Oh, To Be Joyfully Wrong!
By Alex Lin
On manic hope, wild despair, and embracing mistakes: This week, we’re sharing playwright Alex Lin’s response to No Singing in the Navy.
Music is so embarrassing.
At its worst, it is a self-indulgent, hyper-emotional diary set to notes on a scale that repeat ad nauseam until our string of weird mouth sounds finally counts as a “hook.”
At its best, it is transcendent.
When I first encountered Milo’s songwriting in their 2023 play School Pictures, I immediately asked them if they had ever listened to AJJ. This was both my way of bragging that I knew about an obscure, screechy folk-punk band from the early 2000s and a way of not-so-discreetly trying to figure out what brand of indie millennial slop they listened to as a child.
I was trying to humiliate them, maybe? In a friendly way. In a way that I, too, was willing to be humiliated: by admitting that something painfully of its era, a fundamental pillar of twee, early-aughts cringe, had at one time moved me. Against my prior suspicions, AJJ had apparently not been a major musical influence for Milo. Instead they answered, quite quickly, “No, that’s all Bright Eyes.”
A crunchy white millennial from Connecticut with an affinity for Conor Oberst? Color me surprised.
Friendly ribbing aside, I was in fact not at all surprised that Milo referred to Conor Oberst as a major influence. Oberst, the long-time indie darling of angsty suburban teens with two-door garages and Razor RipStiks everywhere, is fixated on life’s constant paradoxical swing between manic hope and wild despair. One of the most exciting things about Milo’s work (me remembering in real time I’m supposed to write about my friend, not my aging, unshowered celebrity crush) is they take this paradox and make it joyful.
This could not be more evident in Milo’s latest musical endeavor, No Singing in the Navy.
In No Singing in the Navy, hope — actually — is quite stupid. And despair — actually — is quite silly. Within this absurdity, Milo has artfully painted the tension of being an unfortunately human person: Life is what you make of it. That includes mistakes.
Fear of mistakes can paralyze us. So much so that some of us go our entire lives never really entirely admitting what we want, simply because if we commit to something, we might turn out to be wrong in the end. No Singing in the Navy, riotously funny and endlessly subversive, hones in on the sometimes stupid, sometimes sweetly awkward parts of navigating want and fear. And it does this by taking one of the most structured and familiar American art forms and intentionally — raucously — joyously spinning it on its head. I’m talking, of course, about the American Musical.
Specifically, the glossy polish of the Golden Age. I’m talking glitz and glamor, flashing lights, ensembles full of tap dancing dimes! A melodic dreamscape of massive physical scale, spectacle, orchestra swells galore — and most of all, pristine precision in its performance. While on the surface, so much of No Singing in the Navy is a refracted fever dream of On the Town (sailors in the city, need I say more?) — its uniqueness lies in its intentional subversion of the Golden Age’s “largeness.” The 2014 revival of On the Town had a cast size nearing 30 and a 28-piece orchestra. No Singing in the Navy has an ensemble of three and an upright piano.
Awesome.
Even its musical foundation is subversive. When I first encountered No Singing in the Navy at its March 2025 workshop, I learned from Milo that they do not write their songs into sheet music. The pianist in me wanted to scream in terror. The songwriter in me wanted to jump with glee. A paradox.
Manic hope. Wild despair.
Here was a musical written in the most non-musical theater way ever, intentionally performed in the exact antithesis of the Golden Age style. Here was a show so rag-tag, so rickety, so intentionally abrasive and pitchy in its presentation, one would not be called “crazy” for insisting No Singing in the Navy cannot possibly qualify as an American musical! To that, I’d challenge: What could possibly be more musical theater than joyfully singing off-key?
Speaking of singing off-key, I cannot help, in the chaos of my thoughts, but think of one of my favorite Conor Oberst lyrics:
All eyes on the calendar
Another year I claim of total indifference
To here, the days pile up
With decisions to be made, I’m sure all of them were wrong.
No Singing in the Navy is the furthest thing from a traditional American musical. Calling it a musical feels “wrong.” And yet, an American musical it is. I am the furthest thing from an accredited or even semi-professional essayist. Writing this feels “wrong.” And yet, here I am, willfully making a potential mistake in hopes of celebrating my good friend. Sometimes a mistake, a disaster, a thing done “wrong” can be immensely joyful. How many maybe-lovers never elope out of fear of being “wrong”? How many maybe-writers never write out of fear of being “wrong”? How many maybe-songwriters stop themselves from ever creating music out of fear of being embarrassing — of being “wrong”? Too many, I think.
May we all be so embarrassing. May we all be joyfully wrong.
Alex Lin is just a girl from Jersey. Plays at: Roundabout, 2ST, NYTW, MTC, Primary Stages, Playwrights Realm, Fault Line, and many more. Blackburn finalist, Stavis Award winner, two-time Kennedy Center Paul Stephen Lim Award winner. Colt Coeur, Rattlestick, Working Theater, and BMI residencies. TV: The Audacity on AMC. Forbes 30 under 30. Juilliard.