I am too broke to go see Last Five Years at the Hudson Theatre. I work part-time as a bartender and spend the rest of my time at the BMI Bookwriting Workshop or attending my friends' shows at The Tank, NYU, Soho Playhouse, and -- yes -- Columbia. I celebrate their success; they are better, funnier, and kinder artists than me. 

I grew up on cast albums. I grew up on Broadway.com vlogs. I grew up looking out the window of a car while it rained, singing Nobody Needs to Know when I was 14 years old, inhabiting the role of man who cheats on wife. A man who cheats on his wife should have specific TV references. Such as the 1960's sitcom, Mr. Ed.

In a blog post published on April 9, 2025 at 3:05 AM, Jason Robert Brown, writer of The Last Five Years broke down the list of changes mad to the show's current 2025 Broadway run, starring Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren. The original line:

And in a perfect world,
A miracle would happen,
And ev’ry girl would look like Mr. Ed…

Brown writes "This was so depressing, but literally no one in the rehearsal room knew what “Mr. Ed” was." He updated the lyrics as follows:

And in a perfect world,
A miracle would happen,
And ev’ry girl would crumble into dust…

The white boys in my life are troubled. I love them. Life is so hard for them already.

The problem with the rehearsal room is that everyone Brown interacted with in it -- Whitney White, Ryan Dobrin, Adrienne Warren, Nick Jonas -- is much too cool. They didn't watch I Love Lucy and Shirley Temple movies with their grandma on DVD as a child. They never sat and devoured a screenshared Bubba Ho-Tep over Zoom in 2021. They didn't have a Tumblr dedicated to Doctor Who and Sherlock as a 7th grader living in Richmond, VA. They don't have friends begging them to give Mike Cheslik's 2022 film Hundreds of Beavers a chance on a monthly, if not biweekly, basis. How can you trust that? How can you trust that when it comes to Mr. Ed, specifically?

As a 15 year old, I learned about Mr. Ed, specifically, by way of this lyric. In this same way, I learned the word "avers" because of Sondheim's lyrics in Buddy's Blues. I learned the Italian word for "help me" ("aiutami") from Adam Guettel's frenetic bilingual masterpiece "Aiutami" in The Light of the Piazza.

Furthermore, the function of art is to remind a community of its shared history, sparking excitement, conversation, discussion, and exploration. In The Band's Visit, the song Omar Sharif reminded me how hot he was. Barbra Streisand's autobiography additionally invokes Omar Sharif's hotness. So does every rewatch of Funny Girl. So does every rewatch of Lawrence of Arabia. So does every rewatch of Doctor Zhivago -- his entire filmography, really. God, he's hot forever. Immortal in hotness. What was I saying?

The reason Omar Sharif's raw charisma is immortal is because film is an immortal medium. With the live nature of theatre and its malleability, in cutting the Mr. Ed lyric, we lose Mr. Ed's vitality -- especially in the lives of freaky white boy writers everywhere. Beyond them, older members of the audience in regional productions appreciate the call back to Mr. Ed, and the genuine surprise and joy at his invocation is really lovely to experience. Let them have something. 

How can we abandon the capacity for musical theatre lyricism to teach us about our shared cultural history? Without this lyric, the legacy of Mr. Ed fades away. And as we all learned from the Disney Pixar film Coco, forgetting those who have gone before us is the only real death that exists between this world and the next. 

Other changes Brown made to the lyrics were great, and in fact, cool. But this one? This was wrong of us as a society to allow. I believe this so strongly that I didn't even let change.org write this with their new AI thing. That's how much I love writing, and how much I want to preserve this one specific line. Please join me in petitioning for Mr. Ed's return home, to the lyrical arms of A Miracle Would Happen. Your signature is the gift horse, now let's make it come out of Nick Jonas's mouth.