Have you heard the adorable story about the bear in New Hampshire who entered a home, ate some fruit, drank the water from a fishbowl, and then grabbed a stuffed teddy bear on its way out? So cute, right? Less cute: The bear-or bears-in Montana who went on a rampage, killing one and wounding two in separate incidents lately. Authorities are in hot pursuit. Anyway, if you’re in Montana and you see a bear, stay away. Don’t even offer it a teddy bear or anything. Totally not worth it.

Sad but true: New York Will Solve the Bedbug Crisis by Speaking Very Sternly to the Bedbugs.

An Incomplete Survey of Newspapers, Magazines, Periodicals and Books Being Read by Potential Jurors in the Clarence M. Mitchell Jr. Courthouse of Baltimore, Maryland, Room 236, Part 33, Videtta A. Brown Presiding

• Three Cups of Tea By Greg Mortenson & David Oliver Relin

• The New Yorker

• Grave Surprise by Charlaine Harris

• Not Without Laughter by Langston Hughes

• The Great Depression Ahead by Harry S. Dent Jr.

• 1000 Years for Revenge by Peter Lance

• The New York Times

• A Quiet Belief in Angels by R. J. Ellory

• The Sex Chronicles Volume 1 by Zane

• ASP.net 3.5 (author unknown)

• The New Yorker (another copy)

• The Baltimore Sun

• The Economist

• Something on a Kindle Wireless Reading Device

JOE MACLEOD DECLARES UNDER THE LAWS OF THE GREAT STATE OF MARYLAND AND UNDER PENALTY OF PERJURY THAT THE FOREGOING IS TRUE AND CORRECT.

Vibe: Dr. Dre said that the last beat that floored him was ‘All About the Benjamins.’ How does that make you feel?
P. Diddy: “It’s humbling. I was in the studio with Dre the other day. He started working on a record for me. Watching him as a producer is watching greatness. We had a lot of similar traits. It was like looking in the mirror. He would ask questions like, ‘How you feel about this?’ People don’t really understand true producers want to know how you feel about things. We are some of the most observant people on the planet.”
–Sometimes humility doesn’t last very long.

‘Time’ Regrets To Inform You That We Will Kill These Women

“We do not run this story or show this image either in support of the U.S. war effort or in opposition to it.” That’s Time editor Rick Stengel on his new cover story…. which is coverlined “What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan,” and has a portrait of a woman brutalized by the Taliban. The story contains this: “As the war in Afghanistan enters its ninth year, the need for an exit strategy weighs on the minds of U.S. policymakers. Such an outcome, it is assumed, would involve reconciliation with the Taliban. But Afghan women fear that in the quest for a quick peace, their progress may be sidelined…. For Afghanistan’s women, an early withdrawal of international forces could be disastrous.” So… which is it? That sure sounds like an argument-and, you know, a very moving and affecting one!-for something like a permanent or at least extended occupation. Making things a little more complicated? The new issue also has an article by expert-without-portfolio Joe Klein, which goes: “Afghanistan is really a sideshow here. Pakistan is the primary U.S. national-security concern in the region.” So now what am I supposed to think while I’m not going on summer vacation because it makes our children stupider?

Welcome to Collect Pond Park downtown, which Awl contributor Paolo Mastrangelo describes as “a fucking rat zoo.” You know the “double rainbow” video? This is pretty much the exact opposite of that.

by David Haglund

Now that we’ve done the history of “Spoiler Alert,” let’s discuss appropriate and/or civically obligatory uses.

The (previously, of course) definitive guide to spoiler alert usage was written by Awl contributor Dan Kois for New York magazine’s Vulture blog in 2008. The whole guide is worth reading, as is the accompanying manifesto calling for a return to a “water cooler culture,” in which people who really care about a show or book or movie make an effort to read or watch it as soon as they can, so they can then discuss it with their co-workers (or whomever) in person.

Spoilers, in this account, are allowed after a brief but reasonable interval that allows for anyone who truly cares to watch or read the show or movie or book in question. Spoilers are allowed in the text of articles more quickly than in headlines, because people can simply choose not to read articles for a few days to avoid spoilers, if they must, but it can be hard to miss a headline.

Furthermore, the rules vary for different media: you should give people a few extra hours to watch a TV show, a few days to see a movie, and a few months to read a book. Reality shows can be spoiled immediately upon conclusion, as they are essentially sporting events. Operas are never, under any circumstances, to be spoiled. (I’m pretty sure that last one is a joke.)

