Chriskirkpatrickmas – the festive *NSYNC musical with absolutely no *NSYNC music

We often say Chriskirkpatrickmas started as a joke, and in a lot of ways it did. A bottle of cheap red wine may or may not have been involved as we first pondered, in a small LA apartment in 2012, the rise and pause of the world’s biggest boy band. What did the guys who weren’t Justin Timberlake think about how things went down with *NSYNC, and how were they adjusting all these years into their indefinite “hiatus”? Had they moved on, or were they still holding onto an old idea of what their lives could have been? And what if there was a musical about it, set at Christmas, that used absolutely none of the band’s own music?

But as is often the case, at the heart of the joke was something uncomfortably real, and it had a lot to do with how our lives in 2012 as newly-minted “adults” weren’t turning out the way we thought they would back in the late nineties/early noughties either. The big dreams that seemed attainable in our childhood bedrooms were proving tricky to achieve in real life, so we escaped into a world of 90s nostalgia where one of the biggest dreams ever—founding one of the most successful musical groups of all time and becoming a genuine pop star—came true for a guy named Chris Kirkpatrick. But our 90s nostalgia wasn’t just for the music we grew up with, the slumber parties where we learned choreography from MTV, or the days before social media—it was for the hope we used to have for the future, and a time in our lives when anything seemed possible.

Watch a performance from the show:

Now, over ten years into the journey of Chriskirkpatrickmas, times have changed again. The long-awaited *NSYNC reunion feels not only possible but potentially inevitable. While we’d love to take credit (and over a slightly less cheap bottle of red wine, we sometimes do), it more so feels like Chriskirkpatrickmas and *NSYNC are part of a larger cultural moment where things have felt so heavy for so long that people are craving art and music and theatre that makes them feel good and happy and hopeful.

If the band does reunite, it might change Chriskirkpatrickmas; in some ways it already has. Since our Edinburgh Fringe run, we’ve updated the show with new references from Trolls 3 to a certain recently published memoir. But if you’ve seen the show (and if you haven’t, we hope you will!) you’ll know our story has always been ready for a reunion to happen, whether or not it ever actually does. Because that’s what Chriskirkpatrickmas is all about—acknowledging the joys and achievements of the past, staying open to possibilities for the future, and ultimately being very much ok with where you are right now. With lots of festive 90s nostalgia. And *NSYNC.

Chriskirkpatrickmas is on at Seven Dials Playhouse until 30 December.