Surviving Ophelia
A Musical Comedy
Book Music and Lyrics by Tom Megan
Surviving Ophelia is a musical comedy about girls finding their true voices in the midst of pop culture that demands perfection and conformity.
“Ophelia,” is a 5-girl singing group, that is perpetually stuck at number two on the charts. Their manager and creator, devises a diabolical plan to boost sales and please the record company. His idea is to fake the girls’ deaths one by one and as each is elevated to tragic pop icon status, sell truckloads of Ophelia Memorabilia. One band member, it is planned, will survive. The girls overcome their initial apprehensions and go along with the plan. As each girl dies a strange, vaudevillian ‘death’, she is resettled on a dude ranch in Texas.
At the ranch, the girls do some soul searching, read Hamlet, find their musical voice but grow increasingly jealous of the surviving Ophelia, Angel. Then, as their CD hits number one, they learn that Angel is in real danger for wanting to reveal the elaborate hoax to the media. Mr. Magic and Elsa plan to kill her at the annual Shammy Awards Ceremony just as she accepts her award for “Best Musical Celebrity”. The four girls, along with their idiot savant composer, mobilize. They sneak into the Shammy Awards, rescue Angel, revive Ophelia, and save the soul of pop music.