All of which is well and good and probably necessary to lay out on a blog such as Vulture where people are writing about shows and movies and books and the reactions thereto several times every weekday. And the accompanying manifesto really is terrific; you should read it (after you finish this; or at least come right back).

But the guidelines, I regret to say, are flawed. They are both too severe and not severe enough. That is because they ignore a crucial factor: artistic ambition.

That probably sounds snobbish, and I suspect (though Dan is welcome to correct me) that an aversion to snobbishness is at least partly responsible for this oversight-just as an assumption of snobbishness is probably the reason Ron Rosenbaum also failed to make this distinction (in his own pro-spoiler blog post from 2006, cited by Kois in his manifesto). Put simply, a truly ambitious and successful work of narrative art is spoiler-proof. If a show or movie or book is really, truly great, you can watch it again and again and again, well after you know what’s going to happen, and the aesthetic pleasure you derive therefrom will not diminish. It may even increase. This is an essential part of the work’s greatness.

Consider this: Alfred Hitchcock knew as much about creating suspense as perhaps any narrative artist of the past century; and when he made what is, hands down, his most artistically ambitious movie, Vertigo, he went out of his way to spoil the mystery halfway through. Vertigo is the story of one woman pretending to be another in an effort to deceive a man, and Hitchcock easily could have preserved the mystery of that woman’s identity until the end of the film.

But the pleasures and satisfactions of Vertigo don’t depend on not knowing a basic aspect of the plot. They derive from the movie’s brilliant illustration of love and desire and the ways we idealize and romanticize particular human beings and then become disappointed or even disgusted by their simple, physical humanity. It’s the best thing Hitchcock ever did, and knowing who is actually who doesn’t change that.

On the other hand you have The Usual Suspects, which, after you have learned the identity of Keyser Soze, really isn’t very good.

(By the way: Hitchcock’s deliberate avoidance of narrative suspense in Vertigo is one of the reasons it is better than the truly excellent but not greatest-ever-made film Citizen Kane-no matter what some fancy poll says-which employs the narrative crutch of withheld knowledge and then bestows that knowledge in a corny and not very satisfactory way at the end.)

So if you’re discussing something like The Usual Suspects, you should not try not to reveal the ending unless absolutely necessary (even now), and, if you must, a warning is in order. If you’re talking about, say, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the rules are different. It’s actually more okay to spoil something the better it is-and this rule comes with good cultural consequences: should we really spend that much time talking about The Usual Suspects? Let’s talk about the things that can’t be spoiled, no matter how many plot points we give away.

Your own artistic ambitions as a critic are relevant here, too: if you’re writing a blog post you consider more or less ephemeral, then, what, you can’t be bothered to throw in the silly but really rather simple phrase “spoiler alert”? But if you’re aiming for something more lasting, then yeah, it’s not really fair for readers to get mad at you for not using what is honestly kind of an embarrassing cliche. Editors can follow this principle as well: is your publication for the next three days or “forever”? Edit accordingly. Readers could then approach a publication with the appropriate degree of caution.

With that established, the other question: Why is imperviousness to spoilers an essential aspect of truly great narrative art? I’m not really sure. I have a theory, though, one that is at present about quarter-baked at best and will probably sound even more pretentious than everything I’ve written so far (which, considering the repeated use of the phrase “narrative art” and the appearance of both “thereto”and “therefrom” is, I imagine, saying something). I think it has to do with life and death and the way the former leads inevitably to the latter. That is: Life is not a mystery. We know how it ends. And if a work of art can be “spoiled” when we know the ending, it can’t really have that much to say about life, can it?

David Haglund is the managing editor of PEN America and has recently written for Bookforum, Slate and The National. He is on the board of the National Book Critics Circle.

by Julie Klausner

After 1981’s “Merrily We Roll Along” flopped, Stephen Sondheim, American music’s last living Genius with a capital “G” (sorry, David Byrne!), lapsed into a depression so severe, he considered quitting musical theater to write video games and mystery novels instead. Yes, video games! Can you imagine the reception “Into The Woods for PSP” could’ve gotten at Comic-Con?

Here is what the man who, in his late 20s, wrote lyrics for “West Side Story” and “Gypsy,” before going onto reinvent Musical Theater entirely, said about his mental state during the period right after “Merrily” ran for 16 performances, then closed: “I wanted to find something to satisfy myself that does not involve Broadway and dealing with all those people who hate me.”

