New Line Theatre opens its 35th season with the American premiere of this gloriously unhinged new meta-musical from certified chaos merchants Mark Hollmann and Greg Kotis — the Tony-winning mad geniuses who looked at musical theatre and said, “What if… but weirder?”
Part Walking Dead, part Bat Boy, and part “you probably shouldn’t eat that,” ZM is a darkly comic fable set in an American small town where a fast-food chain is test-marketing a new sandwich. Which turns customers into zombies. Two brave teenage employees must risk everything to infiltrate corporate headquarters, uncover the truth, and maybe — just maybe — ask, “Should we have read the ingredients list?”
Originally commissioned by True Love Productions, Kotis and Hollmann began developing ZM in 2013 during a five-day writers’ retreat. Thirteen years, multiple workshops, and at least a few questionable snacks later, the show lumbered its way to its first fully staged production — in Spanish — in Mexico City in 2024. New Line’s is the first full production in English, making New Line the only company brave (and unsupervised) enough to produce all three Kotis-Hollmann musicals: Urinetown (2007, 2022), Yeast Nation (2018), and now ZM.