Burning Man: The Musical is a new musical about the collision of Silicon Valley and Burning Man, and though the full show isn't quite done yet, you can check out the first song below! Check out the opening number and click here to donate to the show's Indiegogo campaign!
In the musical, Joe is a young, driven techie in Silicon Valley. He sees Burning Man as his shot to network with Silicon Valley elites who can jumpstart his career and help him achieve his lifelong goal of becoming a multimillionaire by age 30. He crashes a techie plug-and-play camp at Burning Man. Chad and Bill the Billionaire recommend he go on a vision quest by taking mushrooms and going into the deep playa. A dust storm comes when Joe reaches the trash fence, and he nearly dies from dehydration and exposure. Hal the Hippie comes out of the dust storm to rescue him, and like Yoda, he takes Joe under his wing to train him in the ways of Burning Man.
In the second half of the musical, Joe wrestles with several questions. Will he continue making his drone-delivery app to profit off of this festival centered around decommodification? Or will he change course, now that he's seen a different way to live? Will Sparkle Pony return his unrequited infatuation? Or will Catherine turn away from her father Bill the Billionaire to join Joe on a new adventure? Will Joe make it out of the desert alive? Or will his blind ambition and naive want to profit off of Burning Man do him in?
The team writes: "Our end goal is to produce a full-length musical, however, that is a multi-year process. We're currently developing the musical in bite-sized chunks, creating one or two songs at a time and releasing them to YouTube. We're using our fans as our way to workshop and test each song in the musical and see what the response is.
We've learned a lot over the last 6 months creating and filming the opening number, and through that process, we've assembled a fantastic team: writer, composer, director, production manager, film crew, and talented actors, singers, and veteran Burners! We're using the lessons we've learned in producing the opening number to successfully write, record, and film the next two songs over the next 6 months. We've developed our budget and timeline based on our experience creating the first video."
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