Kafka the Musical

And a hypothetical Metamorphosis sequel

One of my cousins works on Broadway, and also on the theaters near Broadway in NYC. Ages ago I said we needed musicals such as “Kafka’s Metamorphosis the musical” and “Scientology the musical.” One of my other cousins aged we needed a Scientology the musical, since it would be kind of like Book of Mormon except you don’t have to be nice to Scientology at all because they have no redeeming factors, however, they also are famously sue-happy. Despite this, I learned from my cousin there already was a Kafka’s Metamorphosis the musical and even a Scientology the musical that hasn’t been sued out of existence, just not as big Broadway shows.

Today I ended up googling if Kafka was public domain due to

Kent Peterson

posting some Kafka stamps a couple of days ago and I learned it just went public domain in 2023. Over Christmas my same cousin liked to talk about how there were lots of Great Gatsby musicals now because it just went public domain, and I said “then you can use Dorothy with silver slippers, but Dorothy with ruby slippers is copyright” and she said that’s exactly what Wicked did and they had some other lore reason that the slippers looked red to give it some continuity with the Wizard of Oz musical film that’s not public domain.

I would love to see a Kafka musical hit Broadway, and since Metropolis and Hardy Boys are public domain as of 2023 too let’s get a robot musical (I don’t care too much about Hardy Boys but it might still be good.) This reminds me how misinterpreted Kafka usually is though. His stuff is usually pretty dark, but it’s dark because he’s being sarcastic. The point of the Metamorphosis isn’t that life is meaningless, it’s that if you woke up as a bug people will care more about the fact you’re late for work and lost your job than that you’re literally a giant insect now. I think I would have to blame all the people who are looking for excuses not to work, especially high schoolers as well as, ironically, their parent s who might not want them to work or they’d have pushed them into getting a job since that seems to be when people usually start reading Kafka (though it’s never too late to read Kafka, people just don’t start younger than that generally and since he mostly wrote short stuff it also seems to mostly not be pushed later, either.)

Maybe Kafka’s Metamorphosis needs a sequel: Gregor Samsa figures out how to argue, somehow, that since not showing up to work is unacceptable he can go to work as a bug instead of all the events that actually happened in the book. The events of the book actually were a dream, just not the part where he woke up as a bug. The entire rest of the story proceeds to be about Gregor Samsa’s life as a bug going to his terrible job and ending up as the famous bugman from Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Since it just went public domain, I’m allowed to do that now, neat. I have a lot of other things to do that are more important but I think I’ll actually do it.