This is Not a Drill: A Thrilling Dallas Musical Makes it to Off-Broadway

On Aug. 18, Holly Doubet, a University Park college prep tutor and one-time Las Vegas backup singer, flew to New York to celebrate her 67th birthday in a fashion beyond her imagination.

She was headed to the Big Apple to start a month of rehearsals for the off-Broadway debut of her first musical, THIS IS NOT A DRILL, a tragicomedy about a group of Hawaiian tourists and natives who face fear, farce and friendship during a now infamously false impending nuclear missile attack.

Doubet wrote the work a little over seven years ago, after she and her boyfriend, Dr. Michael Vendrell, experienced the terrifying 38-minute false alarm as they were vacationing on Kauai. Her path to Broadway is as surreal as the incident that inspired the musical.

In between helping Park Cities high schoolers fill out college applications, Doubet spent most of Covid writing songs and fleshing out a script to wrest meaning from the near catastrophe. Among other characters, a single mother says her long-distance good-bye to the children she thinks she will never see again and imparts life lessons in the ballad, “This You Should Know.”

For the music, Doubet collaborated with longtime friend, Kathy Babylon, a Los Angeles-based studio singer. The two were running buddies back in the day before Doubet decamped for Dallas to raise her two sons, write songs for children’s TV show Barney and Friends and give piano lessons as her first marriage crumbled.

With the help of some of Babylon's Hollywood heavyweight contacts, the duo beefed up the script, enriched the score and held a musical reading of the show – then called 38 Minutes - in Dec. 2021 at the Sammons Center for Performing Arts. Doubet funded the $40,000-plus price tag for the two-night reading with a Kickstarter campaign and a $5,000 award from the Donald Fowler Theater Arts Memorial Fund of the Dallas Foundation.

“I looked at (Vendrell) and I said, ‘What do we do?’ It was weird because it was so quiet," Doubet told us back in 2021. "I said, ‘We need to find somewhere to go.' I put my fanny pack on my waist and put my driver’s license in there in case my torso was found. I was still in my house shoes and my pink pajamas.”

Despite the musical’s star-power support and standing ovations, it went nowhere for the next three years. Though Doubet became a grandmother, launched other creative projects and continued tutoring after, she never gave up on the hope of staging a full-scale production.

Then, last summer, after Doubet traveled to Manhattan to watch a reading of a friend’s play for the theater industry, she decided to do the same — another expensive and daunting undertaking.

Sinking in about $65,000, Doubet booked a theater and hired a casting director and performers to put on something called a "29-hour reading" in March of this year. A way to bypass strict actor equity wage and work rules while helping new works get off the ground, a 29-hour reading gives the cast and crew a little more than a day to rehearse and perform a show. The 14 actors cast in THIS IS NOT A DRILL could not even see the script or hear the dozen songs before the 29-hour clock started. And the time limit included the show’s 90-minute running time.

“It was intense,” says Doubet, over the phone from the Harlem Airbnb she has been renting since mid-August.

In the audience that night was Broadway veteran Jim Kierstead, winner of multiple Tony Awards, including for best new musical for Kinky Boots in 2016. A week after the March 25 performance, Kirstead notified Doubet that he had chosen THIS IS NOT DRILL to open the York Theatre's 2025-2026 season with a five-week limited engagement starting Sept. 9. But first, Doubet had to raise more than $600,000, a large chunk of which came from investors and Doubet and Vendrell's savings.

Since mid-August, the cast and 20-person crew have been holed up from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on the 11th floor of a building near Times Square filled with rehearsal rooms for all manner of theater productions, from opera to concerts.

The show has changed somewhat from the early Sammons Center reading. It includes a new quirky character representing the guy who mistakenly pushed the missile alert button and an overture by multi-award-winning musical director and composer Paul Bogaev, who has been part of the project from the outset.

Matthew Curiano, a New York-based actor, plays Tony, one half of a gay couple from Cincinnati who seek solace in Hawaii after the adoption of a boy they had fostered falls through. He has high hopes for the show, which he finds to be a refreshing departure from revivals and bio musicals, the seeming mainstay of Broadway these days.

“This is a really beautiful show with a lot of heart,” says Curiano, an alum of several national touring shows, including Camelot and Ragtime. “In the face of real tragedies, humans and heroes show up with compassion and humanity – and even humor. But it does not shove it down your throat.”

That was Doubet’s intent all along, she says, to create something that makes the audience laugh, cry and think. 

“Whatever you want to do, do it now," Doubet says. "Love who you want. Be who you want. This is not a drill.”

THIS IS NOT A DRILL will run from Sept. 9 – Oct. 11 at the Theatre at St. Jean’s, 150 East 76th Street in New York City.