On June 21, 2025, Donald Trump announced that the United States military had bombed three nuclear sites in Iran. Because the Soviet Union predates me entirely, and because I’m too young to remember 9/11 and the subsequent allegations of “weapons of mass destruction,” this Trumpian flirtation with war in Southwest Asia is the nuclear touchpoint through which I watched the Opening Night performance of Ro Reddick’s Cold War Choir Practice.

It’s almost too easy to draw connections between the 80s-era Reagan-Gorbachev standoff that dusts this play like the first snowfall of a nuclear winter, and the present-day hamfisted machinations of an aspiring despot. But though I imagine that such geopolitical analyses sit squarely inside Reddick’s intent, it’s an incomplete framing; while it engages the first half of her title, it doesn’t touch the “choir practice” of it all.

More than anything else, Cold War Choir Practice is a play about scale and scales. Scale as in, the concentric spheres of influence from family, to nation, to world. Scales as in, the levers that individuals pull to further their own advancement. And also, scales as in, major and minor, because this is a play with music (the score and lyrics are also by Reddick)—or, as Music Director Ellen Winter noted when we spoke over Zoom, perhaps a musical outright. In either case, in the world that Cold War Choir Practice conjures, music is the primordial essence from which setting and stakes emerge.

The set, designed by Afsoon Pajourfar, is a wash of wooden paneling and red carpet. It looks like what I imagine the 80’s to have looked like (I can only imagine because I, famously, Wasn’t There). It’s alterable only through the strategic positioning of chairs and other small furniture. Other design elements step in to help transport us out of this platonic ideal of an 80’s living room and into choir practice, the roller rink, the Ural Mountains, and elsewhere—but the musical motifs do so with the most decisiveness.

Music is more than a set dresser in this show, though. It is alternatively “the glue,” “a star in a constellation of stars,” and a character all its own, to borrow language from Winter.  This everything-everywhere-all-at-onceness is realized by a choir-of-three that sits dead center in the venn diagram of “Greco-Roman siren,” “Uncanny Valley” and “The weyward Sisters, hand in hand” (performed masterfully by Nina Grollman, Grace McLean, and Suzzy Roche), Winter, in their onstage role of Choir Leader, and occasionally protagonist Meek (an unrelentingly endearing Alana Raquel Bowers).

Meek is a 10-year-old Black girl who has joined the otherwise white Seedlings of Peace children’s choir, believing that the voice of a child can actually deter nuclear disaster. It’s through this choir that Meek meets her Soviet pen pal. Meek’s never had a friend before, and certainly not one who gives her nicknames like “Meeksnaya.” It’s Meek’s very first friend who uses her longing for companionship and love for her family to set the adolescent on a trajectory of international espionage.

Actualizing yet another function, the choir is a tool for materializing the trickled-down ideologies of the American state, whether that’s by singing about how America can fix the world with freedom and milkshakes, or asserting that Black folks shouldn’t fear Soviet bombs because they’d want to obliterate “important people first.”

And in the same way that propaganda can take a myriad of forms, the music that Reddick has composed for this play moves through genre with ease, from Christmas carol-core to slinky spy music to the frenetic, synthetic sounds of last century's pentultimate decade. The lyrics were blunt, taking on the directness of a child. If I thought Reddick meant what she wrote, I'd think they were a disasterclass, but because there’s a distinct absence of insincerity--and deep unseriousness, if you will--I instead find the words delightful. But for all that, while I remember how the songs made me feel, I don't remember much as far as specific musical phrases go. Which, I guess, is another similarity with propaganda: the message remains while the mechanism through which it arrived fades into the depths of the subconscious.

Most of the characters in this play articulate their own beliefs, activate their own agency, and construct their personal reality through their relationship to the show’s music makers and the words they say. Like Smooch (Will Cobbs) and his consistent skepticism of the choir his daughter Meek insists upon being in, or grandma Puddin’s singular ability to sniff out cultish shenanigans (portrayed by a Lizan Mitchell who has no business being that funny).

And then there’s Meek’s uncle Clay (Andy Lucien). Back in the day, he (and Smooch) ran with the Black Panthers. He’s since run away from home, disparaging his family in the press to earn brownie points with his probably-still-racist colleagues. For his pivot from Fred Hampton to Ben Carson, Clay has ascended to the title of Deputy National Security Advisor. But despite carrying the nominal import that that title confers, Clay can’t, or won’t, hear the music. He demonstrates agency by walking in a silence of his own design, alienated from everyone.

It makes sense. At the end of the day, he’s not actually the one pulling the strings.

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Cold War Choir Practice is now running as a part of Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks festival through July 1.