Adding Machine Lyrics – All Songs from the Musical

"Adding Machine: A Musical (World Premiere Recording)" – Album Guide to Tracks and Key Scenes

Review

What happens when you take a grim 1923 expressionist play about a mediocre bookkeeper and turn it into a nearly through-composed chamber musical? In the case of Adding Machine: A Musical (World Premiere Recording), you get an album that feels like a nervous system wired directly into Mr. Zero’s head. The score chronicles his life as a human cog in an anonymous 1920s office, his snap after being replaced by an adding machine, his murder of the boss, trial, execution and strange afterlife in the Elysian Fields. The recording preserves that journey in one long, uneasy arc, where songs bleed into underscoring and the chorus nags at Zero like intrusive thoughts.

On disc, the show’s expressionism really pops. Joshua Schmidt’s music leans into clanging piano figures, eerie synth washes and percussion that sounds like office machinery gone feral, while the cast sings lines that are more like jagged speech-melody than hummable show tunes. Yet the recording never feels academic. When Daisy Devore’s secret love for Zero surfaces, or when Shrdlu spirals through religious guilt, the harmonies suddenly soften and the bleak office world cracks just enough to let melancholy light in. You hear an ordinary man’s small life turn catastrophic, then metaphysical, without the album ever loosening its grip.

Genre-wise the recording moves in phases: modernist chamber musical and quasi-opera to sketch the suffocating office grind; shards of blues and gospel to voice Shrdlu’s jailhouse fervor and the prison chorus; jittery jazz and cabaret colours to underscore the grotesque party and the afterlife bureaucracy. Each style has a job — industrial minimalism for dehumanisation, gospel for desperate salvation, woozy dance rhythms for the seductive but compromised freedom of the Elysian Fields. By the final tracks, that stylistic collage has mapped Mr. Zero’s inner landscape more clearly than any spoken monologue could.

How It Was Made

Adding Machine: A Musical began as Jason Loewith’s long-shot idea to adapt Elmer Rice’s expressionist play The Adding Machine into a musical. Years later he teamed up with composer Joshua Schmidt, then working in Chicago’s Next Theatre, to shape a score that could live in a tiny space with a tiny band. Schmidt has talked about writing from the start for a cramped orchestra pit and designing a full, challenging score for just three instruments rather than shrinking a bigger sound down — that’s why the cast album feels so lean and precise instead of underfed.

The show premiered at Next Theatre Company in Illinois in 2007 under director David Cromer, then transferred Off-Broadway to the Minetta Lane Theatre in early 2008 with many of the Chicago cast intact. The world premiere recording captures that New York company, essentially documenting the full staging in audio form. PS Classics produced the album, with Tommy Krasker as producer and Philip Chaffin as executive producer, and released it on CD and digital on 3 June 2008, timed to the show’s 100th Off-Broadway performance and accompanied by a booklet containing complete lyrics, photos and essays.

The band is a small, brutal miracle: piano, percussion and synthesizer (with players like Andy Boroson, Brad “Gorilla” Carbone and Timothy Splain) under musical director J. Oconer Navarro. That combo does a lot of heavy lifting, from brittle office ostinatos to thick, organ-like afterlife textures. Because the musical is almost entirely sung, the recording functions as a full audio drama. Underscored dialogue, transitions like “Transition to Jail,” and atmospheric cues in the Elysian Fields are retained, so the album plays more like a through-composed work than a selection of highlights.

Tracks & Scenes

This album doesn’t separate “numbers” from scenes very much; most tracks sit directly on top of key beats in Mr. Zero’s story. Here are some of the most revealing song–scene pairings, including how they tend to play on stage.

“In Numbers / Prelude” (Company)

Where it plays:

The opening prelude drops us into the anonymous office floor. Clerks chant and sing about adding, subtracting and carrying figures as Mr. Zero hunched over his desk becomes just one more body in the grid. Onstage, the chorus often moves in strict patterns, lit like factory machinery, while the music layers rhythmic counting and repeated motifs that mimic an adding machine spitting out sums. It’s non-diegetic — no one is literally singing at work — but it feels like the sound of their collective, overtaxed brains.

Why it matters:

This track establishes the show’s language: mechanised rhythm, choral texture and expressionist staging. You immediately understand that Zero is a man defined by numbers and routine, and the album plants its central metaphor before a single plot point is spoken.

“Something to Be Proud Of” (Mr. Zero & Company)

Where it plays:

Early in the first act, shortly after the prologue, we watch Zero at home with Mrs. Zero as he justifies his 25 years of mind-numbing work. In many productions he rehearses the speech he imagines giving at his anniversary dinner, while the ensemble comments and echoes his self-important phrases. The music grinds between grim march and hollow anthem, as if a company loyalty song got warped on a broken gramophone. It’s non-diegetic but staged almost like an inner pep rally inside Zero’s head.

