Top Five Songs: Be More Chill

The score for Be More Chill can be uneven, but the numbers in the show that I like, I really like. With a combination of wildly-appealing melodies, lines that neatly capture the universal high-school condition, and a fine helping of surreality, the show is wild and fun, featuring a number of songs that I love to listen to. Here are my favorites (a few spoilers.)

“More Than Survive” – I love me a good opening number, and this one has a lot to offer. Our introduction to Jeremy, his high-school plight, and his longing to be just a little less of who he is, “More Than Survive” features an infectious melody and quickly populates the student landscape for us. Also, while the lyrics for a number of the songs can be hit-or-miss, I think this one is solid. The Jeremy we meet is insecure and self-berating, but he’s also smart and poignant, and the song sets up the central crisis of his existence (in his mind) in a way that, for me, makes him easy to root for.

Best lyrics: “I’m never gonna be the cool guy. / I’m more the one who’s left out. / Of all the character at school, / I am not the one who the story’s about.”

“Be More Chill – Part 2” – I’m already on the record as being a major fan of the SQUIP, and both iterations of “Be More Chill” are fantastic. Right away, we’re introduced to the SQUIP’s deal: taking control over Jeremy but cutting him down, but with the promise to build him up. In Part 2, that gets even more overt, as the vicious chorus from Part 1 morphs into something so much more triumphant. “Everything about [Jeremy] is so terrible,” but if he listens to the SQUIP and obeys its every word, “Everything about [him] is going to be wonderful.”

Best lyric: The song is super catchy and the theme is spot-on, but the lyrics are more meh. I’d probably go with Jeremy repeating Part 1’s chorus after the SQUIP, especially that soft, “Everything about me makes me… wanna die.” It shows how much the SQUIP is preying on his insecurities.

“A Guy That I’d Kinda Be Into” – Very high school, but very sweet. Christine’s roundabout confession to Jeremy about the eponymous “guy that [she’d] kinda be into” is a charming number. I enjoy Christine’s nervous babbling, which is awkward but delightful, and the ensemble bits add a lot of pop to the song. Also, it’s not part of the actual song, but I laugh when Jeremy wonders if the guy is him and the SQUIP assures him, “I’ve been activating your pheromones. Keep it up!”

Best lyric: “I don’t always relate to other people my age, / Except when I’m on the stage.” Been there, Christine!

“Michael in the Bathroom” – Probably the most well-known song in the show, and I get why. When Michael’s attempt to get through to Jeremy at the Halloween party fails, he winds up locking himself in the bathroom and starts to spiral over the fear of losing his best friend. I like how the song includes lines that might feel flippant or funny, even as it continues to build to an emotional frenzy – that feels like a very teenage thing to me, where even stuff that might seem a little silly or inconsequential can feel like life-and-death when you’re in it. Another great melody, especially the pre-chorus and chorus. This is a definite earworm!

Best lyric: “I am hiding, but he’s out there, just ignoring all our history. / Memories get erased, and I’ll get replaced, with a newer, cooler version of me.”

“The Pitiful Children” – Here’s where we see the SQUIP’s insidious nature beyond its influence on Jeremy. In this banger of a number, the SQUIP seduces Jeremy into “saving” his classmates by giving SQUIPs to all of them. The melisma is delicious, I love that down-and-dirty guitar, and I get a kick out of the awesomely-random “beep boop beep boop” in the middle of the SQUIP’s dark manipulations

Best lyric: I’ve heard a little of the Broadway recording, enough to know that a lot of the lyrics are different here, but I’ll stick with the original cast recording for now, since that’s where the brunt of my experience is. “All your peers are just so incomplete. / You can’t see it, but they’re all in pain. / Their operating system’s obsolete. / So let’s complete the chains / And get inside those brains.”

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Shang-Chi is out now, but I still have more Tony Leung Chiu-wai excitement than can be contained in Marvelous Wednesdays posts. We got a couple of actual press-junket interviews from him, mostly from Asian media outlets. I appreciate what he says about how difficult it is for him to feel comfortable working with a new group of people (but that he had a great experience with the Shang-Chi crew!), and it makes he laugh that he says most of his scenes were done in only one or takes because of how much they had to get through everyday, when Destin Daniel Cretton says it was because Leung was knocking it out of the park and there was no need to do more! Aww.

Be More Chill (2015)

I missed the fervor over Be More Chill prior to its off-Broadway debut, and while I remember the buzz about it when it was making the move to Broadway, I was much more aware of the buzz than much of anything about the show itself beyond its basic premise. Given all the talk around it, I also remember being surprised when the only Tony nomination it snagged that year was for Best Original Score. After I learned that the “James in the Bathroom” number that James Corden performed at the Tonys (with assists from other Tony hosts of years past!) was a parody of a song from the show, my interest was piqued, but I didn’t follow through on that interest enough to check out the cast recording. More recently, though, I picked up the original recording from the show’s 2015 regional run, which features a number of the same cast members from the eventual off-Broadway and Broadway productions of 2018-2019, and I liked it quite a bit.

The premise is this: nerdy/awkward teenager Jeremy is clued into the existence of a SQUIP, a high-tech quantum computer that implants itself in a user’s brain after being swallowed in a pill (I’ve already talked at length about how much I love the SQUIP, so now we’re circling back to the show itself.) When he’s told that a SQUIP can teach him how to be cool, Jeremy decides to get his hands on one. Once implanted, the interface manifests itself to Jeremy and starts orchestrating his life, showing him how to get into the popular kids’ good graces and raise his social status while leaving his cheerfully-geeky best friend behind in the process. As the SQUIP’s influence over him grows, Jeremy has to decide whether or not popularity is worth what it’s turning him into.

