Trivia / The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals

• Acting for Two: As is typical for a stage-show, everyone plays multiple roles, with the exception of the star, Jon Matteson as Paul. Lauren Lopez and Corey Dorris also play multiple roles, but each only have one important role (Emma for Lopez and Bill for Dorris).
  • Jaime Lyn Beatty plays Charlotte, Nora, Deb, and Colonel Schaffer.
  • Jeff Blim plays Mr. Davidson, Sam, the Man in a Hurry, and John MacNamara.
  • Mariah Rose Faith plays Zoey, Melissa, Doug, Alice, and the Greenpeace Girl.
  • Robert Manion plays Henry Hidgens and the Hot Chocolate Boy.
  • Joey Richter plays Ted Spankoffski and the Homeless Man.
• Blooper: A repeated problem for Robert Manion as Prof. Hidgens was his distractingly tight pants making it difficult to reach into his pockets to retrieve the syringe for the Instant Sedation scene with Emma. In the filmed YouTube version, you can see he tries and fails to get it back into his pocket and ends up casually tossing it to the ground. In another performance, he was unable to get it out of his pocket in the first place and instead ends up miming the injection.
  • There ended up being several in the live-streamed performance (not the official YouTube version), including but not limited to: Jeff struggling to put his sunglasses back on in "Show Me Your Hands", Lauren's shoe almost flying off in "Cup of Roasted Coffee", Robert apparently forgetting how to moonwalk in "Show Me Your Hands" and instead just stomping backwards, Robert messing up his lines in "Show Stoppin' Number" and Lauren visibly Corpsing as Joey woke up just before "Show Stoppin' Number". According to the cast commentary, there were apparently also numerous instances of the brains Jeff wears as the zombified Sam either slipping down his head or completely coming off.
• Colbert Bump: This show, along with the Hatchetfield franchise and Team Starkid in general, got a massive one when famous Minecraft YouTuber Ranboo decided to stream TGWDLM on his alt Twitch account to over 25,000 viewers on March 19, 2021, causing a huge influx of crossover fans to the Starkid community, bringing new memes with them. It was a big enough bump to kick "Starkid" and "The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals" into a trending topic on multiple social media platforms, several members of Team Starkid tweeted acknowledging and welcoming the new fans, and much of Starkid Twitter/YouTube/Tumblr ended up creating "explainer" posts to introduce the newcomers to the rest of Starkid's oeuvre.
• Creator In-Joke: Workin' Boys is an in-joke going back fourteen years to Team Starkid's college years, with Darren Criss making an in-joke of what he thought was the worst possible idea for a musical based on running a single hoary, self-indulgent cliché (successful middle-aged men reminiscing about their Glory Days) into the ground.
  • Coincidentally, a musical with exactly this premise, Glory Days, famously flopped after one performance on Broadway in 2008.
  • There's extra Irony in Darren and Nick Lang laughing at the backstory of this joke, since it's older guys bonding over college memories of a joke at the expense of older guys bonding over college memories.
  • The fact that Glory Days is a nearly exact match for everything mocked by Workin' Boys — including the highly specific jab that the musical's takes place in real time and is entirely confined to one location, the football field — has raised speculation that Darren and Nick were in fact doing a direct Take That! at that show, especially since one of the creators of Glory Days, Nick Blaemire, graduated from the University of Michigan musical theatre program shortly before they did. (It should also be noted the "punchline" of the "Workin' Boys" song, the fact that it's only been a week since the boys last saw each other, could also be a swipe at an often-mocked element of Glory Days' premise — the characters are meeting up to reminisce only one year after graduation.)
• Defictionalization: The "Workin' Boys" gag has become so popular and demand for a "real" Workin' Boys so strong that some form of Workin' Boys content was made a stretch goal for the Starkid 10th Anniversary Kickstarter — much to the Lang Brothers' frustration, as the whole point was that it was the worst idea possible for a story and they had no idea how to extend it beyond one joke. Ultimately, Workin' Boys became a short film about Professor Hidgens's goal to get his musical produced.
