Growing up doing theater, I always wanted to be taken extremely seriously. My stage debut as Nana the dog in “Peter Pan JR.” may have included no lines, but it was rich with layered emotional subtext. And in college, I’ve spoken in hushed tones with artsy acting professors to discuss scenes pretentiously referred to as “the work.”
Really, though, it’s all pretty silly. My time as a Tisch drama student has involved lotioning and massaging my classmates, and running around an empty classroom playing tag to get ready for a scene. Theater is inherently ridiculous — a reality that “No Singing in the Navy” at Playwrights Horizons embraces with open arms. The new musical written by Milo Cramer — who won a 2025 Obie Award for their solo show “School Pictures” — and directed by Aysan Celik is about three sailors who have 24 hours on shore before being shipped off to war, and have been forbidden to sing by their sadistic captain. The three-actor, one-piano production is wildly hilarious, with endless comedic bits that grow increasingly ridiculous.
The show opens with the three actors marching in unison to center stage, who animatedly introduce themselves as Sailor 1 (Bailey Lee), Sailor 2 (Elliot Sagay) and Sailor 3 (Ellen Nikbakht). The audience is then transported to the bottom of the sea as the actors put on red mittens to become crabs, desperately yearning to escape from their crab bucket and explore the world. With the help of her crab family, one lucky young crab (Lee) finds freedom and encounters two of the sailors, teaching them to sing.
The three sailors, now endowed with the gift of song and dance, set out to make their last 24 hours their best ones yet. They go to a casino and bet the Navy boat, and Sailor 1 woefully wonders, “How will we get to the war? We’ll have to swim.” With their meager earnings, they head to the theater stacked underneath a single trench coat to try and catch a show about sailors. When that doesn’t work out for them, they try looking for Sailor 1’s long-lost lover, The Lighthouse Woman (Sagay).
Somehow, this 80-minute fever dream is also an extremely tender, heartfelt love letter to the unique magic of musical theater.
Characters abandon their melodies midway through to monologue a la Tennessee Williams about picking apples in Papa’s orchard, with speak-singing accompanied by piano vamps like Harold Hill in “The Music Man.” Sailor 3 sings about their mission to kiss 100 women to a sly, mischievous melody reminiscent of “Fiddler on the Roof.” And of course, the play the sailors watch is delivered with all the Shakespearean melodrama of “Hamlet.”
Everything about “No Singing in the Navy” is absurd, with comic gags played to the absolute limits of their allotted time slots. Just when you think a bit where Sailor 2 keeps saying “perchance” is over, they throw in two more for good measure. In that same scene, Sagay is dressed in a lacy white nightgown with a glowing lighthouse strapped on top of his head as The Lighthouse Woman, singing his 11 o’clock number while Lee and Nikbakht mime waterboarding each other in the background. The slapstick comedy is played to the extreme, with the actors contorting their faces and bodies in ways that could easily cross the line into cringe.
And yet, none of the show’s excess veers even slightly into secondhand embarrassment — it’s actually deeply endearing. The actors are fully committed to every second of their performances, never settling for cheap gags or playing a moment just for laughs, remaining earnest and grounded even as they push their physicality far past the realm of believability.
Cramer’s writing is sincere and witty, juxtaposing kooky comedy with surprisingly heartfelt lyricism: Two sea ants attempt to have sex while bullying a crab, then end up singing “I want to spend each waking moment with you. You make me feel normal, something I thought I’d never feel.” Particularly gut-punching is the line repeated through the show as the sailors contemplate their fate in the war: “What if you die first and then I have to miss you?”
That unexpected emotional core is what makes “No Singing in the Navy” so striking. It’s easy to be wacky for the sake of wackiness, relying on comedic lines playing on overused tropes and empty punchlines. But Cramer is never making fun of musical theater — they’re solely interested in celebrating the art form about being so moved by emotion that only singing will suffice.
As the show ends with the sailors singing, “I love you a lot, it’s all that I got,” it feels as if those are Cramer’s words to the art of theater to which they’ve dedicated themselves. You might leave the theater teary-eyed, with your ribs sore from laughing or confused and unmoved by what you just saw. But everyone in the audience showed up because they were hoping to have fun by engaging with an art form they love — and really, isn’t that the whole point?
“No Singing in the Navy” is running at Playwrights Horizons until April 19. Tickets are available online.
Contact Chantal Mann at [email protected].