Week 33/2024: Singing strangely

Stranger Sings!

Week of 12 August 2024

This week was the culmination of six months work by Kramstable and his college classmates, when they had their first performances of their musical, Stranger Sings!

So this week is all about that.

The parody musical

When Hobart College announced last year that their music for this year would be Stranger Sings!—The Parody Musical, I had a bit of a WTF moment.

I mean, I was familiar with the TV show Stranger Things, which the musical is parodying, but I had no idea there was a musical, parody or otherwise.

I’d originally watched the show because Slabs and Kramstable insisted I’d love it and would need to watch the first three seasons leading up to the release of season 4 in 2022. I had no idea what it was about and agreed to watch it with them. I’m glad I did because it was fantastic. However, catching up took us past the start of season 4 because my method of watching TV is 80s-style, an episode a week. That’s entirely appropriate for a show set in the 80s, right? But we got through all four seasons by the end of March 2023 and began the long wait for season 5.

In the meantime, we found out about Stranger Sings!, and hey, if Spongebob can be a musical, anything can. It didn’t take long for me to be totally sold on the idea and I began listening to the soundtrack obsessively.

(This is a thing I do when I’m going to see a musical. I need to know all the songs before I see it. Spoilers, I’ve got plenty. Who cares? No big deal. I want more.)

I loved the songs! They were so catchy and funny, with so many references to the 80s pop culture I grew up with and love (cringe and all). It’s obvious the creators love Stranger Things, and love the 80s—how can you not?

An unnecessary plot diversion

For anyone not familiar with Stranger Things, it’s a Netflix series set in the small town of Hawkins, Indiana, in 1983. There are mysterious goings-on at a government lab . . . There’s a group of D&D loving kids, Dustin, Mike and Lucas, who set out to find their friend, Will, who has mysteriously vanished in the woods near the lab. Will’s frantic mother Joyce, (played to perfection by Winona Ryder) teams up with the local sheriff, Hopper, to search for Will. Mike’s older sister Nancy’s friend, Barb, also goes missing, Nancy falls in and out of love with the sleazy jock Steve, and has a complicated relationship with Will’s brother Jonathan.

The boys find Eleven, a strange girl with psychokinetic powers, in the woods while they’re looking for Will—and they all have to deal with the Demogorgon right out of their D&D world.

It’s a cool show and I’m glad Kramstable and Slabs enticed me to watch it. I thought it was especially great there was a character called Barb. ‘Was’ being the operative word . . .

The musical journey begins . . .

Fast forward to the start of this year, and Kramstable signed up to do the show, hoping to get the role of Dustin.

Of course, he (and I) was super excited when he got the role. However, despite my constant questions, I got no further information about the show other than the cast list. There were a couple of college events during the year where the cast performed, so I wasn’t totally in the dark. This included one event that showcased the opening number, ‘Welcome to Hawkins’, which starts with the three boys playing D&D. So we got to see Kramstable (and his ‘twin’ Dustin – because the main roles were double cast) at a very early stage.

However, for everything else, I had to wait until I saw it. And furthermore, I was told I was to speak of nothing that I’d picked up from the soundtrack. “This song references Mean Girls, doesn’t it?” “Yes it does. Don’t say anything else.” “This bit’s channelling Wicked, isn’t it?” “Yes, can you just stop now.” (I also couldn’t resist casually dropping the word ‘observation’ randomly into conversations with Kramstable. IYKYK.)

Leading up to opening night, on Monday, Kramstable and some of his cast mates were on the front page of the Mercury (once you got past the Olympics wraparound section). Here I learned that the producers from the college had worked with the composers of the show to arrange the music for an 18-piece band, because the original score was for a five-piece rock band. Cool!

The school also released some teasers and promos leading up to the show and I was so excited!

On with the show

After months of waiting, we went to the opening night on Thursday, and it was as wonderful as I’d hoped it would be. Music, singing, dancing, costumes, cheesy 80s pop culture . . . and the set was amazing.

What’s more, contrary to my ‘no surprises’ expectations, there were differences in the songs from the original soundtrack: A couple of tracks I didn’t know about and one that was completely different (and absolutely hilarious).

Apart from seeing Kramstable, I was particularly looking forward to hearing the big songs from Joyce and Barb. They were every bit as amazing as I’d expected!

And I was so proud of Kramstable taking on his first lead role in a musical. He did a wonderful job and there may have been mum tears at (more than) one point. People who have worked with him in the past talk of his great comic timing, and here he had the perfect role to show it off. I loved every second of his performance and was so happy for him.

I went back a couple of days later to see the other cast. In this show, the leads in the first cast took roles in the ensemble, so I saw Kramstable as ‘alternate Dustin’ as well as in a more general role. What was also interesting was the difference between the enthusiastic Thursday night audience and Saturday afternoon’s more restrained crowd. I wondered how much the audience’s reactions affects the performers.

More shows next week. Excitement!

Week 33 summary

Habit tracker

• 8,000 steps: 7/7
• Shut down at 9.00: 4/5

What was the best thing about this week?

Going to see Stranger Sings!

What did I notice this week?

A fallen sign on the side of the road.

What did I learn this week?

‘Putative’ means to be known as something by reputation, or assumed to be something, or generally accepted.

According to Merriam Webster, ‘putative’ is almost always used in front of a noun. The modified noun is the thing that is assumed or supposed to be. The ‘putative cause of a death’, says MW, is the one widely believed to have caused the death, even if this hasn’t been proven or made certain. However, you don’t say: ‘the cause was putative’.

I also learned that Coca Cola introduced ‘New Coke’ in 1985. Apparently, Coke was losing sales to Pepsi so they changed the recipe to make it sweeter, but no one liked it. Consequently, it was a big flop and they went back to the old recipe, calling it ‘Coca Cola Classic’.

There’s probably still unopened cases of New Coke out back of a bunch of small town shopping malls.

What am I reading?

• The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
• Back to the Body: Infusing Physical Life into Characters in Theatre and Film by Jean-Louis Rodrigue & Scott Weintraub
• Saltblood by Francesca de Tores
• Murder You Wrote ed. L.J.M Owen