Musicals are considered a fluffy medium. 

Despite exceptions aplenty, song-and-dance spectacles are stereotyped as celebrating uplifting escapism from life’s heaviest weight. While death can play a pivotal role in a musical’s story, facing mortality is rarely the primary focus.

Conversely, almost every tune and tale in The Lazours’ Night Side Songs concern our ever-dwindling mortal coils, and how we cope with the inevitable sickness that has and will befall our loved ones, and ourselves. The Brothers Lazour interviewed doctors, nurses, patients and caregivers to hear their experiential insights on what might help us deal with this universal inevitability, one of which almost speaks to Night Side Songs’ raison d’être:

The scariest worry for the dying is that they won’t be around to aid their nearest and dearest in the future (succinctly summarized in a line from PACNYC’s Trash, spoken by…a sentient jukebox? “I don’t fear death; I fear not being here when they need me”). Night Side Songs advises that, to ease a more graceful transition to the night side, soon-to-be survivors should spend the months prior comforting the ailing by promising they will be OK on their own.

This idea is common on deathbeds, to convince the five feet under to finally let go…but it’s equally important to do so during the lead-up to the end, before disease makes their consciousness inaccessible. Of course we want to communicate how much they mean to us, but balanced against the reassurance that we no longer RELY on them to be happy.

This notion that “it might be too late to process if you hold off on starting until it arrives” is the foundation of Night Side Songs’ existence. Audiences gravitate towards musicals to flee thinking about life’s unavoidable calamities, but they might find themselves behind the eight-ball if they dodge preparing for what’s coming for all of us.

Art like Night Side Songs provide a no-stakes forum for such anticipatory rehearsing.

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Along similar lines…

While documentaries can be riddled with death, how many are devoted wholly to chronicling a subject’s full journey from illness to demise?

Welcome to André Is an Idiot, now in theaters.