An Original Musical By MIT Students

The Music

The Revival Version of the Piano-Conductor Score is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)  license.  You can listen to tracks from the original album below, and you can download the album for free or for a donation that will benefit the Musical Theater Guild.

From the very beginning of the writing process, we knew we wanted to write a rock show.  Something that was current, catchy, and appropriately cool enough to suit a show about hacking.  As we began writing, however, we found it was a lot more complex than that.  When we began each song, we would brainstorm about what style it would be, and we would begin to toss around “model songs” from other musicals.  After discussion and some trial and error, we’d end up with a first draft of the song, and with each passing draft, we’d groom the songs until they matched the plot and captured the mood we were going for.  You’ll find that while the show is rock influenced and we have many straight up rock songs, we have a variety of styles represented, including ballads, gospel, jazz, and even one song inspired by Carmina Burana.

Here we have a few demos from before the production process got underway.  The first demo is from the opening number of the show, “The World of the Hacker,” in which our narrator is beginning to introduce the audience to the world of hacking.

Second, we have “I Want to be Hardk0re.”  Here, one of the main characters, Billy, has just arrived to campus, ready and eager to learn about hacking and to become “hardk0re.”
Finally, we have “There’s More to Life than Tooling” (tooling-  n. to work really hard)  which occurs midway through Act II.  Sometimes MIT students need to be reminded of this.
All images are from the final dress rehearsal of the IAP 2012 production.  These recordings are early demos that do not feature the actual cast.

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