While musicals often have the reputation of unreality and happy endings, there are those musicals that have a dramatic poignancy that stick and stay with you. Musicals like The Sound of Music, Funny Girl, and Les Miserables have such poignancy and always speak to the strength of the human spirit amid personal and national adversities. Then there are musicals like Rent that captures a fairly recent time and captures the moment in dramatic song. Everything is Okay (and other helpful lies) has that dramatic poignancy and captures our time today, for people my age and younger.
While I could be accused of bias because I stage managed this musical in last year’s Entry Point, and I have known Melissa Crum and Caitlin Lewins for collectively close to ten years, I can honestly say that it takes an excellent production that makes you forget you have a job to do because it speaks to you. I found myself doing my job better because I believe in this musical.
I was going through a lot of personal stuff at the time I was assigned to tech for Entry Point, and while I didn’t say much and did my job, it’s like the music and lyrics came from my heart, and I didn’t know my heart had music and lyrics. On days I struggle a bit, I still sing lyrics from this musical.
I don’t have to smile today.
I don’t have to hope today.
I believe in you.
I believe in us.
I can do it on my own.
Feeling uncertainty, I am still breathing in and breathing out.
Maybe people will dismiss this as the millennial musical, but this is my young adulthood. Musicals come when they are needed, and this musical has helped me heal. I want this to succeed that if I fall into a financial windfall, I will produce the next iteration.
I hope this musical will speak to you. I hope these characters’ journefy touch you. We have here a musical where it is okay to not be okay. In the age where we are gradually stigmatizing mental health issues, this musical is medicinal and touches on the reality of uncertainty and the desire for the truth of living authentically in inauthentic times. Please see this.
