Mission Drift

Winner of the 2011 Scotsman Fringe First and the Herald Angel Awards

Winner of the Edinburgh International Festival Fringe Prize

“What a blast. Economics has never been more playfully dissected…The company fulfill all their much-hyped promise in this gorgeous, gaudy musical.”
-Lyn Gardner, The Guardian

Mission Drift is a pioneering journey west and east across the USA in search of the character of American capitalism, told through atomic blasts, lizard ballet, and music that fuses Vegas glitz with Western ballads & Southern blues.

In 1624 two 14-year olds, Catalina and Joris Rapalje, get engaged on a dock and set sail west as employees of the Dutch West India Company (the 1st multinational corporation).

In 2008 a cocktail waitress named Joan is laid off in Las Vegas amid the financial collapse, and her faith in her city and the sustainability of the American dream is shaken.

These two stories collide – one mythic and one contemporary – in this epic musical that spans 400 years of American history to chart the implosion of faith in an eternal frontier. Over it all reigns Miss Atomic, a seductive and terrifying narrator inspired by the 1950′s Vegas beauty pageants that celebrated the bomb being developed 60 miles north. She is the symbol of creation and destruction, bankruptcy and bonanza, in this new work by award-winning ensemble the TEAM.

Written by the TEAM in collaboration with Heather Christian and Sarah Gancher

Music by Heather Christian

U.S. Premiere January 2012 in New York City with Performance Space 122