DON’T BLAME MILLENNIALS:
MILLENNIALS ARE KILLING MUSICALS
IS KILLING MUSICALS
(OR, WHEN SATIRE EATS ITSELF)

An exhausting, vulgar, and unfocused musical
that mistakes noise for insight and collapses
into the very thing it claims to critique.

There is a song in Millennials Are Killing Musicals, the new tuner currently suffocating at the Colony Theatre in Burbank, called “Never Alone.” Its hook, sung by two grown women, is “I’ll never poop alone, alone again.” The number returns at the curtain, when the cast floods the aisles and tries to coax the audience into dancing along. Yes, the show ends by urging strangers to celebrate a crap joke together. That is not a finale. It’s an admission. Or a cry for help.

Nico Juber wrote the music, lyrics, and book, three jobs that might have benefited from three different people, or at least one editor. The premise: single mom Brenda (Emma Hunton) is digitally adrift in 2019 Springfield, raising her six-year-old daughter Ruby, whom we never see. Her sister Katrina (Diana Huey) arrives eight months pregnant, an influencer who treats her uterus as a brand extension. Brenda’s daughter has a classmate named Jake, who also never appears; both children exist offstage. Even the next generation is theoretical.

Hovering above them on a rock concert-style platform are three personified Instagram filters—Luna, Atlas, and Pacifica (Lana McKissack, Mitchell Gerrard Johnson, John Krause)—reporting to a Mark Zuckerberg gargoyle called The Algo (Michael Thomas Grant), who sings “Pay the Algo” with the couplet “Pay the Algo / Understand my rationale, bro.” The rhyme scheme alone should have been grounds for intervention.

The opening stretch by The Filters plays like a Vox explainer set to perky pop-rock: millennials are killing retail, killing doorbells, killing snail mail. Each accusation gets a chirpy beat. None of it connects to anything else. The show mistakes having a target for having a point, and a list for a structure. A satire that cashes out as a development deal is not a satire. It is a pitch.

When the show settles into scenes, it splits between two modes. The first is concept theater so literal it barely qualifies as dramatization. Jake’s Mom (Ainsley Bubbico) is a Southern pageant queen who quotes Gwyneth Paltrow. Nate, the tech bro Brenda meets on a plane, sells software called Yamorrow at a conference called YamorrowCon, jokes that arrive pre-explained and still fail to land. The second mode is blunt-force vulgarity. Brenda loudly discusses her daughter’s “itchy vagina” in public. Before a date, she inspects herself in a mirror and launches into a number whose refrain is “I shaved it.” This is what the show offers in place of character.

Emma Hunton is a genuine star and the one element that consistently works—and, in this context, the one that exposes the show most clearly. She brings emotional truth to material built entirely on surfaces, delivering the eleven o’clock anthem “Who I Am” with conviction that suggests a better musical exists somewhere nearby (like Uranus). Mr. Grant, doubling as Brenda’s suitor Dylan, finds a welcome softness in the latter, but those moments are fleeting. The writing rarely allows behavior; it prefers slogans.

The lyrics push the evening from weak to punishing. Act I closes with The Algo chanting “create the problem, sell the solution, monetize content,” while Brenda’s flirtation on a plane includes the line “single parents and corporate sensibility / like solid 401K strategy and business travel.” By the time Brenda confronts The Algo inside what the script calls the source code, her climactic declaration is “Millennials are killing… capitalism!” The Algo collapses. The audience has already beat him to it.

Then the show undoes itself completely. After the two-and-a-half-hour hostage situation, critiquing the way we always perform our lives on social media, it resolves Brenda’s arc by handing her a reality television deal. Katrina goes viral. Ryan Seacrest’s people call within seconds. Brenda pivots to writing show treatments. The closing number is “This Is the Life We Wanted.” The projected hashtag reads #GenZKillList. The critique collapses into the thing it claims to examine.

Around this hollow center, professionals do what they can. Kristin Hanggi directs with efficiency, which is not the same as purpose. Michelle Elkin’s choreography keeps the Filters in constant motion, as if movement might substitute for meaning. Orchestrator and arranger Anthony Lucca’s four-piece band delivers more than the material warrants, which is both admirable and faintly tragic. The design team—Stephen Gifford (sets), Jessica Champagne Hansen (costumes), Cricket S. Myers (sound), Taylor Edelle Stuart (projections), Gavan Wyrick (lighting)—provides a polished frame for a show that has nothing to say inside it.

I can’t blame the cast. Jennifer Leigh Warren, a formidable Broadway presence, appears as the mother of Brenda and Katrina. She walks on and so completely levels the house. detonating “Somehow You Both Survived,” that you briefly forget where you are. The moment passes. Huey, with a voice that fills the room, is repeatedly reduced to fragments. McKissack, Johnson, and Krause cycle through variations on a single idea until even that idea wears thin. Bubbico finds dimension through timing alone before the script forces a late pivot that asks her to become someone else entirely.

Hunton remains both the reason to pay attention and the reason not to. She plays a woman learning to stop performing her life for an audience. The performance never stops. Watching an actor of this caliber work this hard for material this thin is not enjoyable. It is soul draining.

There is no reason to see Millennials Are Killing Musicals. The talent onstage is real. So is the waste. The show ends where it began, mistaking attention for meaning, and participation for connection, urging us to bop along to a poop joke it has already told.

It is, indeed, a shit show.

The title gets one thing right: something is being killed in that theater. It’s musical comedy. And the audience has a front-row seat.

✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦

photos by Ashley Erikson

Millennials Are Killing Musicals
Colony Theater, 555 N Third St. in Burbank
free parking in the multi-level lot adjacent to the theater
Fri at 8; Sat at 2 & 8; Sun at 2 & 7
ends on May 17,2026
for tickets ($70), call 818.558.7000 or visit Colony Theatre
for more info, visit Millennials

for more shows, visit Theatre in LA

✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