Hear Me Out… Some Crumbs of Potential SING! Ideas

You might be thinking that this article is really, really late, because SING! was weeks ago. How badly did we procrastinate on this? But no, this article is actually extremely early and intended for SING! 2027, because it is never too early to start planning. Sure, the freshmen who will participate in next year’s SING! will not see this article, but everyone knows the sophomores do all the heavy lifting for SophFrosh anyway. If there are any freshmen next year who are dedicated to SING!, they can dig through the archives of The Spectator to find the glorious, poetic, eternally-green insights revealed in this article. From a list of dozens of theme ideas generated under the influence of distilled powdered Celsius, we narrowed down the top two. Behold!

1. Quarantine

The curtains open on a man in a heavy orange spray-tan and a yellow wig giving a press release. L&S plays the sound of a loud camera flash on loop. Random extras we stole from the Latin Dance Crew shout “Mr. President!” and wave microphones in the man’s face. Suddenly, he speaks! 

“Folks, let me tell you, we’re gonna roll out these COVID quarantines like nobody’s ever seen before, tremendous quarantines, the best, the strongest, believe me! We’re going to slam these lockdowns down so fast, so strong, it’s gonna make the China virus shake in its boots and say, ‘Sir, please, no more!’ And let me tell you, these quarantines are going to be so effective, so smart, so powerful, that America will come out stronger, healthier, and more dominant than any nation in history—nobody does it better than us, nobody!” 

The stage is filled with raucous applause. Everyone claps for the president’s thoughtfulness and proletarian spirit in making sure all Americans, including those reading at the third-grade level, can understand him. A gray curtain comes down and ends the introductory scene. 

For the rest of the show, the setting will be the streets of New York City, 10 minutes after the 7:00 p.m. city-wide clapping. In the absence of humans, the streets will be controlled by two rival gangs. On one side: subway rats, especially those which are heavy steroid abusers. These rats will be played by whichever dance crew has the second largest number of members, because there is nothing in the SING! rulebook against drafting people who already agreed to being part of SING!… probably? Not that we’ve ever actually read the rulebook. Reading the rulebook is way below the pay grade of the Stuyvesant Disrespectator, please!

The crime syndicate opposing the rats will be the street pigeons. These pigeons will also be played by a dance crew in order to flawlessly integrate dance scenes as presentations of our rival gangs. The actual plot will be completely plagiarized from West Side Story with a forbidden romance between a rat and a pigeon. This plotline has already been done in so many different settings, from 1400s Italy to Harlem to Leonardo DiCaprio’s beach hood… what’s one more? Just ctrl+c, ctrl+v, and add the costumes and gratuitous cameos of iconic NYC landmarks like the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, and 345 Chambers Street.

2. Tricer-amilton

Another possible SING! theme is one where we dress every lead actor up as a dinosaur. It is important to note that you can only attempt this theme if you have a passing-grade level Costumes department! (Please don’t pull a Soph-Frosh and just buy a zillion of those blowup T-Rex costumes that are always at Stuyloween). As for the non-Cast kids, dance crews can just wear all green and be leaves or something (the strat is to buy thousands of plastic leaves off of Amazon and glue them to cheap white clothing to barely get the points for modifying costumes). Alternatively, dancers could be used to represent the main character’s mental disorientation and anguish. Or his haters. This is up to the actual costumes department.

The main character in this play will be a dinosaur named A-Rex-sander Hamilton, a scientist now driven mad by his revelation that the Earth is not flat. His long-term, low-commitment situationship, Fossil-liza, shows up soon for their weekly “not-date,” and they go out to their usual cliff over the ocean to “study together.” A-Rex tries to show her that when a raft sails far enough on the ocean, it is hidden by the curve of the earth. [Sidenote: We have no idea how Tech will manage this; lock in I guess.] While the two of them are arguing, she takes a wrong step, slips, and falls off the edge.

Struck by the horror of being responsible for her death, A-Rex wanders deep into the forest on the verge of insanity. He comes across a mother dinosaur telling her clutch of itty bitty dinosaurs a bedtime story. The story is about cursed lovers from an era long ago who, instead of being influential and leaving a mark on history, chose to elope. This decision ironically backfired because their love story is now the only thing left of that historical period. 

The story reminds A-Rex of his situationship, who he would never have eloped with, or even confessed to, because that wouldn’t have been tuff or nonchalant. Think of the aura loss! Then, thinking of it again, he realizes that this attitude is what cost him the last months he could’ve spent with her. Nonchalance is a scam. He finally sheds his fear of losing aura and becomes a new man.

A-Rex then goes to George Wash-iguanodon and asks for federal funding to sail a ship all the way around the world and prove his discovery. With his request granted, he becomes like his era’s Christopher Columbus, except that there are no other continents for him to discover, because at the time, it is all Pangaea. When he arrives home, the scientific community is shocked. As he walks through the streets on his way to Antibacteriall Street (Wall Street but for research), kids call him cringe. “Bro thinks he’s all that,” they say. He smiles and accepts the fact that prioritizing your reputation is a waste of time and being cringe is the only way to be happy.

All right, those were our two theme suggestions for a potential future SING! Considering that the play is only an hour long, and communicating major plot points to the audience has been a problem for SING!s in the past, these themes might be too complex for an hour-long play. But… how hard can it really be? Stuy is like, the best school in the city or whatever; this is totally light work. We can make it happen. After all, we have a whole 11 months until the official start of SING! season. We could just do 90 percent of the work over the summer and then use the actual SING! time to just bring that work in and put it together. I mean, probably. Remember, we didn’t actually read the SING! rules.