• Deleted Scene: One of the major Headscratchers for this show would've been answered in the original script — Col. Schaeffer was not intended to be infected and her offer of a new life to Emma was genuine, which would've been shown by Schaeffer showing up after the first verse of "Inevitable" with her weapon drawn only to be ambushed and killed by the zombified nurse. Unfortunately, the concept for "Inevitable" required Jaime Lyn Beatty to return as Nora for the line "Get your cup of coffee!" as a callback to "Cup of Roasted Coffee", so this moment had to be cut to give Jaime time for the quick change.
• Dueling Shows: A bit of a one-sided duel, since one was a full-budget movie and the other a regional theatre production filmed for YouTube, but thanks to bizarre synchronicity Anna and the Apocalypse did the Horror Comedy Zombie Apocalypse musical High Concept the year before this show, and got a release in US cinemas in November 2018, right after The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals' run in LA. Adding to the synchronicity, many Starkid fans noticed that Sarah Swire as Steph in this film looks and acts eerily similar to Lauren Lopez as Draco Malfoy from A Very Potter Musical.
• Irony as She Is Cast: Prof. Hidgens is clearly meant to be the oldest of the main characters, while Robert Manion at 26 is one of the youngest members of the cast. (Lampshaded with the Vocal Dissonance of Hidgens suddenly becoming The Ingenue when he begins singing the title track of Working Boys.)
  • To some degree this applies to the whole show, since it's a musical about how musicals are dangerous and evil; hence the Stylistic Suck of most of the cast showing they can't sing in order to prove they're uninfected (and hence the surprise pulled on the audience, who mostly didn't know that Jon Matteson, the titular Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals, is an experienced musical theatre performer). Special mention goes to how Emma watches "Showstopping Number" in horror and revulsion when Lauren Lopez choreographed that number in Real Life.
  • In one scene Emma makes fun of her coworker Zoey for majoring in theatre. Lauren Lopez joined Team Starkid when it was still a college based Theatre troupe. (And, of course, Starkid's internet fame came from their college performance of A Very Potter Musical). Mariah Rose Faith, who plays Zoey, did not go to school for theatre despite being told to, as she did not want to lose her enjoyment for it.
• No Budget: Starkid was never known for having a huge budget to work with, but Nick Lang described this season in particular as a "rebuilding" year. Unlike the relatively lavish production Firebringer was, this show has a minimalist set in a small black box venue, a cast of only eight compared to Firebringer's thirteen, and no expensive gimmicks like elaborate puppets or bespoke costumes (just costumes built from regular clothes plus standard cop/army uniforms). Despite — or perhaps because of — these limitations, the show has been a huge hit and revived the dormant Starkid fandom. (It's notable that this show has escaped one common complaint about Starkid shows, of being too long and having unnecessary filler scenes.)
  • The sheer amount of choreography for this show combined with the modest budget to rent space and pay for people's time meant that the opening night performance was the first full run-through of the show with all tech in place — a level of crunch matching the old A Very Potter Musical days in college. Amazingly, opening night audiences reported it went off without a hitch.
  • It seems doubly justified to attribute this show's success to its relative Minimalism in the wake of complaints that the sequel, Black Friday, was underwhelming because the bigger budget and cast brought back the curse of an overstuffed script and overambitious storytelling.
