New Line Theatre wants to pay tribute to the folks creating "guerilla musical theatre," musical theatre that is public and unannounced, that assaults its accidental audience in public spaces around the world. Pass on the video URLs to your friends and help us spread the Good Word...
The label "guerilla" comes from the kind of fighting we did in Vietnam -- sneaking up on the enemy in small groups without them knowing it (it literally means "little war"). In the 1960s, guerilla theatre was created to make political statements, but as political theatre grew less common, guerilla theatre changed. Now, with many of these pieces, it's the very act of breaking the rules of polite society and performing spontaneously in a public, non-performance space, challenging our preconceptions of audience, actor, theatre, stage, distance, etc., that is the point. And perhaps that very act of challenging conventions is itself a political act.
In the case of guerilla theatre that is musical, it also offers a tearing down of that age-worn complaint about musicals, that "people don't break into song in real life." Clearly, sometimes they do. Work like this intentionally, often comically blurs the line between the real world and the happily artificial world of Breaking into Song... And we love that!