Photos by Maria Baranova

 

 

                                    

                                 By Eugene Paul

 

 

Let’s say that the musical Be More Chill now playing to sold out houses at its Off-Broadway Pershing Square Signature Center moved to the Palace Theatre, 1743 seats on Broadway, and sold out there for a year.  That’s 517,088 tickets.  Let’s fantasize, let’s sell out for ten years. 5,170,880 tickets. Oh, what the hell, let’s go bonkers and sell out for 100 years. 51,708,800 tickets.

 

That’s how many hits the Be More Chill album totted up in ONE year on the web. For each of THREE years.  So far.

 

When the Two River Theater in Red Bank, New Jersey released a cast album in 2015 of their short run, so-so reviewed latest musical, Be More Chill, there was no expectation, none, that the album would garner more than a trifling response, friends, family, maybe the morbidly curious. Gobsmacked after the first year, they knew they had to do something and when the album reached 100,000,000 by the second year, everybody got feverishly to work. The fever is still rising.

 

To observe an audience –75% teen age girls – react to the songs by Joe Iconis delivered in a calculated, coordinated  bombardment of Ryan Rumery’s sound designs , Tyler Micoleau’s lighting designs, Alex Baso Koch’s projection designs and Beowulf Boritt’s  enveloping set designs in combination with a cast electrified with their success, swathed in zoned out tuned in costumes by Bobby Frederick Tilley II is to experience the very essence of the show: gulp down  a pill and zoom from utter high school loserness to utter worldly maxpop. The showcrafters have struck a nerve of widespread rawest vulnerability.

 

In the book of the musical by Joe Tracz (based on Ned Vizzini’s novel), teen ager Jeremy Heere lives in deepest New Jersey with his forlorn dad (Jason Sweettooth Wiliams) who hasn’t got dressed since his wife left them a couple of years ago. Jeremy has a special bud, Michael Mell (George Salazar) and develops a crush on a special girl, Christine Canigula (Stephanie Hsu) who is not in the big league popular high school vamps and might consider a loser like him.  Except that there’s Jake Dillinger (Britton Smith).  All Jake has to do is beckon and Christine melts. In this dire contretemps, Rich Goranski (Gerard Canonico) campus bully turned sudden hotshot, offers Jeremy the way to shed his wimpish loserness:  buy a Squip. It’s a pill which contains a tiny computer that will work miracles in his brain, in his whole system, turn him into BMOC. Rich took it.  And look at him. Only $400.

 

Convinced, desperate  Jeremy ravages his savings, buys the fateful pill and swallows it.  To discover that he now has a full time companion, The Squip (Jason Tam) who sports a whole range of scifi outfits and wigs and lives in Jeremy’s brain.  Nobody else can see him or hear him as he directs Jeremy into super confidence, wit and popularity, making every one of Jeremy’s choices and decisions. It’s all so easy.

 

Not for director Stephen Brackett. He’s got to keep his high wire act  going and he’s doing a bang up job along with choreographer Chase Brock’s balancings and Emily Marshall’s music direction and vocal arrangements and Charlie Rosen’s music orchestrations and supervision. But where’s he going to go in the second act: follow the yellow brick road to tried and true or – new directions? He’s got a cast that can do anything he wants, they’re terrific.  He’s got a score that’s already a gigantic hit. He’s got so many successful production elements zooming and crackling and  flashing and crashing it’s as if the Squip was being pounded into everybody’s head on stage and in the audience.  The music never stops during intermission even. But it’s up to him to choose: tried and true or really new?

 

He turns up the volume for eyes and ears. He chooses more and more.  And more and more. Of everything. Except new. There’s bound to be at least 200,000,000 hits by the end of this year. Maybe – it’s the Squip?

                                                         

Be More Chill. At the Pershing Square Signature Center, 480 West 42^nd Street.  Tickets: $65-$160. 2 hrs 20 min. 212-279-4200. Thru Sept 30.