Dr. Frick's Home for the Mentally Unique

Prepare to Be Shocked

De: Neal Fox

Narrado por: Neal Fox

In a world being taken over by computers and robots... Where emotions are considered "chemical reactions"... One story dares to defend the Human Soul.

Dr. Frick’s Home for the Mentally Unique is a darkly funny, emotional, and entertaining adaptation of Neal Fox's original musical, Meat Street—a story of a planet that’s lost its soul. In 2001, a workshop of Meat Street finished literally, days before 9/11. America was reeling. It wasn’t the time for a show with a controversial subject: how all of life’s problems were mental diseases and the solution was a little orange pill called NoZone. But, now it’s back—and more relevant than ever. Prepare to be shocked!

Young Orson can’t fall sleep. The bad news on TV is keeping him up. Finally, he calls out for his Uncle Neal to tell him a story. Well, this isn’t your usual family. Orson is a precocious five year-old, and his uncle is a wee bit eccentric. So the story his uncle reads to him, is a real nail biter.

Three best friends, under totally difference circumstances, end up as patients at Happy Hills. Tony worries about the world and thinks he’s saving mankind by selling Lo-Flow toilets. Danielle, his rather timid fiancee, is making the world a better place by painting pretty pictures. And, Flo, a pre-op trans woman, lost in her own problems, is having second thoughts about her surgery. A collision of crises lands them on Dr. Frick’s doorstep seeking help. But there’s a darker side to Dr. Frick, which links him to Tony, a mysterious book, and man called Jon. Q. Public.

The feature-length film is scheduled for release in 2026. Meanwhile the audiobook, the script of the audiobook, and 26-song score are available on Amazon (and other digital outlets). Note: This is not appropriate for young children as it is not an actual children’s bed-time story. Audiobook script, Dr. Frick’s Home for the Mentally Unique, ©2024 Neal Fox. All songs written and produced by Neal Fox, ©Foxalot Music — BMI

©2024 Neal Fox (P)2024 Neal Fox

Great great great —but wait!

Review regarding Dr. Frick’s Happy Hills Home for the Mentally Unique, by Neal Fox:

This is a marvelous work, well-deserving of repeated listens. Go and listen to it now. And then again, later.

(Based on the 1997 work MEAT STREET. Music, lyrics and book by Neal Fox.)

For those who would like to read a detailed review, please continue below:

Considering the thousands of hours of work that go into a recorded musical production, if one were to attempt an honest review of it one must listen to it more than one time before giving a proper reaction, rather than merely daubing one’s existing prejudices onto a new, partially perceived target.

I listened through Neal’s musical five times fully and have to say it’s quite an amazing epic presentation, not only in writing and production, but also in underlying concept. It does get even better the more times you hear it.

Any musical has its locale and local color (i.e, characters) to be presented as a given to the audience: starchy folk in Iowa, murderous gangs in New York, as well as elocutionary pretenders to British aristocracy, and so forth. We as the audience are accustomed to settle in and assimilate to the landscape presented, perhaps even becoming one of the gang. In Doctor Frick, we have a man, a woman, and an in-between who have somehow stepped into the upside-down world of psychiatric coercion and drugging without really detecting the strangeness to this new landscape.

Of course their lives are now upside down as well, leaving them to woefully interpret the resultant spiritual contamination as an internal personal failing. Thus we have a fictional drama of people who are themselves lost in an equally fictional synthetic world of drug and media-induced stupor. Tony, who sells low-flow toilets to save the world, Danielle, his (secretly) pregnant girlfriend, and Flo, who is about to have a body part removed to transition to another gender, evil psychiatrist Dr. Frick, the medical staff, and other characters (including Neil as himself telling the story to his nephew, Orson), are all presented as if you know them already. And of course we do. In this way, they come off as somewhat pathetic and ironic, much like Thomas Pynchon characters struggling their way through Gravity’s Rainbow or Thr Crying of Lot 49.

The main problem with this familiarity of presentation of ordinary people falling prey to drugging and involuntary incarceration is that the familiarity is all too , well—familiar! What drama? This is just an everyday thing, anymore.

But here’s the thing: in spite of the underlying menace of the actual subtext (as it were) Neal keeps things light and silly with banter and rude jokes for a while, until—it being a musical—we inevitably run into a song. It is at this point you realize that Neal is not joking around. The songs give the internal world of the characters that we find—to our own shock—is our own. The songs have beautiful, memorable melodies, great chord and key changes, arrangements, are well- performed, and recorded, and would hold their own for an audience acclimated to, say, Andrew Lloyd Weber. You must hear them.

Each character has their own showcase song, of course. Tony song combines artfully unwinding musical structure with actual toilet flushing sounds (artfully recorded); you have to hear it. Danielle’s heart-rending song about being a painter, who paints out things she doesn’t want to see, is everything you could want in such a song, plus the authentic charm that is rises above the current slangy cultural cues we usually must endure like we consider a driver who somehow just drove through that puddle in front of us.

it’s a harrowing journey, no matter how you look at it, and Neal makes you look at it in many, many ways.

As I got used to the work, I became aware of a new concept of the Inquisitor, at least in its modern apparition. The traditional concept of the inquisitor involves someone who has accrued authority to torture and kill people in order to get their secrets, their confessions of crimes, in thought, word and deed, against those in power. There’s a sort of brutal method or perhaps skill at work, getting out of the target the secrets so accused. The modern Psycho-Pharma version, however, as we can see (if we would) has no questions to ask, has its own secrets, and so proceeds efficiently to the final outcome of simply shutting the patient up for good.

But in this musical, at least for now, all works out to a happy conclusion, and so in Dr. Frick’s Happy Hills Home for the Mentally Unique we have an excellent addition to the culture of those who somehow still possess their wits.

—Daniel Robinson, author and composer (aka “EtherGun”)