Keep this in mind when professional writers are accused of being too sensitive about Internet commenters, or when artists are accused by well-meaning friends of taking their reviews too seriously.

Soon after that, Stephen Sondheim did what any of us would have done — he felt awful, he did crosswords, and eventually separated from his longtime director and collaborator, Hal Prince. He spent three years freaking out and being miserable. He felt what it was like to fail.

And then, he started over. Inspired by the George Seurat painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” Sondheim began work with a new director, James Lapine, on the epic “Sunday In the Park with George,” one of the few musicals to have ever won a Pulitzer Prize, and probably my favorite of all of his shows.

“Sunday in the Park with George” is, more than anything else, a complicated valentine to the art of making art. The process of creation is a twisted alchemy that’s not easy to rally behind, even for those who haven’t been recently burned. But Seurat’s relationship with his paintings is depicted in the show as so loving, so inspired, so passionate and wide-eyed and intense, that it’s a joy to translate Sondheim’s generosity toward that character’s process as permission to himself to create again, even after the sting of lousy reception.

It is also a very sexy love story, harrowingly relatable to anyone who’s ever been romantically involved with an artist and wanted to steal the attention he had for his work and transform it — with Stevie Nicks-ian witchcraft if necessary — into lust for you. The principal characters in the first act are George Seurat and his muse/GF, Dot.

When Dot finally leaves George after what seems like ages of being taken for granted, they duet on “We Do Not Belong Together,” which is a punch in the throat. When Dot hurls out the word “NO” when she sings, “No! You are complete, George. You, all alone,” her delivery wields the kind of cruelty that Bill Murray implied when he fired his parting shot at Chevy Chase, post-fist fight. “Medium talent!” he spat, and Dot’s rejection of George has the same effect, but more hurt and heaving.

She had taken so much shit from this genius, who painted her and fucked her better than anyone, who made her feel smart and adored and even got her pregnant, but could never give her more than second billing to his relationship with his work.

Later in the act, George positions the characters he’d been painting throughout the show into his masterpiece, and they all stand perfectly still on stage in “La Grande Jatte” formation. And as he walks up to Dot, who poses in the front, he adjusts her hat and touches her face, and they share a moment together of sad realization that they do NOT indeed belong together in the way that most couples do; how one will pick up the kids after work because she’s more flexible with her hours, and the other is more outgoing to cover up for his partner’s social anxieties at dinner parties.

But here is the way that George and Dot do fit: together, they made this beautiful painting, because she inspired him, and he labored on it while he she was out living her life. It’s tragic because it’s not everything.

The second act of Sunday marked the first of Sondheim’s characteristic forays into the topical gravitas of reality, dying, getting older: everything sad and based in truth about what grown-ups are afraid of.

The exposition, rather high-conceptually, concerns George and Dot’s love child, Marie, who grew up in America after her mother fled to the states with her feckless husband, Louis, who raised Marie as his own. Marie, played by the same actress who plays Dot in Act One, is the grandmother to an installation artist, also named George, and played by the same actor who played Seurat.

Weeks after George’s gallery opening, his grandmother Marie dies. And soon after that, George finds himself in a state of creative crisis, having been invited to France to present one of his pieces and feeling like a fraud, a failure, and an artist with no ideas.

He gives up. He sits on a bench in the same park that Seurat once immortalized in oils. And then, Dot appears to him, having walked out of her painting and confused her great-grandson for the lover who painted her into it, years ago. She sings to George: “Move On.”

It is here that Sondheim shows what forgiveness is, what love can do. A talented young man, buried by bad notices and crippled with writer’s block, finds comfort in the tender sagacity of a muse, who tells him, “Stop worrying if your vision is new. Let others make that decision — they usually do.”

To say such loving things to a creative person stymied by the grim realities of making things in a commercial world is the ultimate intimacy. And when Dot/Marie pleads, smiling, “Give us more to see,” it’s a maternal kindness that somehow channels an inner voice within every artist — one that’s usually drowned out by self-loathing or doubt or snark or envy or just demonic apathy, whinnying “Don’t do that, it’s dumb” or “It won’t make you any money, what’s the point” or “That anonymous commenter who said you write like a high school freshman is right.”

