Broadway and the West End may be shut down due to the ongoing pandemic, but musical theater is alive and well, and it's happening on TikTok.
Specifically, an epic, and epically ridiculous, musical being created using TikTok's duet feature. More and more people keep adding on to the original clip, and the result is a hilarious mess that perfectly lampoons the modern musical.
It all began with TikToker Daniel J Mertzluff's satirical creation of a musical theater song about a man having an apocalyptic break-up with his partner in a grocery store.
And honestly, it could've ended right there and been perfect, right?
It sounds exactly like the new musicals that come out nowadays (are we certain this isn't a rewrite from Dear Evan Hansen?), it's structured similarly, the lyrics are juuust a touch ridiculous, and it ends with the perfect melodramatic cliffhanger. Frankly, he nailed it!
Oh but reader, you've seen nothing yet.
A fellow TikToker used the Duet feature to add the other half of this couple's side of this grocery store fight, and well... it just gets even better.
NOW we have a musical, right? Not quite! Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the couple's child who's watching them essentially get a divorce in the pickle aisle!
This is getting entirely too real though, right? Have no fear, because now we get our comic relief: The over-it grocery store employee being forced to listen to this family fracture while she's just trying to do her job.
If you didn't rupture a vein in your neck cackling at her deadpanning "We close at 9," then you have no sense of humor.
Now you might assume that this couldn't possibly go any further, but you'd be wrong!
From here, the musical takes a sharp turn into the absurd, with the addition of another four characters: The Squeaky Wheel on the Shopping Cart, The Automatic Door With the Too Loud Bell, The Random Voice That Comes Over the Loudspeaker, The Water Sprayers That Always Mist You When You're Reaching for Kale and, arguably, the most important role of all: A Can of Soup watching the proceedings from his shelf nearby, dulcetly singing essential truths like, "I'm a can of souuuup."
If every TikToker in this thing doesn't win every Tony there is next year, musical theater as an art form should be canceled forever!
On Twitter, pretty much everyone agreed.
And a consensus seemed to form around Can of Soup and The Squeaky Wheel on the Shopping Cart being the MVPs.
Like Shakespeare writing King Lear while locked up during the Black Death, it seems the pandemic of 2019-2020 has found its masterpiece, and its name is Grocery Store: The Musical. Congrats to the whole team!
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