Walking past the bulletin boards around campus last week, a poster caught my eye. It had a red and blue heart adorned with computer chip-like circuitry. In front of it read “EMOTE: An Original Musical.”
Original musical? I don’t see that from students very often. There wasn’t any other information other than the title and director name on the poster, so I had no choice but to go in blind.
Saturday evening of the second and last showing, I went to McConomy and sat in the midpoint of the room — a proper seating position to match my uncertain expectations. The seating was not full, but there was a sizable audience for an event that had no description.
I stared at the “set,” confused. There were a couple of music stands and a group of people next to the stage wearing normal clothing. One guy wore a branded Citadel shirt. Had I walked in the wrong place?
The performance started and I saw the PowerPoint presentation above the actors change slides. It took me a while to realize the slide deck was the “set” and the stock photo of a laboratory in the first scene was where the characters currently are. It was so low-budget that it was entertaining. I was hooked. There’s a YouTube channel that I like called Low Budget Stories that makes films from stock photos and memes, but this was taking it to the next level on a stage.
This wasn’t a Broadway or School of Drama show, so it was nice to not be banished from my phone for two to three hours. I pulled out my phone to record a couple of the songs and found myself doing that again and again for every song.
All this to say, I loved “EMOTE” so much. The co-directors, second-year Arrim Jung and fourth-year Tim Carullo, mentioned in the beginning of the play that Carullo, a vocal performance and computer science BXA student, didn’t want to do a recital or write a paper for his Capstone, so he wrote a musical to perform instead. It’s a story about a robot that starts to feel emotions trying to navigate its way through the human world and all the intricacies of non-literal language. It’s not a dreadful story of the robot destroying humans, but a loving story of family and love and friendship. I could not have imagined a better format to share such a beautiful story to be experienced by us all. I’m so lucky to have seen “EMOTE” and I really hope to see it played more, with the larger budget that it deserves. I’m also holding my breath until the music is put on Spotify as well so I can listen to it on loop.
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