Off-Broadway musical warns of deadly threat of antibiotic resistance

NEW YORK (PIX11) – When you think of an Off-Broadway musical, you probably think of lots of singing and dancing and romance.

Well, there’s an Off-Broadway musical that has all that plus a dire warning about a global health threat.

Lifeline is a musical that tells the story of Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin in 1928.

But this musical also has a deadly serious message.

Lifeline tries to raise awareness of the urgent global health threat of anti-microbial resistance, known as AMR, which is linked to 5 million deaths per year as antibiotics lose their efficacy due to overuse.

“I was approached by an infectious disease scientist to write a musical about antibiotics and so sort of looked at her like she had three heads,” Robin Hiley, Lifeline composer and lyricist, told PIX11 News.

Mixed in with this cast of professional actors is a chorus of local scientists and healthcare workers appearing for the first time off-Broadway.

Their goal is to combine theater and science to warn about AMR.

“Thinking about how AMR really affects us on every level,” Tess Palmer, an epidemiologist, told PIX11 News. “How will we manage global health emergencies if we don’t have the first line second lines of defense.” 

Another member of the chorus is Jimmy Deats, an emergency response evaluator.

“As a health care worker, I use one side of my brain, but I always had a passion for theater, so I now flex a different side of my mind,” Deats said.

The creators of this musical chose to bring Lifeline to New York this month because the United Nations General Assembly is in session in September.

One of the hottest topics this year is the global threat of AMR.

“What we want to do is start a conversation about this problem, like climate change, which we may not understand,” the show’s composer, Hiley, told PIX11 News. “It’s not just taking too many antibiotics. It’s in the crops, it’s in our livestock, and it’s in our water as well.”

Lifeline runs until September 28th. Seven shows are at the Signature Theater on West 42nd Street a week.