And when that muse recedes again into wherever we live when our physical selves are gone, and all that’s left of us is what we’ve made for people to enjoy, or fight about, or do whatever art really does for people beyond the ones who make it, George is left on stage alone, with a big white canvas. It’s the same blank space that tortured him moments before. But now, encouraged by the wisdom of that small, kind voice, he instead smiles and rubs his palms together, getting ready to dive back into the process that, he suddenly remembers, has given him so much joy in the past.

It’s time to make something new.

Julie Klausner believes in life after love.

by Jane Hu

During a scene in Hamlet 2, Dana Marschz, played by Steve Coogan, laments to his cat, “Oh my God, writing is so hard!” It sure is, when you’re writing a sequel to Hamlet 1! It’s easier to borrow. These following artists took a page out of Shakespeare’s own script and wrote songs borrowing from the Bard himself.

King Lear

“I am the Walrus” [1967. The Beatles, from the album Magical Mystery Tour]

The only Shakespearean reference in The Beatles’ entire recorded repertoire. When compiling the sound collage for the song’s ending, they used the radio as a source for found elements. Coincidentally, King Lear was being broadcast: beginning at around 3:56 in the song, you can hear the lines from Oswald’s death (4.6.246–55).

King John

“You’ve Got Everything Now” [1984. The Smiths, from the album The Smiths]

The first line from The Smiths’ debut record is “As merry as the days were long,” a phrase Shakespeare liked so much that he used it twice in his plays. The first reference is in King John, when Arthur notes that Hubert looks “sad” (read: “serious”). As per Shakespeare, Morrissey is concerned with bondage: he doesn’t “want to be a lover,” he just wants “to be tied to the back of your car.”

The Comedy of Errors

“Miss Misery” [1997. Elliott Smith, from the album Good Will Hunting]

Toward the end, Smith sings, “It’s a comedy of errors…It’s about taking a fall.” In Comedy of Errors, love triumphs, but only after a series of false starts, mistaken identities, and near misses. If “taking a fall” is necessary to eventual success…the singer of “Miss Misery” seems to think so too.

Henry VI, Part II

“Get Over It” [1994. The Eagles, from the album Hell Freezes Over]

Listen to Don Henley make fun of 1990s confession culture and its consequent discourse of victimization. In the second verse he quotes Dick the Butcher, who speaks the most famous line from the Henry VI plays: “old Billy was right, / Let’s kill all the lawyers-kill ‘em tonight.”

Hamlet

“Cracked Actor” [1973. David Bowie, on tour for the album Aladdin Sane]

In live performances of this song, Bowie often sings while holding a skull. Thaaat might be where the similarities end.

“To Be or Not To Be” [1994. Composed by Marky Mark and Marvyn Warren, from the movie Renaissance Man]

An unemployed adman (Danny DeVito) gets a job teaching academic subjects to underachieving army recruits. Shakespeare soon becomes the main focus of the class and the students put together a rap music based on Hamlet. Example lyric: “The shit’s iller than Cape Fear, the Shakespeare saga. Started with this Prince kid, his moms and his father.” Sold.

“What a Piece of Work is Man” [1968. From the musical Hair, lyrics by James Rado and Gerome Ragni, music by Galt MacDermot]

In Hair, the Tribe sings this song in reaction to the horror of the Vietnam War; as in Shakespeare’s play, their words are both hopeful and ironic (see man’s “noble reason” and “infinite faculties”). Hair lyrically contains a play within a play! Knowing Shakespeare’s habit of keeping things meta, I think he’d approve.

Macbeth

“The Milkman of Human Kindness” [1983. Billy Bragg, from the EP album Life’s a Riot with Spy vs. Spy]

Whereas Lady Macbeth worries that her husband’s nature may be “too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness” (1.5.17), Bragg’s song kind of follows through on Shakespeare’s metaphor: if there is such a thing as a “milk of human kindness,” shouldn’t there be a “milkman” of human kindness” too?

The Merchant of Venice

“Stairway to Heaven” [1971. Led Zeppelin, from the album IV]

Robert Plant is better known for adapting J.R.R. Tolkein, but this song beings, “There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold.” An inversion of the message written on the scroll that Portia’s unsuccessful suitor, Morocco, finds in the golden casket: “All that glisters is not gold, / Often have you heard that told” (2.7.65–66).

