Music

Yep, there's going to be a Martin Shkreli and Wu-Tang musical

by Jeremy Mersereau

Because we live in the most absurd of all possible worlds, it’s now futile to resist the culture industry’s attempts to immediately commodify every single moment of legitimate strangeness, so why bother trying to stop the onslaught of crowdfunded funhouse mirror-style reality distortions.

Case in point: an upcoming musical is looking for funding on Indiegogo, and it’s about the Wu-Tang/Bill Murray heist hoax against performative troll, pharmaceutical kingpin, and goober extraordinaire Martin Shkreli.

Called Martin Shkreli’s Game: How Bill Murray Joined the Wu-Tang Clan, the musical has already landed a slot on New York’s Midtown International Theatre Festival, and the creators are looking for a grand total of 6,500 crowdfunded dollars to properly stage their play about the fake hoax that took the blogosphere by storm last year.

In case your memory of ephemeral, fake viral stories only goes back a week: the musical will detail, in true painful theatre-dork song-form, the alleged clause in Shkreli’s ownership contract of the one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang clan album that states the Clan would be allowed to stage one (1) heist attempt to reclaim the album with the help of Bill Murray.

Of course, as that sentence practically screams “way too good to be true” through a megaphone set on “eardrum vaporizing”, the alleged clause soon proved to be a hoax, but still, there have been musicals made about stupider things.  I don’t doubt that’s it’s going to to take $6,500 worth of work to come up with a rhyme for “Daraprim” and “Turing Pharmaceuticals”, either.

Tellingly, one of Martin Shkreli’s Game‘s biggest fans is… wait for it… Martin Shkreli, who never met an opportunity to build his Bond villain brand he didn’t like. He’s offered the musical’s creators Lauren Gundrum and Joel Esher the opportunity to have him fund and star in the show:

One idea in particular seems like a must:

As of right now, actors are planned to fill out all the main roles, but if Shkreli actually ends up starring in this thing who’s to say Ghostface, RZA, and Murray won’t end up playing themselves, in a true recursion loop of Baudrillardian hyperreality? We can only hope.

[h/t CNBC]