Screenshot: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2oT1qpu0MA">Above Average</a>/YouTube
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.”
