I read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon for a Babson class this semester, and I swear it’s relevant to The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals. The book’s main character, Christopher, opens his story saying: 

“…when I first met Siobhan, she showed me this picture:

and I knew that it meant ‘happy’… she drew some other pictures

but I was unable to say what these meant.”

I love theater for many reasons. The first is because I get to make heightened expressions to convey characters’ feelings to the audience. A simple smile goes unrecognized because of how far the audience sits. Instead, a performer must convey a more pronounced emotion—elation:

Without context, these expressions look exaggerated, uncanny, or even grotesque – but in order to effectively communicate the story, it is necessary. 

It’s often said about musicals, “when your character cannot express their feelings with words, they sing.” It’s a sweet sentiment, but if you don’t relate to emotions the same way, the experience can feel uncanny. The aliens from The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals weaponize songs, lighting, and most interestingly, their facial expressions, to sell their otherworldliness. The aliens, like actors, are unnervingly over-expressive. Professor Hidgens questions how the aliens could wordlessly choreograph their song and dance. Christopher, similarly, asks how we could relate to each other so seamlessly just by using the shape of our face. The people in Christopher’s story operate under an unspoken assumption that their mode of expression is not only normal, but correct, excluding those who do not understand. The aliens in TGWDLM make that assumption explicit.

The most interesting line in TGWDLM to me is from the song, “Let It Out”, when Paul sings solo, “I’ve never been happy. Wouldn’t that be nice?” When he makes that proclamation, I don’t see a man who isn’t happy. I see someone who has been given a definition of happiness he cannot attain. Paul has never “been happy” because the world around him invented a concept of happiness that doesn’t apply to him. In the real world, it enforces conformity, and the contagion in TGWDLM repurposes the aesthetic of happiness to convince everyone to join the hive. 

The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals speaks to the social understanding of health and wellness. This perspective suggests that wellness is oriented around being a productive worker. Imagine ADHD not as a unique inability to focus, but instead a natural state of being that has only been given a diagnosis because the world forces adults and children to primarily work at computers.

When the hive entices the world to consume its ‘blue shit’, it reminds me of the mood-stabilizing drugs I took when I was 10. The pills came in shades of green and blue. My friends from back then have said it made me look like this:

The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals argues that separation from the neurodivergent self is inherently violating. We are genetically reconstructed from the inside out, given new personas that others will find palatable. Some people are forced to take medicine or receive surgery so they can conform to the standard of “normal”. For many of us like Professor Hidgens, the resulting identity is worth that pain. It is a worthy second chance. For others, like Paul and Emma, with this conformity we see the death of unique, interesting, authentic, and happy experiences.