One January morning in 2018, Hawaii Civil Defense broadcast an alert. Not for an earthquake or a hurricane or a tsunami, but for a ballistic missile heading for Honolulu, on the island of Oahu, followed by the warning: “This is not a drill.”
But it was, in fact, a drill. A CD staffer failed to follow protocol to kill the alert before it went public. Most people didn’t panic, but some did. And on that, a new musical is based.
This Is Not a Drill focuses on ten people at a resort hotel who panicked. The culturally clueless hotel manager (Marianne Tatum); five tourists—a wife (Felicia Finley) running away from her adulterous husband; a Black couple (Aurelia Williams and Gary Edwards) coping with his recent heart attack; and a gay couple (Matthew Curiano and Chris Doubet) unable to commit to marriage. There is also a local family: mother, father and son (Caitlin Burke, Kelvin Moon Loh, and Sam Poon), and a waiter (Victor E. Chan) who, with a small ensemble, all work at the hotel.
Lukas Poost
And we get the screwup at Civil Defense: a goofball (Lukas Poost) who pushes the panic button and later channels Elvis to wail “Damn, I’m Sorry.”
No one in the creative team (per their bios, at least) was there at the time, and none but one claims any connection to Hawaii at all. Which is why the “local” family endures the cliché conflict between needing to work for tourists and wanting to honor actual Hawaiian traditions. And it’s why the songs, plus a post-curtain-call hula with plastic leis, have no authenticity but only (as the hotel manager calls it) “Hawaiianocity.”
There are a few lovely numbers (by Holly Doubet, Kathy Babylon, and John Vester) that could have “legs” if performed out of context. The book (by Holly Doubet and Joseph McDonough) is a sturdy-enough scaffold, but it lacks the menacing inevitability of doom that makes audiences care about the passengers and crew in the musical Titanic.
And this is because the characters fly off half-cocked and (as in the opening photo) seek shelter in the hotel basement. Unfortunately, they never stop to do what most people in Hawaii did when they got the alert: try to find out if a mortal threat was really approaching.
The show has merit, and it looks good. It rolls right along for 90 minutes with no intermission, helmed by director/choreographer Gabriel Barre. The set (by Edward Pierce and Noah Glaister) is nicely flexible; the costumes (by Johanna Pan) are true to life; the lighting and sound (by Alan C. Edwards and Shannon Slaton, respectively), and the five-piece band led by David Don Madore, all work together well.
Gary Williams and Aurelia Williams
Shoutouts to Williams and Edwards, and to Curiano and Doubet, for beefing up their thinly-drawn couples. And to Poost, for going deliciously over the top.
But I need to say more about the show’s flawed premise, because I was in Hawaii on that day.
My wife and I were living in Hilo, about 250 air miles away on The Big Island. If a missile’s nuclear warhead exploded over Oahu, we would probably hear the repercussion, but we’d survive long enough to die from the radiation.
For weeks, there had been tension between President Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, but it had simmered down. So when we saw the CD alert on our phones, we turned on the TV to see how the story was being covered by the Honolulu stations and by nationwide channels like CNN.
Matthew Curiano and Chris Doubet
Later that day there would be video footage of university students and hotel tourists running into 1950s-era bomb shelters. But at that moment—and I can’t stress this enough—no one from the military was confirming the story! The armed services have an enormous presence in Hawaii, and since Pearl Harbor they are always looking out for threats.
My wife and I and, indeed, nearly everybody on Oahu and the other islands, quickly realized that the “alert” had been sent by mistake. As a local expression puts it: “Cool head main thing.” And in less than 40 minutes, the truth came out.
We would do well to remember Orson Welles’s 1938 radio broadcast of the sci-fi thriller “War of the Worlds.” The people who panicked, thinking it was a real news broadcast, didn’t try turning their radio dials to another station, to see if anybody else was reporting an invasion from Mars.
Seeing This Is Not a Drill makes me insist that we must not rely solely on our cellphones for information. We want professionals to seek and report actual facts. We still need our “mainstream” media.
Photos by Carol Rosegg
This Is Not a Drill
York Theatre
150 East 76 Street at Lexington Avenue
Through October 11, 2025
