Do You Hear The People Sing?

After weeks of rehearsals, a small amateur theatre company is ready for the opening night of its production of Les Misérables. However, at the pre-show party last night, everyone managed to get drunk and high, secrets were revealed, and the drama is about to drop both behind the stage as well as in front of it. Can the cast hold it together to perform the show?

In this game, everyone is an actor with a role in the show. Half the room is backstage, the other half front of stage. While everyone is bickering about their issues backstage, people have to keep running off to perform their songs on stage. Singing is optional.

Long Description

In this game, everyone is an actor with a role in an amateur production of Les Misérables. At the previous night's pre-show party, everyone got drunk and high, and a lot of secrets came out. It's now opening night, everyone has assembled backstage to perform the show, but tensions are rather high. This is intended to be a Comedy Drama game - expect to both laugh and cry!

This game is heavily inspired by Les Mis (obviously) but also a very funny play called Noises Off! in which members of a touring theatre company bicker about their drama backstage while also continually running off to perform their parts.

So basically expect to spend this game arguing and shouting at each other, but having these arguments interrupted by the need to run off to the stage and perform your role in the show!

Singing is optional, but everyone will need to perform in some way. The default mode for performance will be the music from the Original London Cast Recording playing on a speaker, and you can either sing along, or you can hum, mime, speak the words, lip-sync, la-la-la... whatever you want. if you've never sung before, this will be a very supportive environment to have a go (and you may surprise yourself!). If you are already a confident singer and want to perform your songs in a different way, such as to a karaoke track or a-capella/no music, then that's possible.

Characters are all pre-written with interlinked backgrounds and relations. All of the actor characters are written without a specific gender - players can give their character whatever gender identity they want. However, the Les Mis characters they are portraying in the show retain their canon genders. This means there could be a female character playing Javert, a male character playing Fantine and a non-binary Monsieur Thenardier. This is all fine. Just roll with it and have fun!

For costuming: All the actor characters are dressed up to perform the show, so your costume should be for the Les Mis character.

There is one NPC character in this game - the local theatre critic. This is a non-performing role - the critic in the audience and has their own agenda. They will be trying to influence and pressurise the actors throughout the game using text messages (portrayed with notes on paper) and phone calls. This character also serves as an intimidating audience! If anyone is up for playing this, that would be great! :)

Important Players for this game need to have basic familiarity with the music, songs, story and characters of the Les Misérables musical (stage or movie). This is required, as the game won't work otherwise. You don't need to know all the lyrics, just be able to recognise and join in with the songs in some way.