‘Nerds’: A high-tech musical (1st review)

And then I helped develop the integrated banking and brokerage systems that we take for granted today. I worked at Merrill Lynch when even that giant brokerage house lacked the time or the physical tape to handle the volume of its trades. I was at Chemical Bank when they had trucks that drove around at night from one ATM to another to pick up the mylar tapes that held the day’s transactions.

Those new little machines that could sit on your desk and do the same work seemed ridiculous and not worth learning. But things changed. For about $3,000 I bought my first IBM personal computer with an ink-jet printer and 250 K on the motherboard. And then a Six-Pack to double the memory. It ran on DOS (which we called the Dumb Operating System) and could only do one task at a time. No pictures. No mouse. Just a keyboard, a screen and nimble fingers.

Today, of course, even jocks, hunks and prom queens are keenly aware that nerds rule. Now I have the world in my pocket, and I need to be reminded to “turn off my cell phone” to enjoy a show about how it got turned on it the first place.

Gates turns ruthless

Nerds, the high-energy, snappy musical about the guys who made nerdiness cool, makes it cooler still.

Set in front of a giant mother board (the innards of a computer), the musical pokes fun at itself and the overblown egos of its main subjects as it traces the development of the computer from “the size of a city block” to one that fits into your pocket, as well as the transformation of Bill Gates (Stanley Bahorek) and Steve Jobs (Matt Bradley) from outcasts with a dream to titans of industry sufficiently powerful to transform IBM’s chief, Tom Watson (Kevin Pariseau), into a crackhead.

Bahorek portrays Gates’s growth from nerdy pathos to determined inventor to budding entrepreneur rapping about his product at a trade show to ruthless business mogul to, ultimately, philanthropist at the urging of a good woman. Jobs, meanwhile, evolves from sexy dreamer to man with a Messiah-complex to awareness of his own mortality, ultimately winding up in the Cloud, whence he presumably watches over us today, with an Apple Store gift card in his pocket.

Female conscience

The women hold the moral compass in this play, while the men grow their empires and shrink their toys. The women want the work to be meaningful and change the world; Gates and Jobs strive constantly for more and more while caring less and less about those around them.

There is enough tech-speak for those in the know to feel superior when they get it, but this play doesn’t require a manual to understand, and while there weren’t hummable tunes, you could tell the audience wanted to get up and dance with the cast during the last number, “I Wanna Get Down and Nerdy.” This was a cheerful romp through recent history in a way that made it come alive.

To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.

To read Dan Rottenberg’s review of the 2007 production, click here.