I wrote a musical? (Also: St. Paddy's show 2026)

So, this past year, as our nation has slipped into something frightening and unrecognizable (but also utterly recognizable, in all the worst ways) — with masked agents of the state kidnapping children and PhD students, aggressively raiding family apartment buildings with military choppers in the middle of the night, hunting people of color based solely on skin color and racial profiling, and even executing US citizens in broad daylight and then lying about it (!) despite plainly available evidence — I was gripped by a passion and fury beyond my control. 

And so I did the only sensible thing I could do with that amount of energy, which was to write a whole-ass musical. 

It's called 'Robyn and the Merrymen,' and it's a feminist riff on Robin Hood set in mid-90s London. 

Robyn, a woman in this telling, is a big-hearted busker and lead singer of the Merrymen. She and her bandmates, along with a fiery new friend named Marian, must take down a greedy developer before he demolishes their home and neighborhood pub. (You can read the full synopsis here.)

Here's a demo recording of the first song, 'Pickpocket Philanthropist.' It opens with Robyn busking in Camden Town, until she's chased off by Inspector Nottingham; she walks through the streets of North London until she reaches the Filch & Friar pub, where she joins the Merrymen on stage. 

Our world is hurting so deeply right now, for so many terrible reasons — some of which I’m not in a position to write about authentically. But one central theme behind so much of this suffering, and one I do feel able to speak to, is the dramatic rise of wealth inequality and our society's grotesque adulation of the rich. 

With billionaire tech oligarchs empowered to defund and dismantle life-saving government research and aid programs, while further enriching themselves through tax cuts for the rich and lucrative contracts, it's plain to see that obscene wealth inequality is a harmful influence on our country and the world.  

Since the 1980s, the most wealthy households in the US have steadily sucked trillions of dollars of wealth away from the middle class. During our postwar economic heyday, the richest 0.1% earned about 50 times as much as those in the bottom 90% of the country. That's a lot! But by 2018, the wealthiest Americans made 200 times more than the average of virtually everyone else in the US — on par with the robber barons of the Gilded Age —and that gap has only grown in the past eight years.

There are a lot of policies and circumstances that have led us to this point, from marginal tax rates on higher incomes to the broader decline of labor unions. But part of it — even more perplexing to me, but potentially more easily changed — comes down to narrative. A lot of people cheer on and even idolize the uber-rich, when frankly, billionaires should not exist. 

When I was a kid, Robin Hood was a cultural hero whose ethos of stealing from the rich and powerful to give to the poor and working class was widely celebrated. Now the name is often associated with an online investing platform, of all things. (Barf.) 

So I wanted to bring back Robin Hood — and in a more female-centered way, since, let's face it, patriarchy is another deep-rooted source of our systemic societal failures. Now more than ever, we need to summon and emulate the generosity and optimism of our best-known socialist outlaw folk hero to stand up to the corrupt oligarchs taking over our world. 

It's a musical about social justice and inequality, and about love and good works. It's about how what we do matters more than what we say, how acts of kindness come back to us, and how it's better to break the rules in an ethical way than to adhere to immoral laws. 

Stay tuned for more demo recordings and details on a staged reading later this spring.

In the meantime, I'm playing a St. Patrick's Day show on Saturday, March 14th, at the Monument Restaurant & Tavern in Charlestown. It's free and I'd love to see you, so stop by if you can! 

And on that note... I'll leave you with this message from Harvard Square.