El Milagro - A Musical Drama Review (2025)

You can watch the musical drama for free here. I'll be spoiling the entire musical drama, although you can probably guess how it plays out already.

Sometimes the YouTube algorithm blesses you with a video of high school kids in a school you've never heard of doing the Harlem Shake. And sometimes you just need to look up more about that school and wind up across a fundraising musical drama from their elementary school division.

I guess these things do happen.

It's all classic fluff, really: a kingdom is under attack, a family of strong people is sent out to attack except their youngest kid because she can't do any combat, and from there, you can guess where the plot goes. It's that simple and generic with a ham-fisted moral at the end. I do mean ham-fisted: every big character steps forward, looks to the audience, and straight up states the moral of the drama (have a heart of a servant, for an act of kindness can change everything). They literally ended the war with the power of sandwiches!

Is it harsh for me to say that this musical drama performed by kids not old enough to be on Instagram is the worst musical drama I've ever seen? Yes, absolutely. But there's a weird charm to it.

Everything is so stilted and weird: actors stand awkwardly while waiting for their next line to say, the sound clips in and out, and sometimes they can't even pronounce words correctly. There's a moment where the subtitles say "sleeping potion", but the characters say something closer to "sleeping pokien". What the hell is a pokien, and why does it sound delicious? Even in the beginning, "until all the world is under their control" becomes "untill aaallll their world is un their control". Maybe microphone issues.

The worst part? They start plagiarizing songs from freaking Disney, from Encanto and Mulan. And it's not like they take the instrumentals and write new lyrics on top of them: sometimes, none of the lyrics are changed! It's especially obvious in the ending, where they steal the final song of Encanto as the conflict comes to a rest. Why is the war general now singing "I was so afraid to lose you" when the musical drama was nothing about that and was instead about a whole other aspect of family? Especially because the general straight up killed 200 people in the "war" and wanted maximum casualties the next day. Other times, only one or two words are changed ("Make a Man Out of You" becomes "Make a Team Out of You", "Welcome to the family Madrigal" becomes "Welcome to the family Caritas").

And the changes they do make to the lyrics are just out of place. Obviously, with the song introducing the family, they need to replace the members of the Madrigal family with the Caritas family, and swap out their magical abilities with regular weapons. But why does the choir emphasize "We all talk about Fatah"? It makes sense in the original song because it's Bruno, considered bad luck for the family, but here it comes out of place. And then you have nunchucks being called "stick" and Kandi (pronounced Kanye, their words, not mine) has her sword where she says, "I'm so amazing with all the slashing I can do". Yeah, it's a rough copy.

Even Hamilton isn't safe from the stealing, shown in the sequence after the army blows up a school where kids run out screaming (and then immediately get into formation for a dance), when suddenly an instrumental version of "Alexander Hamilton" blares through. And I do mean suddenly; it comes out of nowhere, and the dance serves no purpose at all to the story. I couldn't tell if the school added anything on top of the instrumental, and I'm hoping they didn't. Thankfully, that's the only instance of Hamilton being used in this musical drama.

Even more hilarious is that the camera then reveals there was a whole choir (no, that was not a typo) and (pianica and drum) orchestra playing these songs. They put so much effort into copying from Lin-Manuel Miranda that they might as well have written their own songs. They have xylophones over their version of "Surface Pressure" (with more unchanged lyrics, which makes zero sense because in no way did the musical drama ever explore that theme) and "Waiting On A Miracle". To be fair, it makes it easier on the kids, especially because at this point, it seems like every person has Disney+ and would have watched Encanto or Hamilton at some point (I haven't).

Although maybe it's for the better that they didn't write their own music for their own musical drama. The only original pieces of music I could recognize is the song at the beginning, which is ok, and the interludes between each location, which are just trap music with the most unenthusiastic "rapping" with lyrics like "Boom! Here comes the bomb, yeah, boom!" and "We need an army, army, right now". There's also the interludes between each act with unenthusiastic rapping and more amazing lyricism like "Boom and crash, everybody run". And yes, it's also trap music.

Would this have been better if I were there in person? Probably. Besides the unenthusiastic acting, on-the-nose writing, and plagiarism of Lin-Manuel Miranda, the biggest problem is the sound. I don't know if the kids misspoke that much or if it's simply the microphones or the sound system to blame. But there is actual quality involved in this stealing. There's a whole children's choir and orchestra, even if they're doing simple songs and adding simple instrumentation over Encanto songs as if it's theirs, and every single character has good costumes.

At least it wasn't all for nothing. According to the hosts, all the money would be donated to building a well in a rural area of Indonesia for their residents to get access to clean water, which is a noble cause. According to them, they raised 75 million Indonesian rupiah in doing so, which is approximately NZD 7500.

What we do have to remember is that these are kids. This is the elementary school division, so it's definitely too much to ask for Hamilton, written, designed, and performed by experts on Broadway. There's a charm to this badness: I found myself rewatching it again and again despite fully knowing this was bad. I could feel that the kids did give the best they could in this musical drama from the costumes and set design, to how many dance and musical sequences were in here. They come out of nowhere, but it allows many more kids to perform at least something in this one-hour play. The heart is there, even if it's bogged down by the story.

I feel like a simple thing that could have been changed is how characters just stand around, waiting for their next line. I feel like if the writers (who I couldn't find in the credits) had given each character one defining thing, it could have been better. Now, every actor knows what their character is, so even when standing around and waiting for their next turn, there is some deliberation. Take the underlings of the war general: if their main character is that they fear the general and pity the kids, they now have direction for what to do if they're not just standing around. They could be making more glances towards the kids, the way they get out of the general's way would be more fearful, etc. Or the main hero, Sandwich Girl: she wants to be strong, brave, and good like her siblings, but doesn't take any agency to do so. Now, instead of waiting idly for her next line, her "waiting" would involve trying to get a glimpse of the queen's message, or having a more dejected pose, or something. Point is, if the writers better communicated to the kids what each character is, the kids would know what to do while "waiting". There would be deliberation in everything they do: it would look like they are still acting when, in reality, they're simply waiting for their turn to speak.

The other big problem I have is how sudden the musical numbers are, but there's not a lot we can do about that.

Overall, it's a mess. But it's a heartfelt mess, with plenty of room for improvement. It's laughable at first, and still is because of how on-the-nose it is. But there's heart to it as seen in how its designed at the cost of the story: it allows a lot of kids to be able to have their moments on the play.

And their stolen song from Mulan does have a reference to Pink Floyd with the lyric "Mysterious as The Dark Side of the Moon", so I'll forgive them for everything.