• Old Shame: Amusingly, Nick Lang's turn as Emma when Lauren got sick has become this for him (but not the rest of the cast), since he's stated that his artistic vision as writer/director was always to have Lauren play Emma and he wasn't really a proper understudy (being unconfident in his singing voice and having only learned the choreography last minute), and that he only went on as an understudy rather than calling off the show because Emma is one of the characters with the fewest singing parts in the show (next to Bill) and because this performance was on opening weekend and being attended by high-level Kickstarter backers who'd traveled to see it. He's also hinted in one livestream that since the old days of A Very Potter Sequel he's become uncomfortable with the possibly transphobic vibe of casting a man in a female role, at least when done badly and Played for Laughs. (Word of God emphasizes that regardless of who played her, Emma is intended to be a cis woman.) In any case, he seems distressed that fans have latched onto Nick-as-Emma as a Lost Episode they desperately want to see, and has emphasized that no recordings of it exist and if they did he wouldn't release them.
• Promoted Fanboy:
  • Robert Manion, a Starkid fan originally from Australia, returns after his ensemble role in Twisted: The Untold Story of a Royal Vizier to a main cast role as Prof. Hidgens.
  • Also applies to Mariah Rose Faith, who had been a fan of A Very Potter Musical long before meeting and working with people from Team Starkid.
• Throw It In!: Mariah Rose Faith revealed that the gag with the zombies failing to Speak in Unison is because she, Jaime Lyn Beatty and Lauren Lopez really did struggle with this in rehearsal. (Ironically, executing this joke required more practice speaking in unison than the original line did.)
  • Many Starkid fans were fans of Emma's hairstyle and asked how it was done, only for Lauren Lopez to reveal that this is just how she puts up her hair normally (when she's not wearing a wig to play a little boy).
  • When Nick Lang filled in for Lauren Lopez as Emma he was able to do so thanks to already having shaved his legs to play Annie for Halloween, and having a wig from a previous costume where he played Sporty Spice.
  • Originally the dance move on "Should we kill him? Should we kill him?" in the Opening Chorus was meant to resemble Dracula (1931) holding his cape, but it looked so much like dabbing they decided to just go with it, and the Starkid fandom "aggressive dabbing" meme was born.
• Wag the Director: Minor example — Lauren Lopez has mentioned before that she doesn't really like stage kissing and prefers to avoid it if possible, and as a result Nick Lang was willing to accommodate her by subverting the Big Damn Kiss trope and instead pulling a Bait-and-Switch gag with her coughing up blood and killing the moment.
• What Could Have Been: Behind the scenes videos reveal certain elements were deleted from the final choreography for practicality and time that fans wish they'd seen, like an elaborate "human train" dance the whole cast minus Paul performed in the Opening Chorus.
  • The behind the scenes videos also reveal the original scratch tracks Jeff Blim wrote and recorded for the show, which differ in some ways from the final lyrics and reveal a few tantalizing things about the characters. For instance, the original lyrics of "La Dee Dah Dah Day" reveal that Greenpeace Girl's bad attitude was partly due to her financial troubles:
  Greenpeace Girl: You could pay off your rent
  It's way past due
  But I'll make you a bet
  Just a smile will do!
  • Originally a full length solo was written for General MacNamara, "Red-Blooded Americans", which was cut for time and replaced with the shorter punchier ensemble number "America Is Great Again".
  • The original script for the show, made available to Kickstarter backers, has a few memorable bits that didn't make it into the final show, like Alice briefly becoming a Mad Prophet and quoting Isaiah 14:12 when she sees the meteor^note How you have fallen from heaven, morning star, son of the dawn! You have been cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations! implying the Hive Mind is Lucifer, or an impressive Shown Their Work bit about Hidgens predicting the musical apocalypse based on the historical phenomenon of St. Anthony's fire.
  • The original script also had a more explicit reference to Sam being a Dirty Cop, having him steal a baggie of cocaine from the evidence locker as a gift for Zoey.
  • Contrary to the Old Shame entry above, there are many fans — including Lauren herself — who really, really wish there were a recorded version of Nick Lang playing Emma, especially ones who've been a fan of his comedic acting and ability to play The Woobie since Holy Musical B@man! and Little White Lie.