Twelfth Night

“Highway 61 Revisited” [1965. Bob Dylan, from the album Highway 61 Revisited]

Dylan demonstrates his cultural literacy by filling this song with irreverent cultural references that range from the Bible to French history to Shakespeare. His allusion to “Mack the finger” points both to Macbeth and Weill and Brecht’s “Mack the Knife.” The most overt Shakespearean moment comes in the next stanza: “The fifth daughter on the twelfth night told the first father that things weren’t right.”

There are, undoubtedly, several hundred more that we’ve missed in this simple survey.

by Tess Lynch

Everybody knows that musicals are among the easiest things to write and produce. The only things you need to create a successful musical are: the ability to make music out of nowhere, without cribbing from songs you’ve already heard; a flair for drama and a deep understanding of the human condition; and, lastly, a rhyming dictionary. Writing a brilliant musical should take anywhere from one to three hours, by my mathematical calculations. If it takes you longer than that, you’ve over-thought it. I’ve already written sixteen musicals, I’m just fine-tuning them and waiting until the world is ready to receive them before I let those babies fly. I have all the music and stuff, it’s written down in a spiral notebook. I basically took notes and put them together in ways that made brand new songs that sound nothing like anything you’ve ever heard. It’s not as though I ripped off Xanadu, not even a little bit. In fact, I used notes that don’t even exist yet, like R flat. Coming up with an original musical score was actually easier than all of the other complicated technical details I’ve figured out, such as where to put lights or who will play Dr. Snood in my apocalyptic tour de force, Cannibal Apocalypse: 2012: The Musical.

The other day it occurred to me that I might die tomorrow and my musicals might sink into obscurity. Perhaps nobody would find the spiral notebook labeled “Life’s Work,” what with everyone being too busy mourning and crying and divvying up my belongings. The thought of a world that would never know the joys and sorrows expressed so eloquently through my songs, like the haunting ballad “Garbage Smell” or the uplifting chorus of “Olives, Please!”, horrified me. What if future generations built their dreams on tripe like The Phantom of the Opera instead of absorbing, sponge-like, the messages embedded in my stupid musicals instead? This fear drove me to do something I swore I never would: I’ve decided that it’s time to share four of my musicals with you, for the first time ever.

Infection: The Musical

Statistically, your average theater-goer is between 90 and 150 years old (double this for matinees). Taking this into consideration, I developed a musical around a popular topic of conversation among the older set: who has died, who might be next to die, and whether or not the last flu season has resulted in a serious infection. To amp up the drama, this being a rather tragic musical, I’ve decided to focus my attention on a mysterious illness the main effect of which is that it makes you feel moderately lousy. Not terrible, just perhaps a bit tired, fighting a sniffle that won’t go away, worrying over that tickle in the back of the throat.

The opening number is set in the doctor’s office. The doctor tells our protagonist, Greg, that he’s suffering from a low-grade respiratory infection. I would characterize Greg as a hypochondriac, so Greg addresses the audience woefully as he sings about his resistance to azithromycin (“and I’ve tried Niacin/enough to treat a bison”). Gradually, Greg infects his entire social circle, and Act One culminates with a group number around a dinner table littered with used Kleenex. It’s called “Vaccine.” Greg’s friend Cindy, upon realizing that he’s the one who infected everybody else, cries “If there’s no vaccine/We’ll throw Greg in the ravine!” Curtain. Act Two opens with Greg in the ravine, infecting a pair of wayward orphans, who then deliver the duet, “So Cold & Homeless.” Things get worse before they get better as Greg scratches his leg on barbed wire crawling out of the ravine and develops a second infection (“Neosporin Makes It Worse, I Hear”).

Eventually Greg dies. Not from the infection, actually, he’s just eaten by bears (who are resistant to the infection, so it’s kind of heartwarming when you hear the finale, “Natural Immunity”).

Spider Village: The Musical

First of all, this musical is nothing like Cats. It’s hard to think about musicals without thinking about Cats, which I think is unfortunate. I’ve spent my entire life trying to forget sitting in a theater and wondering how a human being made millions of dollars off of making actors wear whiskers and scamper around talking about coming alive at night to train the cockroaches to dance. Spider Village is an imaginative romp through a quaint town of spiders who have lived there for generations, fashioning linen tunics to sell at Eileen Fisher. They’re industrious critters. They don’t just sit under street lamps complaining about “no wet food this, no wet food that.”

