A Review Of Daryl Morey's Musical 'Small Ball'

The review you never asked for and never needed.

Devin Daniels is the gentleman who introduced our official poet, Mia Kang, to the Ricky. At this point, this is all we know about Devin, so if he turns out to be a murderer or something, we don’t endorse that at all.

On the afternoon of the NBA Draft, Mia and Devin went to go see Small Ball, the musical that was co-produced by Daryl Morey at Philadelphia’s Suzanne Roberts Theatre.

Devin sent us his review of the show, in great detail. Below is that review.

- Spike

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At some point in Small Ball, the Liluputian coach Phil Jackson, describes his waking dream as "one horrible, swirling dream-cluster that defies interpretation." He might as well have been talking about Small Ball, one of the strangest pieces of art I've ever witnessed. I felt like I was watching a fake musical inside a movie. That said, I can't say it's bad: it's, at the very least, interesting, though I couldn't give it more than one confused thumbs up, alongside an equally confused thumbs down. It recalls the Process Sixers themselves, really: everyone is doing their best, but they haven't been put in a winning position.

But the musical is most interesting as a look inside the mind of the man who commissioned it, Daryl Morey. Now, it's hard to know how much Morey actually had to do with this, but somehow, this musical ended up being an oddball, fantastical rendering of Morey's inner psyche.

But first, some background. As you know, the musical is about a basketball player named Michael Jordan (not "the" Michael Jordan, a joke the musical makes dozens of times) who joins a team of Liliputians, the tiny people from Gulliver's Travels, who are all six inches tall. The musical actually has some very clever special effects to make the size differences work on stage, and the songs are uh, fine. What's weirder though is the early reveal that the musical doesn't just take place in a world in which the Liliputians are real: it takes place in a world in which ALL FICTIONAL CHARACTERS ARE REAL. It turns out that there are also basketball teams of characters from Narnia, Game of Thrones, The Phantom Tollbooth, and other properties (though we don't see them). The musical on some level is about the nature of fiction itself, as I'll come back to.

A number of Morey-relevant content is laced throughout. It opens with a song about how "you lose and then they make you talk about your losing," as player and coach complain about the press. The Liliputians also do not have a concept of the number 5 (no, this doesn't make sense) and so they play with only 4 players. The attempt to introduce the number 5 meets harsh, anti-math resistance, a clear metaphor for advanced analytics.

The central tension of the musical, though, is that Michael Jordan is not willing to even inbound the ball, because he is afraid of crushing his teammates with it (also, one of whom becomes his love interest - there's a song about it where they keep singing "Do we wanna have sex with giants?"). This is a weirdly realistic concern for such a fantastical story, so it begs the question of why? Wouldn't it be more fun to make a musical about him trying to play with the tiny people? Think of all the opportunities for comedic choreography.

The ultimate theme of the musical, however, is the fear of actually playing a game: the one thing that analytics cannot control. Morey wants to live in a world of processes, and who can blame him. But the thing is: we live in a world of results. Whether the Kawhi shot SHOULD have gone in or not, it did, and we have to live with it. This is something fictional Michael Jordan can't accept: he is too afraid to pass the ball and find out what happens, so he just stands still every game. "What do you think happens if you pass the ball, Michael?" he is asked. He shrugs and answers: "Movement? Life?" Michael is afraid of life itself, which is just one big result.

Until, in the final game, he inbounds the ball, and the team wins. (This is a lot more complicated in ways I can't get into.) I'm sure you're wondering: How? How does the musical explain this? Well, it doesn't. The sports reporter character falls asleep during the game, just waking up to see that the team has won. There's a whole musical number recounting the game for her, in vague detail, but she just keeps asking: How? How? But they can't really tell her: "Stats don't tell the story, that's why we play the game," she says. This musical isn't just about a world in which all fiction is real, it's about how reality itself, to Morey, is a fiction. What's real, to him, are the numbers, the equations, the probabilities. What actually HAPPENS is just one instance, the random reality we happen to live in. It's totally made up, and yet we have to live with it. The musical is about resigning yourself to that reality, something we all must do but I think Morey in particular, in the back of his head, must struggle with. It ends with a simple request as Michael gets ready to leave the island on a raft: "don't drown."