  • The line "And a new trash tattoo!" in "La Dee Dah Dah Day" originally would've made a bit more sense, with the Homeless Man pulling a half-empty bottle of ketchup out of the trash and drawing on his face with it. Unfortunately, this had to be cut because it was too messy to clean up in between scenes, and replaced with a halfhearted reference to the original bit with Joey Richter just putting a strip of toilet paper across his shoulders.
  • One choreography rehearsal for "Inevitable" shows that it was sticking with the scripted version where the military had actually rescued Emma, but the Hive Mind had survived Paul's Heroic Sacrifice and made it to the mainland. When the military officer sees the zombies ambushing Emma, she tries to fire at them but gets attacked from behind. This got cut for the reasons stated above, that Jaime needed more time to change into her Nora outfit, leaving many audience members under the impression that Schaeffer was a zombie all along and setting Emma up.
• Word of God: Team Starkid clarified a couple things through social media about the show:
  • The No Such Agency is called the "PEIP" unit because PEIP stands for "Paranormal, Extraterrestrial, and Interdimensional Phenomena".
  • Hatchetfield is a fictional town that, like previous Starkid productions set somewhere in the real world, is located in their home state of Michigan.
  • Despite the Downer Ending where Hatchetfield is completely assimilated and the rest of the world will soon follow, the Langs expressed an interest in returning to the setting in a future show, implying either a prequel or some kind of Sequel Reset. Over time, it became clear that every installment in the Hatchetfield series takes place in an alternate universe, each introducing a different horror element to the setting.
  • The Langs also allowed that the fan theory that Paul is to some degree faking being assimilated and Fighting from the Inside in the ending is something they considered, and Emma may not necessarily be doomed.
  • Nick Lang came out again to address a specific issue that bothered him — he has officially debunked the Villain Has a Point interpretation of the show where the Hive Mind is the real hero of the story. Being assimilated is death — a physically and psychologically agonizing death — and the resulting zombies are not the original people, or indeed people at all, they're puppets used by the Hive Mind as a mask. Whether or not the original personality survives buried deep inside somewhere, the promise the Hive Mind makes that it will make you happy and give you peace is a lie, and every assimilation in the show should be mourned as a death. (Which, yes, means that Hidgens was indeed quite insane and his betrayal qualifies as a Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum.)
  • Nick came back after the release of Black Friday and revealed that the "Hatchetfield universe" is a lot deeper and more detailed than people who saw this show initially realized. One major revelation is that the Hive Mind entity in this show has a backstory, including having a "true name" and a history for why it acts the way it does, which he promised to reveal if the Hatchetfield series continues. Said entity appears to be Pokotho, one of the quintet of Arc Villains who have been slowly revealing themselves since Black Friday.
  • One totally random revelation ended up being that Peanuts the Pocket Squirrel, despite being referred to as "he/him" by everyone including his owner, was female the whole time.
  • The Fan Nickname of Ted's last name being "Porker" led Nick to tantalize fans by saying his actual name can't be revealed because it's a "spoiler". His name was eventually revealed in Nightmare Time to be Ted Spankoffski; the element of it being a "spoiler" was because Nerdy Prudes Must Die was intended to be the third installment of the Hatchetfield series, and stars Ted's brother Peter Spankoffski, with the reveal that the two are brothers presumably having originally meant to come later down the line; the need to produce two seasons of Nightmare Time before Nerdy Prudes ever came out led to Ted's name being revealed before Peter's proper introduction.
  • When asked a seemingly innocuous question about which Starkid cast member he'd most like to see play Emma's unseen sister Jane, Nick Lang also expressed that it would be a spoiler to say so at that time. This is because a future installment did allow Jane to appear, in which she was played by Jaime Lyn Beatty.
  • In order to also add to the Fanfic Fuel, he added that Charlotte and Sam weren't meant to be permanently dead even after Prof. Hidgens dissected them, since the Bizarre Alien Biology means that all the zombies are made of nothing but alien cells shaped to look like human puppets, and the Hive Mind can regenerate any body over time if it wants to. (Paul, after all, was at ground zero of a huge explosion in "Let It Out".)
