Five years ago, music man Paul Mackie and playwright Dan Sullivan had a wild barroom dream of producing a musical. Today, it has morphed into some sort of reality called “Wiener Sausage: The Musical!,” a soon-to-be cult classic to premiere Saturday night as part of D.C.’s Capital Fringe Festival. For a complete list of showtimes, go to wienersausage
themusical.com or capitalfringe.org.
“Wiener Sausage” is an intriguing title, but what’s it about?
Very hard to explain. It’s about everything and nothing. There’s an overwhelming philosophical message conveyed through a comedy about sex scandals, politics, war, death, secret societies, megastores, the media, the environment and the Apocalypse.
How did it come to be?
We were debating the pronunciation of the word smock, the thing you wear. So we Googled it and found a link to Dr. Uwe Schmock’s paper on Brownian motion in wiener sausage pathways — it was a serious math theory. That was the moment of revelation when we named the master mad scientist Professor Schmock and he created the Wiener Sausage Derivative, which could account for the entire map of the history of time.
Do you have a favorite lyric from the show?
“Washington Monument, Eiffel Tower. Conductors of super love power.”
Are you doing this for love or money?
We’re doing this for the love of art and of sausage, but we’ll take your money for the sake of art.
What do you hope people get out of the experience?
We want their stomachs to hurt from laughing so hard, and from eating all of the hot dogs that Chief Ike’s will be selling. [“Wiener Sausage” will be performed at Chief Ike’s Mambo Room at 1725 Columbia Road NW.] We’ll also be selling souvenir pint mugs to drink from during the show.
Was the play written with any greater goals in mind?
One: that the mainstream media stops [doing a bad job]. Two: that politics stops being corrupt. Three: that true love always wins in the end.
