I am a big fan of comedy that pushes the envelope. When I look back on my life and think about the comedians and comedy troupes I grew up watching, the one thing they all had in common was that they never played it safe. In my opinion, comedy should not be criticized for tackling subject matters that make people uncomfortable. It should be embraced, because in the darkest moments of our lives, laughter helps break through the pain. It is often the best medicine and serves as a healthy outlet for expressing our frustrations and criticisms about our lives and the world around us.
The Musical is a film I honestly never thought would be made today. I will be referring frequently to Hamlet 2 throughout this review, as so much of this film reminded me of it. Ironically, Hamlet 2 also premiered at Sundance, though much earlier, back in 2008.
The Musical stars Will Brill as Doug Leibowitz, a playwright with big dreams of moving to New York City to become a world-renowned artist. Unfortunately, life is not going as planned. His girlfriend has recently broken up with him, and in an era where people are often judged by box-checking rather than genuine passion or merit, Doug is likely to be overlooked for a prestigious program he desperately wants to join in New York.
As if things were not already bad enough, Doug learns at the start of the new school year that his ex-girlfriend is now dating the school’s principal, played to perfection by Rob Lowe. Enraged by these circumstances and feeling increasingly sidelined by the world around him, Doug devises a secret plan to sabotage the school’s chances of winning the coveted Blue Ribbon prize by creating a new controversial musical that he must keep secret from everyone, including his colleagues.
While Hamlet 2 is not a film about revenge, its premise is strikingly similar to that of The Musical. In Hamlet 2, the lead character, Dana Marschz, played by Steve Coogan, is a struggling artist whose life is falling apart, and he is forced to take a job as a high school drama teacher in Tucson, Arizona. In an effort to save the school’s drama department, Dana creates a wildly controversial new musical titled Hamlet 2, a so-called spiritual sequel to Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
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When the production finally debuts, parents react with shock and outrage, labeling the show crude, offensive, and ethically questionable. The school is quickly engulfed in backlash, drawing national attention and controversy that threatens its reputation. As with The Musical, the chaos that follows is less focused on helping the school than on burning it to the ground.
The reason I am drawing a correlation between these two films is not simply to highlight their surface-level similarities, but to examine how both exhibit a very specific style of comedy. It is a brand of humor that deliberately pushes boundaries through wildly inappropriate situations, most notably an overarching premise in which a teacher exploits his students as part of an elaborate scheme designed solely to satisfy his own needs and desires. In both cases, the audacity of the concept is the point, challenging the viewer to laugh at situations that are intentionally uncomfortable, provocative, and ethically absurd.
I also admire Alexander Heller’s script for its intelligent skewering of woke culture, cancel culture, and performative virtue signaling. Rob Lowe’s Principal Brady feels like a more grounded, true-to-life version of PC Principal from South Park. Where South Park often pushes the satire to extremes, as Trey Parker and Matt Stone are famously unconcerned with who they offend, Heller takes a more restrained approach. Principal Brady presents himself as relentlessly upbeat and personable. Still, as the film unfolds, it becomes clear that his decisions are not motivated by what is best for the students or community. Instead, they are driven by self-preservation and optics, revealing a character more concerned with appearing morally correct than with genuine accountability in the so-called woke world he is desperate to appease.
Doug Leibowitz is not an easy character to root for. Unlike most teacher-centric films, Will Brill portrays Doug as a deeply self-serving asshole who cares far more about tearing down the system than about his students’ futures. The students, desperate for attention and validation, go along with his plan simply because they want to be seen. Through Doug’s constant rhetoric about fighting the man and rejecting the system, they buy into what he is selling, unaware that they are being manipulated to serve his personal agenda.
The idea of West Side Story being used as a facade to make a 9/11 musical is so outrageously funny, especially when you see how it all plays out in the final act. What is particularly interesting is that despite being called The Musical, the film itself features only one musical sequence, and even that is not shown in its entirety. As much as I loved the movie, I would be lying if I said I was not a bit disappointed by the lack of additional musical numbers in the final act. What we do see is quite ballsy and hilarious, but giving the students one or two full songs addressing the subject matter head-on could have added another layer of absurdity and fun.
At the end of the day, I am grateful and thrilled that a film like The Musical could be made and embraced by the Sundance crowd. Comedies that dare to tackle controversial themes or center unapologetic antiheroes are increasingly rare, so seeing one land with an audience felt genuinely refreshing. I truly hope the film finds a distributor, because fans of theater, musicals, and fearless comedies deserve the chance to experience this one with a crowd.
Scott Menzel’s rating for The Musical is a 9 out of 10.
