UCLA students create musical comedy based on Zoom learning experience

This post was updated Nov. 9 at 2:15 p.m.

This musical was recorded on Zoom.

The Shenanigans Comedy Club at UCLA premiered the recording of “Zoom School Zoomsical the Zoomsical the Zoom! (A Musical)” on Oct. 8 at their first in-person show of fall quarter.

The “Zoomsical” is an original musical comedy about a group of students’ shenanigans in a Zoom class about ants, said Sophie Wells, a second-year mechanical engineering student who stars in the show.

The musical also stars current club members Minu Choi and Devin Bosley, as well as alumni Jessica Block and Matthew Flynn.

“It’s a time capsule depicting the hilarious and also very sad, and – dare I say – unprecedented struggle that the whole 2020-2021 school year was,” Block said.

Second-year English student Devin Bosley said she first pitched to the club the idea to write a comedic song about the different people one can meet over Zoom.

There are people who talk over each other, people who are always silent in the breakout rooms and people who have their sound and video off the whole time and are doing something completely different, Block said. She, Wells and Bosley wrote songs to accompany each kind of student, she said.

Over the summer, the five members of the cast filmed the musical, said Choi, a fourth-year neuroscience student. The majority of the process took place over Zoom, Bosley said.

The musical numbers were prewritten and the actors had a script, but Wells said Flynn improvised most of his lines in his role as the professor.

Flynn said he had plenty of experience from watching professors in real life.

“My inspiration was watching my teachers struggle,” Flynn said. “In some classes of 60 people, I’d be one of two people with the camera on. I would do office hours too. I’d be like, ‘Man, it sucks, doesn’t it? No one talks, it’s kind of painful.’”

The show is a group commiseration about Zoom, but they tried to make it as entertaining as possible, Block said.

For instance, the writers had the students in the musical be in a class studying ants because “the life cycle of ants” rhymes with “makes me wanna dance,” Wells said.

Block said she writes comedy to make the people around her a little bit happier. The Zoomsical counters the inundation of depressing news and content relating to the pandemic. It reminds people of the things they found funny and the Zoom characters they met while taking classes online, she added.

Michael Bunte, a first-year computer science student who watched the Zoomsical, enjoyed the production’s satire of the Zoom experience.

“I think everyone just had this universal hatred of Zoom,” he said. “The class setting kind of sucks, and I really like that they were able to express that hatred.”

Looking back on the project, Bosley said she is glad their work is preserved on the Shenanigans‘ YouTube channel. The Zoomsical serves as a memory of how the five cast members connected with each other and the larger community of students who had to take classes virtually during the COVID-19 lockdown, Block said.

“We made it out of this super isolating period of time,” Bosley said. “We really tried to speak to this experience that we could all relate to. Now, being back in person, we can all just sit together and laugh about how crazy the last year has been.”