Asexuality! The Solo Musical

What I liked

The integration of the live and video footage was tightly managed.

What I didn't like

Spoilers ahead.

So here’s the thing. If you need to straight-up say at the end of your musical—which dramatically makes the case that asexuality is just a phase you mistakenly went through in the course of figuring out your gender identity—that people shouldn’t use this to invalidate asexual people in general…you have gone seriously astray and should really step back and reconsider what you’re doing. Showing trumps telling; in this case, what you’re showing calls asexuality into question, and including a sentence saying that viewers shouldn’t come away with the message you’ve delivered is kind of hot garbage.

The framing makes this much worse. THIS is “Asexuality: The Solo Musical”? A title like that is at the very least a bait-and-switch, but also it strongly indicates that asexuality is something of a joke. See, we can have an entire show that ultimately concludes that you’re not ace, but still give it a title promising that it does portray the ace experience, and that’s somehow okay because…well, the implication is that the ace experience maybe isn’t real, so it doesn’t matter.

Again, the fact that you say that the thing you’re saying isn’t really the thing you’re saying carries about as much weight as J.K. Rowling saying that she has nothing against trans people. Everything else about the show argues against it.

And that’s sad, not least because this show is clearly heartfelt and deeply personal, and I believe you don’t mean to be doing harm. Perhaps you only arrived at the personal revelations after most of the show was already written, and you had to make some course corrections, and failed to consider the larger structural issues. If so, I hope you do take the whole thing back into the shop and figure out how to make this work.

At the moment, it doesn’t at all.

My overall impression

A deeply personal and creatively staged musical that may be cathartic, but that serves to damage the ace community.