We open on beautiful Mavel Merriwood, a dancing spider, who completely entrances us with her tale “I Caught a Gnat.” Gradually, other spider-actors come down from the rafters, suspended by cords that effortlessly form a beautiful web (the LED lights attached to the cords will spell out SPIDERS). They join her in singing about the predator/prey relationship, the beauty of a short life span, and biting the ankles of humans who disturb their grassy dell.

Unfortunately for our arachnid friends, there’s trouble in the ranks: evil Harry Darvinwheel, a recluse, forms a union to demand higher wages from Eileen Fisher by kidnapping an innocent market researcher, Kevin. Kevin’s heart-wrenching number, “I’ve Been Kidnapped (by Spiders),” hints at the inter-species tension that is so socially and politically relevant right now. Of course, Kevin escapes unharmed when Mavel Merriwood decapitates Harry Darvinwheel, but unfortunately Mavel loses three legs in the scuffle, damning her to life in a wheelchair.

The finale, “A Day Late and Three Legs Short,” is a study in optimism. The play ends when all of the spiders in the village ascend their cords back into the rafters, and Mavel sits on stage alone, twiddling her mandibles, happy merely to be alive.

Cannibal Apocalypse: 2012: The Musical

I have never been genuinely terrified by a musical, which seems odd to me since some actors have the ability to sing extremely loudly and dance in a way that makes me uncomfortable; it seems so easy to use this rare ability to intimidate and alienate an audience, and yet nobody’s taking advantage of it. Well, that’s about to change when you go to see Cannibal Apocalypse: 2012.

If you haven’t heard, the end of the world is going to happen in about a year and a half. It probably takes six months to stage a musical, and I’d like to plan CA’s debut so that it can run for three months before the earth explodes. That means that somebody’s got to grab this gem now, before it’s too late. We open on a stark stage with some references to Soylent Green tossed in for good measure. Our hero, Annabel, is stirring a giant pot on her stove and crying. She cries for a good four minutes to disturb everyone thoroughly. After she’s finished crying, she launches into a very loud number called “PEOPLE IN MY POT.” This musical sounds nothing like Sweeney Todd. It’s not funny like Sweeney Todd, it’s fucking scary as hell like the film American Gothic. Nobody can refrain from screaming their lines or hollering their songs, and sometimes someone will just stand in the middle of the stage and shriek.

Absolutely everyone gets eaten in this musical. Annabel is eaten by her lover, Carles; Carles is eaten by his son Damon; Damon gets eaten by his uncle Herb. Herb eventually succumbs to an actor playing a Doberman, Sneakers, who then eats himself, right before everything onstage combusts pyrotechnically and blood oozes out of the theater walls. The finale (“Impeccable Taste”/”Blame the Mayans (Reprise)”) is performed by the ghosts of the entire company, yelling in minor keys.

I Had a Wee Giggle: The Musical

It seems a shame to not capitalize on the popularity of twee-core, so I’ve created a magnum opus to all things cute and whimsical, I Had a Wee Giggle. In this romantic comedy with a score played mostly on the harpsichord, Devlin and Quinn fall completely in love with each other’s quirks after finding each other through Apartment Therapy. “That’s a Cute Credenza,” a duet, illuminates the moment when we fall headsies-over-heelsies in luv with our bespectacled protagonists:

DEVLIN: But do you love Miranda July? And do you cry when Mayflies die?

QUINN: Did you see the poot I made? A violet-colored love grenade?

DEVLIN: You’re thirty-three but still a girl. Peter Pan collars you knit and perl.

QUINN: You wear a bow tie out to dine; I made a bunny out of twine.

Who needs conflict when you’ve got such an intricately woven tapestry of compatibility and superficial affection? Act One closes with the number “Install My Woolly Wally,” where Quinn hilariously struggles to set up her vertical garden. At the top of Act Two, Devlin wonders if he should go vegan, but decides against it (“Anemia’s Not Cute”). The show closes with Devlin and Quinn giving each other haircuts and gently making out to my personal homage to Joanna Newsom, “Milk Made From Yams.”

Tess Lynch is a writer and actor living in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared on This Recording, Urlesque, and on her Tumblr blog, Wipe Your Feet. She is currently working on her seventeenth musical, The Arsonist of Arsongrath.

Tully Mills is an illustrator in Boulder, Colorado who has been drawing pictures since he was four years-old and hasn’t seen a vast improvement.