A High School Musical for Grocery Geeks
When cult supermarket Wegmans took a New England suburb by storm, it inspired a local drama teacher to pen a tribute.
The Algonquin Regional High School student cast of Wegmans… The Musical 2.0 backstage before the beginning of the play in Northborough, Mass., on June 7, 2018.
Photographer: Amy Lombard for Bloomberg BusinessweekThe spring musical at Algonquin Regional High School in the Boston suburb of Northborough last year was in many ways your typical teenage mélange of singing, dancing and overacting. The closing number of the first act paid homage to “One Day More,” the rousing hit from Les Misérables, but with some lyrical tweaks:
Instead of a barricade on the streets of Paris, the sparsely decorated set included a pallet of paper towels and a shopping cart. Most theatergoers might be confused by a musical about a supermarket, but the Algonquin audience ate it up. In fact, some of them had seen it before—the show was originally staged on a smaller scale in 2012, just months after an upstate New York grocery chain called Wegmans opened its first New England location in town. On its first day of business, the store attracted 25,000 people.