“Trapped,” as Ellen and her collaborator, David Strickland always called it, was the first show Ellen wrote with a partner whom she had met through the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop. It is a collection of five short musicals, where people don’t just happen to burst into song – they sing because they have to. The selection for this web-site is the short musical called The Trapped Family Singers, which follows the fortunes of a high school student whose problems – as a sympathetic coach discovers – arise from the fact that his parents do nothing but sing – for a reason that only becomes clear at the end. The show was presented at the New York City International Fringe Festival in 2003, and the lead actor, Alex Gemignani, received the Best Actor award at the Festival. The show was praised for, among other things, “lyrics with clever and unexpected rhymes.”

The lyrics for this track can be downloaded here.