emma chases after him. Ted is met with the General who he thinks will save him but it’s revealed that he has also been turned, dooming Ted along with the rest.

 

Emma saves Paul and they make it onto the Helicopter but soon they realize that the woman operating it is also a musical double, in a struggle with the gun, the helicopter crashes still in Hatchetfield. Emma having been impaled by a piece of the helicopter can’t go anywhere, it is up to Paul to save them. He arms himself with grenades and follows Emma’s instructions to try and destroy the meteor. 

 

Once he gets there, these doubles taunt him urging him to sing along with them Paul tries his best to refuse but his proximity to the hivemind causes notes and dance moves to come out of him against his will. With the last remaining bit of his humanity, he pulls the pin to the grenade and throws it into the meteor. 

 

The last scene of the musical takes place at the hospital where Emma has had her leg patched up and is in the process of being given a new identity and being moved to a remote plot of land in Colorado, Emma Perkins will be believed to have died in the Hatchetfield catastrophe. After the colonel leaves Paul walks in but Emma’s joy quickly shifts to fear once he begins to sing. An entourage of town folk come from behind the curtain and the play ends with Emma screaming to the audience for help.

 

You would think that an ending like that wouldn’t lend to another musical but you would be surprised because next along came Black Friday. Which will need its own blog. 

 

But TGWDLM was well-liked when it came out and is still known as one of Starkid’s most popular pieces at the time of its release, besides the Harry Potter trilogy. This musical does a great job of balancing strong emotions with humor. Emma’s monologue about her sister is heartbreaking but it’s perfectly sandwiched between moments of comedic relief but not in a way that doesn’t allow the audience to sit in these emotions and recognize the depths of these characters. Another instance of this is Bill’s daughter Alice’s death, her double performs a heartbreaking song about the two’s strained relationship confronting Bill with the mistakes he made wracking him with guilt. Watching him confront this while also realizing he had lost his daughter was so beautifully depressing. 

 

Overall it’s a beautiful piece of work, and I recommend it to anyone who likes horror or apocalyptic media and musicals. Also, the songs don’t take away from the story at all and add to the story whether it reveals characters’ inner-emotions, make revelations to the audience in a playful way, or make moments that would be less entertaining with dialogue more entertaining.