I Gotta Be Meme

    The shows on Broadway all closed months ago, and the Great White Way will remain dark for at least another few months. But some people just gotta sing, gotta dance, and so musicals are beginning to blossom on...TikTok?

     Yep, TikTok, the app that lets you make and share brief videos with the world, beloved especially by The Young People, be-loathed by a president who tried to ban it (and then seemingly forgot about it). All sorts of people and memes have gone viral on TikTok. One of them is Grocery Store: The Musical.

    It all began when a young composer/music director named Daniel Mertzlufft posted a silly little ditty about a marital argument amongst the dry goods. Then other TikTok-ers began adding themselves to the musical, creating a duet, then a trio, and so on. By now there are hundreds of variants. People have sung as a can of soup, a squeaky grocery cart wheel, an automatic door...

    This is all impressive/goofy/weird enough, but now Mertzlufft is part of an even bigger TikTok collab called Ratatouille: The Musical. Somehow Disney/Pixar has not gotten around to making a tune-filled extravaganza about this culinarily talented rat, so the internet has stepped up. A plethora of people has stepped up to contribute songs, choreography, puppets, even a playbill for this notional productions. Behold, a sampling:

    Projects like this are enough to make a person feel excited about the internet again, in spite of...basically everything else that happens on the internet. They are a reminder that many of us have creative tools at our disposal that would have seemed like pure magic a mere half-century ago. Let's hope the artists behind Ratatouille: The Musical meet up in person one day and stage their show at least once. A mere plague is not enough to dim the glittery spirit of Broadway!