Hack, Punt, Tool
An original MIT musical
Hack, Punt, Tool started out when someone in the MIT Musical Theater Guild said "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if there was a musical about hacking?" Ultimately, with three bookwriters, one lyricist, two orchestrators, and myself as the composer, we developed the show through three workshops and over 20 drafts. The Musical Theater Guild premiered the show in February 2012, almost exactly one year after the idea was first proposed.
Composer: Julie Henion Richardson
Lyricist: Daniel Levine
Book Writers: Zach Barryte, Rachel Bowens-Rubin, Danbee Kim
Orchestrators: Matthew Putnam, Hubert Hwang and Julie Henion Richardson
Hack, Punt Tool by the numbers
3
15 ± 3
19 ± 4
over 9,000
12 hours 23 minutes
250 ± 50
“Wank, Wank, Wank”: 20 ± 2 drafts found
14 ± 2
160 ± 2
too many…
3600
shhh… don’t tell his advisor…
104 ± 19
19
79 ± 10
Tensor: formerly (Lorentz, Talia, Tali, Euler, and Sir Jection)
“scoffed”: 22 hours ± 5
30 ± 7
19/8
workshop readings
meetings with Michael Cuthbert, Julie’s music advisor
“emergency” meetings
emails sent
longest Skype call
total hours spent on Skype
greatest number of scene/song drafts
highlighter colors used on Google docs
total number Google docs used
number of times we broke Google docs
miles put on Julie’s car to attend meetings
number of hours we kept Daniel away from lab
gallons of juice consumed
people on the creative mailing list
number of shows listened to for inspiration
character with the most name changes
single word yielding the longest discussion
dawns shared
craziest time signature proposed
This video is the 2017 revival of Hack, Punt, tool put on by the MIT Musical Theater Guild. It was filmed by MIT Student Cable, with audio mixing by Julie Henion Richardson.