Why it matters:

The album uses this track to show how little Zero actually has. The bombast of the melody clashes with his meagre achievements, underlining the tragedy: in his world, “something to be proud of” means never being fired, even as the machine waits to replace him.

“Harmony, Not Discord” (Zero, Daisy, Office Staff)

Where it plays:

Back at the office, the boss and staff chant the company’s motto while Daisy hovers near Zero’s desk. The song usually plays as an official work slogan weaponised into music, with office workers literally straightening their bodies into lines as they try to suppress any “discord.” Between the chanted slogans, we catch flashes of Daisy watching Zero, the orchestration tilting slightly more lyrical whenever she steps forward. The number sits at the pivot point between everyday grind and the emotional undercurrent neither character can voice aloud.

Why it matters:

On the album, this track tells two stories at once: the company’s insistence on conformity and Daisy’s quiet longing. The tight, locked-in harmonies mirror an office that doesn’t allow deviation, which makes Daisy’s small musical deviations for Zero feel startlingly intimate.

“I’d Rather Watch You” (Daisy & Zero)

Where it plays:

Midway through the first act, in the office after hours, Daisy finally lets her feelings slip. As Zero drones about movies and distractions, Daisy sings that she’d rather watch him than any picture show. Staging often leaves Zero half-oblivious at his desk while Daisy circles him in a pool of warmer light. The music loosens into a hesitant, almost jazz-tinged ballad, with the rhythm breathing more freely than in the earlier office numbers.

Why it matters:

This track is the emotional heart of the first act, and the recording captures Daisy’s mix of yearning and self-loathing. Her melody reaches for romantic musical-theatre sweep but keeps bumping into awkward intervals, mirroring a woman who sees something tender in a man too blinkered to notice.

“The Party” (Ensemble)

Where it plays:

At the fateful dinner party where Zero expects his big promotion, the ensemble crowds into a cramped domestic set. Guests gossip, drink and sing through a brittle, off-kilter party tune, while Zero waits for the boss’s speech that will change his life. Instead, he learns that an adding machine will replace him. The music slides from forced conviviality into sharp dissonance as the news lands; choreography often turns physically jagged, furniture and bodies skewed by the blow.

Why it matters:

On the album, you can hear the exact moment civility shatters. The song’s upbeat surface and sour harmonies finally collide, and that tension primes us for the sudden, shocking violence that follows when Zero murders his boss.

“Zero’s Confession” (Zero)

Where it plays:

After the murder and arrest, Zero sits in a stark interrogation room or prison cell and spills his version of the story. The staging usually strips away chorus and clutter so it’s just him, a chair and harsh light, while the orchestra pares down to skeletal chords and eerie synth pulses. He cycles through justification, self-pity and resignation, the vocal line hovering in a narrow range as if he can’t escape his own monotony even here.

Why it matters:

The album captures how un-heroic this “confession” feels. Rather than a big eleven-o’clock showstopper, it’s a grim inventory of a life misspent, making his fate feel inevitable instead of tragic in the romantic sense.

“Ham and Eggs / Ham ’n’ Eggs” (Jail Ensemble)

Where it plays:

In the jail sequence, fellow prisoners and their families sing about cheap food and everyday routines as they wait for executions and visiting hours. On stage this often plays with a mix of gallows humour and desperation — tin cups, metal bunks and clanking doors punctuate the rhythm while a small group sings about ham and eggs like it’s the height of luxury. The tune hints at a jaunty music-hall number while the underscoring keeps curdling underneath.

Why it matters:

As a track, it shows how the score uses banal images — breakfast, small comforts — to talk about class, punishment and the thin line between “ordinary life” and state-sanctioned death. You can almost smell the prison cafeteria, and that grounded detail makes the later afterlife scenes feel even stranger.

“Didn’t We?” (Shrdlu & Zero)

Where it plays:

Sharing a cell, Shrdlu unspools the story of his own crime and twisted religious guilt, pulling Zero into a duet that’s half confession, half sermon. The scene tends to be staged in close quarters, both men confined to the same tiny square of light while other prisoners watch from the shadows. Musically, the track bends toward blues and gospel, but the harmony never quite resolves, as if the promised redemption keeps shifting just out of reach.

Why it matters:

This is where the album cracks open the larger moral universe. Shrdlu’s fervent, unstable testimony makes Zero’s crime feel less like a single sin and more like part of a world that chews up small people, then blames them for getting swallowed.

