Who let them do this?'” Tony award winner WIll Brill asks this aloud over a meal with Variety at West Hollywood’s Canter’s Deli. Brill starts with a steaming bowl of soup at 11 a.m. before joyfully moving on to French toast. The Broadway vet is rail thin, but as hungry for diner classics as he is to discuss “The Musical” — his darkly comic Sundance gem that’s now rolling out in limited theatrical release.
Brill plays the nebbish Doug, a middle school theater teacher smitten with his colleague Abigail. When he learns that his beloved has taken up with the school’s principal — a smug “Chad” played expertly by Rob Lowe — Doug sets off on an absurd revenge quest. Lowe’s principal is out for a blue ribbon prize from the school district, and to sabotage his ambitions Doug stages an original musical in secret starring his earnest, talented young students.
The titular musical is a recounting of the 9/11 terror attacks, with original music and cardboard Twin Towers ablaze. While audacious and almost surely offensive, Brill and his director Giselle Bonilla pull off the impossible: a broadly comic look at obsession and bitterness, laced with a healthy dose of sunshine thanks to its innocent cast of kids. Here, he discusses revenge, risky cinema and the jokes left on the cutting room floor.
I understand you have a deep connection to student theater. Will Brill: What’s cool in a holistic sense about this movie, is that I came from doing children’s theater. I started when I was six years old.
I was in “The Velveteen Rabbit.” I remember distinctly the auditions and the chaos and the friendships built — and the gunning for the same roles and never getting them. Some kids were always ahead of you. What’s so funny about this movie is [my character] is the one experiencing the petty highs and lows, and he’s the adult in the room.
A lot of my comedy specifically comes from never getting cast as the leading man in anything. I was always the kid playing the old man or having to do funny voices. I was the badger in “The Wind and the Willows” and the king in “Cinderella.” Why do you think those were the parts you got?
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