  • Charlotte was, in fact, cheating serially on Sam just as Sam was cheating on her, with Ted far from her first fling — in fact, she was intended to be revealed as cheating on Sam with their couples' therapist.
  • Nick Lang has revealed the answer to one Riddle for the Ages — the woman in the photo of "Carol", Mr. Davidson's wife, is not any member or acquaintance of Team Starkid, but just a a stock photo pulled from Google Image Search.
  • After the release of Nightmare Time, Nick Lang indirectly confirmed that Pokotho was the cause of the Hive Mind, pointing out that the blue matter on his mask looks an awful lot like the "blue shit" found in Sam's skull after he's assimiliated.
• Word of Saint Paul: Jon Matteson has addressed a couple of fan theories about his character:
  • He accepts the fan theory that Paul knows the lyrics to Moana better than Bill because he stayed closer to Alice than Bill did after the divorce, despite Bill's best efforts, and went to watch it with her.
  • He believes Paul, like many people who performatively hate musical theatre, is a Hypocrite who was hiding a secret love of musicals — or desire to find a musical he actually liked — underneath it all, meaning the internal conflict during "Let It Out" wasn't all created by the meteor.
  • The Opening Chorus saying "his name is in the title" despite the title not having the word "Paul" is because Paul was such a nonentity at the office most people really did just know him at "the guy who doesn't like musicals".
  • Although the Langs left it ambiguous when directing the show, Jon Matteson did have a specific choice in mind during the last scene for whether Paul really is fully assimilated or is still resisting, but has chosen to leave this as a Riddle for the Ages.
    • During a Twitch stream, Jon finally decided to reveal his choice for the scene: Paul is fully assimilated, although he did admit to playing around with it for some of the non-taped performances.
  • Jon's description of how he played the "La Dee Dah Dah Day" scene reveals the Background Music is emitted telepathically by the Hive Mind and is inaudible to anyone who isn't already assimilated, which goes a long way to explaining why the uninfected have such a Freak Out reaction to it — the choreographed dancing and singing is a lot creepier when you imagine it taking place against dead silence.
  • While Jon has chosen to leave the ending ambiguous, Robert Manion and Lauren Lopez are both clear that their headcanon is that Emma dies in horrible agony immediately after the curtain falls. Lauren even specified she imagines Emma being "torn limb from limb" (as the Hive Mind previously threatened to do to Paul).
  • Robert Manion has also weighed in to debunk a popular fan theory — he strongly believes that Prof. Hidgens is not already partially possessed or influenced by the Hive Mind when he turns against humanity, and that he really always was just a messed up person to begin with.The Hatchetfield Ape-Man seems to prove him correct.
  • Jaime Lyn Beatty has randomly revealed that, just to make Charlotte even more The Woobie, Charlotte acts like a Crazy Cat Lady and has a lot of cat-themed merchandise but doesn't have any actual cats, because she's deathly allergic. No wonder she's lonely enough to latch onto Ted, of all people.
  • Mariah Rose Faith shared an Instagram story of her practicing the choreography of "Show Me Your Hands" and saying she headcanons that her cop character in this scene is non-binary and named "Doug". (Given Nick Lang's stated strong feelings about not casting cis people in transgender or non-binary roles, this is almost certainly not canon.)
  • Joey Richter got into the Word of Saint Paul game, dropping the random bit of trivia that the death and assimilation of his Bit Character businessman ("Mr. Business") in "Cup of Roasted Coffee" isn't all that tragic, since he's both kind of a jerk and a resident of Clivesdale.
• Written by Cast Member: Jeff Blim wrote the songs for this show, as he did The Trail to Oregon! Notably he did not cast himself as the main character this time — which would mean he couldn't sing for most of the show — but his characters (who are relatively minor in the plot) do get a disproportionate number of solos.