“The Gospel According to Shrdlu” (Shrdlu & Ensemble)

Where it plays:

Expanding on the jailhouse conversation, Shrdlu preaches his personal theology to the prisoners. Staging often places him on a bunk or table like an improvised pulpit, with other inmates forming a reluctant congregation. The band breaks into full-on gospel-inflected patterns — hand-clap rhythms, call-and-response figures — but everything is crooked: phrases stretch too long, chords resolve to the “wrong” place, and the chorus sounds more anxious than saved.

Why it matters:

On the recording, this track foregrounds Schmidt’s ability to quote familiar styles while keeping them off balance. Shrdlu’s warped gospel sharpens the show’s critique of systems that promise grace but deliver only more judgment.

“A Pleasant Place / Daisy’s Confession” (Daisy & Zero)

Where it plays:

In the Elysian Fields — a dreamlike, bureaucratic afterlife — Daisy and Zero reunite. “A Pleasant Place” often scores the moment Daisy leads Zero through an apparently idyllic landscape of cubicles and clouds, while “Daisy’s Confession” brings her feelings fully into the open. The staging can feel almost absurdly pretty compared to the grimy first act: soft lighting, lush projections, chorus members drifting like clerks turned angels. The music finally offers more sustained lyrical lines, but faint mechanical figures still tick underneath.

Why it matters:

The album uses this sequence to make the afterlife feel like both reward and trap. Daisy’s tenderness sounds genuine, but the persistent rhythmic patterns hint that Zero may be headed for another cycle of the same small, wasted life.

“Freedom! / Freedom! (Reprise)” (Company)

Where it plays:

Near the end, Zero stands in front of a colossal new machine in the afterlife and is given a choice: step back into the same old life or truly change. The ensemble circles him, chanting and singing about freedom while the machine pulses with light. Some productions stage this as an ecstatic, terrifying dance around an enormous adding device, with Daisy trying to pull Zero away even as he gravitates back toward routine. The reprise hammers the word “freedom” until it sounds like another slogan.

Why it matters:

On disc, the rising intensity of “Freedom!” and its reprise plays like a warning siren. Instead of a triumphant liberation song, it becomes a portrait of a man who can’t imagine a life outside the system that destroyed him.

“The Music of the Machine” (Company)

Where it plays:

The final track layers voices, piano, synth and percussion into something that’s not quite song and not quite soundscape. In many stagings, the company melds into the machinery, singing word fragments and rhythmic syllables as Zero disappears into the workings of the cosmic adding machine. Lights strobe, projections of numbers spin and the human figures become silhouettes against gears and cogs.

Why it matters:

As an album closer, it’s devastating. The “music of the machine” has been with us since the prelude; here it finally swallows the characters whole, leaving listeners with an unresolved chord and a lingering sense that the cycle will repeat.

Notes & Trivia

• The musical drops the word “The” from Elmer Rice’s original title, a tiny trim that mirrors the score’s lean, no-waste aesthetic.
• Loewith reportedly got the idea for a Rice adaptation after discovering that Kurt Weill had turned another Rice play, Street Scene, into a musical decades earlier.
• The world premiere in Chicago at Next Theatre Company won the Joseph Jefferson Award for Best Musical before the show ever hit New York, so the album preserves a piece that was already a local legend.
• Despite its small three-instrument band, the creative team and reviewers often describe Adding Machine as “almost operatic” because of its near-continuous music and demanding vocal lines.
• The PS Classics booklet is unusually generous: it includes complete lyrics and a detailed synopsis, effectively acting as a mini-libretto for listeners who never saw the stage production.

Reception & Quotes

Critics in both Chicago and New York responded to Adding Machine with the kind of fervour usually reserved for big Broadway juggernauts. The musical won the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Musical, multiple Outer Critics Circle Awards including Outstanding New Score, and a cluster of Drama Desk nominations for music, lyrics, book and design. The cast recording rode that wave: reviewers praised its uncompromising sound world and the way it captures a nearly through-composed show without smoothing out its edges.

The New York Times called the musical “brilliant” and noted that Schmidt’s music “gets under your skin and stays there,” a sentiment echoed by the album’s champions, who argue that repeated listens reveal new musical and textual details. Time Out New York dubbed it the best new musical of its Off-Broadway season, while trade outlets and theatre sites singled out the recording’s clarity — you can follow the story without staging, yet still feel the claustrophobic visuals that made the production a cult favourite.

Fans tend to fall into two camps: listeners who treat the album like a challenging contemporary opera and those who latch onto specific tracks — Daisy’s songs, Shrdlu’s gospel, the “Freedom!” sequence — and play them on repeat. Either way, the recording has helped the show travel. Regional and international productions often use it as a template for the sound of the piece, and for some newer audiences, the album has been their first encounter with Rice’s bleak, oddly moving story.

