September 26, 2013

“Homeland”: The Broadway Musical!


Homeland, Showtime’s Emmy-winning drama, returns for its third season on Sunday. While they’re waiting, fans of the series can check out Homeland: The Musical. It’s a small production, blending the show’s war-on-terrorism thrills with jazz-hands theatricality. “Homeland is such a serious show, a big time drama; it was time for a lighthearted spin on it,” says Brendan McMorrow, a producer with Above Average, a NYC-based entertainment platform created by Lorne Michaels‘ Broadway Video. “There was some on-the-fly choreography, some throwback to Bob Fosse moves in there…Carrie Mathison is like something out of Chicago, and we have a little bit of Guys and Dolls thrown in there, for example.”

The musical will not, however, be debuting on Broadway any time soon. The video is a parody—a four-minute promo for a garish and fake musical adaptation. It was posted to this week to the YouTube page of Above Average, which specializes in promoting original comedy shorts. The sketch and lyrics were written and performed by comedian Eliot Glazer, the guy behind “Shit New Yorkers Say.”

Homeland: The Musical was intended as both a loving send-up of the Showtime series and as a riff on Broadway’s addiction to adapting popular on-screen fare—Legally Blonde, Catch Me If You Can, Billy Elliot, The Wedding Singer—to the stage and pumping them full of song, dance, and artificial cheer. Glazer pitched the idea to McMorrow about six months ago, but shelved the idea until the season-three premiere got closer.

In the past month, they booked their cast of Broadway singers and actors and quickly recorded vocals at a Broadway Video facility. Production and editing then took roughly two weeks. (Scenes were shot in the Producers’ Club, a small improv theater in Manhattan.)

McMorrow says that as of this week, there are no plans to extend their short into a full-blown Homeland musical. “Our office sits next to The Book of Mormon [playing at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre], though, so we might be in a good position to do that,” he says. Glazer is about as open to the idea. “Could I write a whole Homeland musical? It’s definitely a possibility,” Glazer told Mashable. “It would be very Sondheim, if Sondheim was lobotomized and hadn’t seen a live play since 1988. Sorry, 1978, not ’88.”

WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

payment methods

WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate