I’m not a theater reviewer, and I didn’t even sleep at a Holiday Inn Express last night (isn’t that great advertising, by the way, for exactly that reason?). Still, I have to report that Nerds: A Musical Software Satire was a lot of fun, especially if you have any kind of working knowledge of the history of Apple and Microsoft. Here’s a Playbill article that has more production details and a few performance photos.

Jordan Allen-Dutton and Erik Weiner are the writers (lately of Robot Chicken) who provide such theater lunacies as the Homebrew Computer Club in song and dance … Bill Gates and Paul Allen rapping (and breakdancing!) about Windows … an actor running up the center aisle wielding a hammer in a recreation of Apple’s 1984 ad … Steve Jobs singing about spiritual rebirth in a song called “Think Different” (the lyrics of which smartly reference many personalities featured in Apple’s well-known print campaign, such as Albert Einstein, Muhammad Ali and John Lennon) … Gates throwing money at the audience during the song-and-dance version of the antitrust trial … and, well, that should give you a general idea of the proceedings.

The play runs through February 27 at the Philadelphia Theater Company, and who knows what’ll happen to it after that. I think someone in the show should torrent a video of the entire production, or at least make a DVD available online. Then build off the inevitable blog buzz, head out to the San Francisco area and open the week of MacWorld 2008. In the heart of Silicon Valley, it’d probably run for years.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 28th, 2007 at 10:08 am and is filed under This 'n' That.