Frequently Asked Questions

Is this a partisan show?

No — and the distinction matters. The show isn’t aimed at conservatives or conservative ideas. It’s aimed at a specific event, the specific people who drove it, and the way a grassroots movement was co-opted and monetized by a small group who profited from it. A musical about Watergate that pokes fun at Nixon and his circle isn’t “an attack on the Right” — it’s a show about a scandal and the people who made it. This works the same way.

It also makes a point of knowing the difference between a movement and a political party. Plenty of conservatives condemned the events this show depicts; many have only grown more critical since. The show doesn’t ask any group to laugh at itself. It asks everyone to look at something most Americans, across the spectrum, already agree went badly wrong.

And in the tradition of the best stage satire, it doesn’t flatter its audience either. Nobody in the theater gets to feel entirely off the hook.

Isn’t it too soon?

It won’t be. A new musical takes years to reach a stage — reading, workshop, out-of-town tryout, and a commercial run. By the time audiences see this fully staged, the events it depicts will be roughly a decade old.

That’s the same arc as Come From Away, which opened sixteen years after 9/11. You could not have made that show in 2004 — the wound was too fresh. Time is what made it possible, and time is what turns a raw event into something an audience can engage with through theater. The long road to Broadway isn’t a problem for a show like this. It’s the very thing that makes it work. The right moment to begin the journey is now, so the finished show arrives exactly when the culture is ready to reckon with it.

How do you handle the violence?

Carefully, and almost entirely sideways. The show is built on absurdity, not brutality — the storming of the Capitol is staged as an over-the-top, fully choreographed production number, not a recreation of real harm. The horror is implied and refracted through comedy, never depicted literally.

Come From Away never showed the towers; it found the human story at the edge of the catastrophe. The Producers made audiences laugh at the unthinkable through sheer theatrical audacity. This show works in that lineage: it earns its laughs by coming at the untouchable from an unexpected angle, with enough craft that the audience can hold the subject at all.

Who is this for?

A very large, very under-served audience. Tens of millions of Americans — and countless more around the world — watched these events with disbelief and have never been offered a way to process them through entertainment. No major commercial musical has given that audience the catharsis it wants. This isn’t a niche show searching for an audience; it’s a show built for an audience that already exists and is waiting. That said, theater has never been in the business of pleasing everyone — and neither is this.

What’s the show really about?

On its surface: the sixty-four days between a presidential election and the day the Capitol was stormed, told as a fast, genre-spanning musical comedy. Underneath, it has more on its mind than the jokes let on — about how outrage gets manufactured, how a movement gets sold for parts, and how a society tells itself a crisis is resolved.

The ending doesn’t wrap things up in a tidy bow. It’s not interested in letting anyone — on stage or in the audience — off easy. Beyond that, the show would rather you draw your own conclusions than have them handed to you.