Tonight, MusiCoLab will present the first full performance of Red & Black, a new musical by Nick Hatcher and Sheridan Merrick. This is the culmination of a long development process, and I’m thrilled my Drexel students will get to see it as part of their summer course in Contemporary Musical Theatre.
Here’s the choice I’ve had to wrestle with: how much do I tell my students in advance?
I could assign them to read the script, or share the writers’ notes, or frame the show’s themes in context. On the other hand, I could send them in “cold,” with no preparation at all, and let their first encounter be pure discovery.
It’s an interesting question because so much of how we experience art is shaped by expectation. Sometimes advance knowledge sharpens our focus and primes us to notice things we might otherwise miss. Other times, it narrows our vision and dulls the thrill of surprise.
The Power of First Encounters
I’ve been thinking about my own early encounters with musicals—times when I walked in with little or no idea what I was about to see, and walked out transformed.
As a college freshman, I signed up for a student activities bus trip to Washington, D.C., to see Leonard Bernstein’s Mass. I can’t imagine what I thought I was in for—probably something solemn, maybe even religious—but the combination of the words “Bernstein” and “Mass” was enough to make me curious. What I encountered was overwhelming: music, theater, ritual, chaos, and ecstasy all colliding in ways I didn’t know were possible.
A few months later, I found myself in London with classmates, performing a play at a local university. One night we had free, and somehow the decision was made to see Company. I didn’t know anything about Sondheim (hard to imagine now), but what I saw that night reshaped my sense of what a musical could be: sharp, contemporary, funny, deeply human.
Both of these experiences came to me almost by accident—random choices that became pivotal. I hadn’t studied up, I hadn’t read reviews, I hadn’t been primed to know what to expect. And because of that, the impact landed with full force.
Ripples That Last
Sometimes you don’t realize how important an encounter will be until years later. At the Red & Black workshop, one of the actors reminded me we’d met twenty years earlier, when he was a teenager in a summer program I taught. He said the turning point for him was a Broadway field trip we took to see Caroline, or Change.
“Changed my life,” he told me.
It’s humbling to think that a single performance—whether stumbled upon by chance or chosen for you by a teacher—can ripple forward for decades.
What About You?
Now I want to turn the question over to you:
Has there been a time when your expectations—shaped by a blurb, a review, or advance hype—changed how you experienced a musical?
Did prior knowledge deepen your appreciation, or did it get in the way of surprise? And have you ever had the chance to encounter a show with no context at all—and how did that feel?
I’d love to hear your stories in the comments.