It’s all painfully high school and follows the same beats of angst and insecurity that crop up in other teenage shows that have gained popularity on Broadway, from Spring Awakening to Dear Evan Hansen, albeit with more of an offbeat sci-fi hook. Musicals like this are known for their rabidly-devoted young followings and are frequently derided by theatre aficionados who find them trite and immature. Be More Chill is definitely tropey, and there’s more than one plot point that you can predict from space. But despite not being in the target demo, I’ve had a good time listening to the original cast recording.

Do I find the plot to be high art? Not particularly. But these shows resonate with young people for a reason, just like teenagers have also, at various times, been into Glee, Riverdale, and Pretty Little Liars. It’s wild and kind of sci-fi soapy, but it also wears its heart on its sleeve and speaks honestly about feeling alone, about feeling like everyone except you has cracked the code of how to be “normal.” There’s a place in the theatrical landscape for stories like that, and I’m fine with making room for it.

For my money, the score is the best thing to recommend it, which makes its lone Tony nomination make a bit more sense in retrospect. Composer/lyricist Joe Iconis doesn’t hit it out of the park with every number, but when he’s on, he’s really on. There are a lot of super catchy songs in this show with frank lyrics and infectious hooks, and I know I’ve spent my fair share of time in recent weeks singing snatches of “More Than Survive,” “Michael in the Bathroom,” or the title number while cleaning or cooking around the house. The show has a nice Broadway rock style that employs a fun pop/rock sound while still maintaining a good theatrical sensibility.

I’m most familiar with the show’s original cast recording, since that’s the album I have. Like I said, quite a few members of the original cast stayed with the show through its Broadway run, like George Salazar as Jeremy’s endearing best friend Michael and Stephanie Hsu as quirky theatre girl/Jeremy’s crush Christine. The show also features Gerard Canonico in a supporting role, who I’ve had a lot of affection for since he was a kid appearing in Children’s Letters to God off-Broadway. For original-recording-only cast members, Will Connolly does a great job as Jeremy, and Eric William Morris is excellent as the SQUIP. To be honest, when I downloaded this album, I hadn’t realized that there were two different recordings, but even though there’s a lot of cast crossover between the two, I’ll probably need to get the Broadway recording eventually, if only because YouTube taught me how much I love Jason Tam’s SQUIP performance, which is very different from Morris’s but equally fantastic.

Warnings

Language, sexual references, drinking/drug references, violence, and thematic elements.

Favorite Characters: The SQUIP (Be More Chill)

I recently got into Be More Chill – I know, I missed the bandwagon on that one by quite a bit, but I don’t mind. As with a lot of polarizing pop culture things, I find it to be neither Teh Best Musical Eva!!!! or The Worst Thing Ever to Happen to Broadway! Instead, I enjoy it, finding a lot of the songs catchy and the plot more than a little messy (even as I get a kick out of its “what if you fed Dear Evan Hansen to Little Shop of Horrors?” energy.) All that said, I positively love the SQUIP and make no apologies about that (spoilers.)

The central premise of Be More Chill is this: Jeremy, high school dork and seemingly-incurable loser, gets turned onto a hush-hush pill that promises to solve all his social problems. The pill is the delivery system for a SQUIP, a Super Quantum Unit Intel Processor – in short, an extremely high-tech computer that implants itself in Jeremy’s brain and teaches him how to be cool. If it sounds too good to be true for an awkward, anxious kid, that’s because it obviously is, and by the end, Jeremy has to defeat his SQUIP to keep it from taking over the world, learning a valuable lesson about being himself in the process.

Listening to the cast recording, I immediately enjoyed the SQUIP, even as it was plain that it’s pretty terrible. The way it increases Jeremy’s social status is by a potent mix of manipulation, negging, slut-shaming, and leaving Jeremy’s nerdy best friend in the dust. It regularly insults Jeremy, it sees people as a means to an end, and its ultimate goal, irrespective of Jeremy’s desire to be popular, is to propogate itself in other minds in a total “rise of the machines” scenario. The SQUIP is the villain of the piece, and it’s plainly A Problem.

But it’s just such an entertaining one. While, for me, movies and TV are filled with endlessly-watchable villains/antagonists like Spike, Moriarty, and Loki, I’m not as used to seeing characters like that in musicals. The SQUIP fits the bill, though, and to borrow again from my earlier comparison, it’s definitely the Audrey II of the show. It’s funny, it’s sinister, and it has some of the best songs. I love the titular “Be More Chill,” and “The Pitiful Children” is such a banger.

As much fun as it is on the cast recording, I found I loved the SQUIP even more when I saw a clip of it in action from the original Broadway cast. So not only is it a hyper-advanced computer who speaks like Point-Break-era Keanu Reeves, but it also dresses in gleaming white anime streetwear adorned with motherboard patterns? Yes, give me all of that, and also give me its oddly-inhuman hand motions. It’s every bit as cool as it is weird, and I appreciate that in a villain.

I also like the fact that while, as I said, the SQUIP is totally a problem, its stream of putdowns and pickup-artist tendencies are actually just part of its programming. I find that really interesting. If it were a person, it’d be terrible, but as a quantum computer designed to help teenagers be cool, it fulfills that function with mercenary efficiency. It is highly effective to make Jeremy comply with its instructions by berating him, and it is relatively easy to make other teenagers like Jeremy by manipulating them. Even its megalomaniacal moves toward the end of the show aren’t as strictly self-centered as Audrey II’s in Little Shop of Horrors. By convincing Jeremy to SQUIP his classmates, the SQUIP is spreading its power and influence, but it’s also ensuring a smoother path for Jeremy’s social climb by removing the variables of human nature. When it tells Jeremy, “I’m going to improve your life if I have to take over the entire human race to do it!”, it’s being weirdly sincere, which adds an interesting slant to the proceedings.