“A brilliant musical… a superb libretto and music that gets under your skin and stays there.” – The New York Times

“Exciting and adventurous… brave and bold.” – New York Post & Variety

“The best new musical of 2008.” – Time Out New York

“Almost all the words and certainly all the music is there… undismissible.” – Broadway.com on the cast album

Interesting Facts

• The album’s running time is roughly 74 minutes, which means almost the entire 105-minute show is represented; there’s very little “off-disc” stage material.
• The band’s synthesizer isn’t used for lush orchestral pads; it’s often dialled toward brittle, metallic colours that evoke typewriters, cash registers and, of course, adding machines.
• Although the score can sound atonal on first listen, many hooks live in rhythmic patterns and spoken-sung refrains; fans report the office chants getting stuck in their heads like pop choruses.
• The MusicBrainz entry for the musical styles the title as “ADD1NG MACH1N?: A MUS1CAL,” reflecting the original cover art’s number-and-symbol typography.
• Because the show has a reputation for difficulty, the cast album has become a calling card for performers; actors auditioning for productions frequently use pieces like “I’d Rather Watch You” or “Shrdlu’s Blues.”
• Regional and academic productions around the world — from Boston and Los Angeles to Brisbane — often license the show from Concord and lean heavily on the PS Classics recording to shape their sound design.

Technical Info

• Title: Adding Machine: A Musical (World Premiere Recording)
• Year: 2008 (release of the world premiere cast album)
• Work type: Stage musical cast recording; near–through-composed chamber musical with expressionist elements
• Primary composers: Joshua Schmidt (music)
• Lyricists / book: Jason Loewith and Joshua Schmidt (book and lyrics)
• Source material: The Adding Machine by Elmer Rice (1923 play)
• Original producing theatres: Next Theatre Company, Illinois (world premiere, 2007); Minetta Lane Theatre, Off-Broadway (New York premiere, 2008)
• Album label: PS Classics
• Album release date: 3 June 2008 (CD and digital)
• Approximate duration / tracks: ~74 minutes; 21 tracks including prologue, jail sequence, Elysian Fields music and finale
• Instrumentation: small combo — piano, percussion and synthesizer; orchestrated to maximise colour from a three-player ensemble
• Music direction: J. Oconer Navarro (Off-Broadway production and recording)
• Notable vocal features: prominent roles for Mr. Zero, Mrs. Zero, Daisy Devore and Shrdlu; SATB chorus doubling as office workers, prisoners and afterlife figures
• Awards context: Musical itself won the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Musical and multiple Outer Critics Circle awards; the recording is often cited in discussions of 2000s Off-Broadway cast albums.
• Availability: Widely available on streaming platforms and digital stores; physical CD releases through theatre retailers and online vendors.

Key Contributors

Subject	Verb	Object
Joshua Schmidt	composed	the score for Adding Machine: A Musical.
Jason Loewith	co-wrote	the book and lyrics for the musical.
Elmer Rice	wrote	the original play The Adding Machine on which the musical is based.
David Cromer	directed	the Chicago world premiere and the Off-Broadway production captured on the album.
J. Oconer Navarro	served as	musical director and conductor for the Off-Broadway company.
PS Classics	released	the world premiere recording of Adding Machine: A Musical.
Tommy Krasker	produced	the cast recording for PS Classics.
Scott Morfee, Tom Wirtshafter & Margaret Cotter	produced	the Off-Broadway production at the Minetta Lane Theatre.
Next Theatre Company (Illinois)	premiered	the musical in 2007, leading to later New York and regional runs.
Minetta Lane Theatre (New York City)	hosted	the 2008 Off-Broadway run documented by the album.

Questions & Answers

Is the Adding Machine cast album a full recording of the show?

Pretty much. With 21 tracks and a 70+ minute running time, the world premiere recording preserves most of the sung text and underscoring from the Off-Broadway production.

Do I need to know the original Elmer Rice play to follow the album?

No. The recording and its booklet synopsis tell the story clearly on their own, though knowing the play can deepen the political and historical context.

What kind of musical style should I expect from the score?

Expect a hybrid: modernist chamber musical with moments of cabaret, blues, gospel and quasi-operatic writing, all filtered through an expressionist, slightly abrasive sound.

Is this a good entry point for people who usually only like big Broadway show tunes?

If you want lush hooks and easy sing-alongs, maybe not. If you’re curious about darker, more experimental musical theatre, it’s a fantastic listen.

How does the small band affect the recording compared to larger cast albums?

The trio of piano, percussion and synth keeps everything intimate and exposed. You hear text and vocal acting very clearly, and the “machine” textures feel brutally focused.

Sources: Wikipedia; Concord Theatricals; PS Classics; Playbill; Broadway.com; AllMusic; Apple Music; Dress Circle London; MusicBrainz.