Local Playwright Turns Corporate Layoffs Into a Musical Comedy — ‘Happy Monday’ Opens in Little Falls

Local Playwright Turns Corporate Layoffs Into a Musical Comedy — ‘Happy Monday’ Opens in Little Falls

LITTLE FALLS – Some people process trauma in therapy. Maria Salamone wrote a musical.

“Happy Monday the Musical” opens next month at 410 Canal Place in Little Falls, the debut production from a writer many locals will remember for a very different venture: the Happy Waffle, the Main Street eatery she opened after a decade away chasing a career in New York City.

Salamone left Little Falls at 17 to study musical theater in New York, then drifted into the restaurant industry before returning home in 2018 to open the Happy Waffle, a brunch spot built around community and, as she put it at the time, giving people “a good experience” rather than just selling them food.

That chapter ended when the pandemic hit. Plans to expand the concept to Myrtle Beach were shelved, and Salamone took what she figured would be a temporary job while she waited out the economy and scouted new space for a second location.

That temporary job became a career — and, eventually, the raw material for the show.

“There’s this culture that I just was like, this is me. This is everything I stand for. This is everything I ever wanted a business to be,” Salamone said of the unnamed company she joined, describing how completely she bought into its mission before eventually rising into upper management, where she ran the training department and onboarded new hires into that same culture.

The cracks showed slowly. Salamone described days that started at 7 a.m. and didn’t end until 3 the next morning, and a dawning realization about what the company’s stated values actually meant in practice.

“The first one’s like, one team,” she said. “And I realized one team meant, hey, you should be okay doing three jobs. That’s what one team meant… I was realizing how much I was actually brainwashing people, and I didn’t recognize it until later on.”

She eventually moved into sales, a change she said she genuinely enjoyed — “I was selling fun, I really was” — but the layoffs that followed left a deeper mark. Salamone described three separate rounds of cuts, watching coworkers vanish mid-shift from internal messaging platforms during virtual town halls, not knowing whose job was next.

One meeting in particular stuck with her: employees kept working through the day not knowing if they’d still have a job by the end of it, after a company executive opened by thanking staff for hitting 80 percent of a bonus target — then announceing layoffs in the same breath.

“It was like watching a funeral,” she said.

Salamone said she was furious — at the timing, at the language, at watching people she’d trained and worked alongside disappear one by one while she was left to absorb their workload. So she started writing.

“I was so angry about the way it was handled… that I just decided to make a big joke out of it, because that’s how I feel,” she said. “I started writing that next day. It was kind of my therapy.”

The result folds years of workplace observation — hers and, she says, roughly ten trusted coworkers’ — into a single fictionalized company and cast of characters. Salamone wrote the lyrics and cast her real-life brother as an exaggerated version of the CEO whose words had haunted her.

“I made him endearing in the most hateable way, if that makes sense,” she said.

Her brothers, Nick and Sam Salamone, helped build the show from the ground up and created their characters from scratch — contributions Salamone credits as essential to the finished production.

The score came from composer Erica Stiglia, a collaborator Salamone found through the freelance platform Fiverr and who wrote every track in the show without ever having met Salamone in person.

Salamone is quick to note the show isn’t a tell-all about any single employer. “I toe the line so that you would never, in a million years… know it was that real story,” she said. “It’s based on a real story, but it’s based on several real stories.”

Structurally, the show leans into that duality. “The first half of the show is very funny,” Salamone said. “The second half, I cried… in the second act is when, classically, everyone comes together, and they realize that corporations use the word family a lot. And it is a tactic.”

Her focus, she said, isn’t on the employees who get laid off — it’s on the ones left behind afterward, absorbing extra work and bracing for the next round. “What about all those people that get left behind? You know, what about all those people that have to keep working while their friends just disappeared?”

One recurring figure in the show is what Salamone calls “the culture champ” — the person at any company whose job is to keep morale high. “Everyone has a culture champ,” she said. “You slowly watch what happens, and it kind of destroys them a little bit.”

Despite everything the show skewers, Salamone said she still works for the company that inspired it and genuinely likes many of the people there. Until now, she’d kept her connection to the production quiet.

“This is the first time I’m even letting anyone know I’m having anything to do with this show,” she said, “because I don’t want it to be about me… it’s about everyone.”

“Happy Monday the Musical” runs for two weekends at 410 Canal Place, Little Falls, the 2nd floor Blackbox Theatre:

• Saturday, Aug. 8 — 7 p.m.
• Sunday, Aug. 9 — 2 p.m.
• Friday, Aug. 14 — 7 p.m.
• Saturday, Aug. 15 — 7 p.m.
• Sunday, Aug. 16 — 2 p.m.

Tickets and additional show information are available at happymondaythemusical.org.