CALL CENTER: The Musical

The proscenium of Kyle Fackrell’s theatrical venue is about 4 inches tall — the size of a YouTube video.

Kyle Fackrell holds a Bachelors in Music Composition from Brigham Young University, a Masters in the same from James Madison University, and is a graduate of the BMI Musical Theater Writers Workshop in NYC. He’s worked on numerous musicals with many collaborators in venues in NYC and elsewhere, but his most recent ventures are short-form video musicals.

His thumbnail opus, SPACE RACE, began during summer 2020, and showed all the hallmarks of pandemic—six Fackrells in black boxes, playing different characters, sing enthusiastically as members of a spaceship crew undertaking a manned mission to the stars.

His latest work, CALL CENTER: The Musical, premiered last month. Mostly composed of shots in a single room and video from Google maps, it tells the story of a put-upon call center employee who goes above and beyond to try and help a caller who's far from home and trying to make friends in a new place.

If you’re thinking that Fackrell’s DIY, anyone-can-make-art-anywhere approach has big high school teacher energy, you’d be spot on. He’s a longtime music teacher in Staten Island, running a music program for John W. Lavelle Preparatory Charter School. Nested amid the thumbnails of silly costumes on his channel is an impassioned video co-written with his students about gun violence in schools. While the students sing and rap, Fackrell conducts and plays percussion, clearly feeling the music deeply. For all his personal ingenuity, Fackrell’s work shines most when others make it into the frame. — Ted Bushman (CALL CENTER: The Musical can be viewed on YouTube.)