Happy 2026! Here is my first bonus video of the year for you, and possibly my favourite so far: a look at the short-lived Obama musical that showed in Frankfurt in 2010. This is, to me, a beautiful relic, and I had so much fun exploring it.
A strange thing about theatre is that often there isn't much of a record to look back on. I saw a Brief Encounter musical in, I think, 2018, and there's such a small smattering of evidence that this existed - but it did! A musical version of my favourite film! But I can barely remember it at all. Weird.
Much fuss is made over media preservation, and it chills the spine to think of the sheer volume of early cinema that was burned and lost forever, but of course, with live performance, ephemerality is the point. You see the show, you store it in your memory, and you go home.
Of course, this means that when a show closes, it's often as if it was burned. There is nothing left. Just the loose scraps of crunchy, 2010s jpegs that I must collect together in a bag. I can squeeze a video out of it, but it's not enough!
What I am saying is: Obama musical revival when?