First things first: “The Musical” is indeed about a musical. Your next question will then likely be, “Well, what kind of musical is it?”
Well, and this must be established up front, it’s a 9/11 musical. Or, at least, it’s a musical about making a 9/11 musical as tasteless and unabashedly ridiculous as one could possibly imagine. The film finds a bitter and insecure middle-school teacher and aspiring playwright putting together that musical to sabotage his principal. As this film lays out in hilarious, if slightly overstretched, detail, spite can be both a creative and destructive force.
The 9/11 of it all is revealed in a great gag right at the beginning, leading into a ridiculous title sequence and setting this destructive comedy in motion. Once it sets off down that path, there’s no going back.
As directed by Giselle Bonilla from a script by Alexander Heller, “The Musical” is about how the deeply troubled and entitled Doug, played by a wonderful Will Brill (a Tony winner for “Sterophonic”), sets out to use a 9/11 musical to take down Principal Brady (Rob Lowe), who has begun dating his ex-girlfriend (Gillian Jacobs). He wants to prevent Brady from getting the supposedly prestigious “Blue Ribbon of Excellence” and decides he’ll swap the planned production of “West Side Story” for a secret one about 9/11 that he has written himself.
The film, consistently funny before going out with a bang, is as much about the insecurities of artists and the miseries of middle school theater as it is about the 9/11 musical. “The Musical” doesn’t minimize this real moment in history or the immense impact it had on the world. Quite the opposite, in fact.
While this is a good thing in that the film never bites off more than it can chew, “The Musical” doesn’t offer much biting humor or many incisive observations; though it can be deliriously and darkly funny, it’s an occasionally empty experience. But when it all builds to the uproarious finale, the production is a gleefully triumphant one as the entire world it’s built up comes crashing down.
Lowe is appropriately smarmy, and Jacobs, despite being underutilized, becomes the perfect foil to the two different yet equally insecure men around her. However, it’s Brill who gives an all-timer of a comedic performance.
The way he dumps his character’s baggage onto the naive children looking up to him, or projects his own disappointments in life onto them, is endlessly funny but also shows the ugly resentment festering within him. Doug is a chaotic wrecking ball of a man, one you wouldn’t want to get trapped in a room with — and yet can’t look away as he intentionally wreaks havoc on his little world.
There’s nothing that can suck the fun out of humor more than explaining too much about why it works, but Brill’s performance is proof that comedic acting is just as valuable as its dramatic counterpart. We must fully buy into the psychology of his character for the well-written and delivered jokes to work; without Brill being anything short of completely believable, all of this would fall flat.
Thankfully, he and the wonderful ensemble of kids are all pitch-perfect even while putting on their musical, an intentional comedic disaster of epic proportion. The finale they all perform together is a showstopper, delivering on everything the film had promised and then some.
That this is Bonilla’s feature directorial debut makes one only hope she keeps making comedies like this, as every escalation, cutaway, and lighting cue is perfectly executed. Doug may be a terrible director, but she proves to be a great one.
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