Eddie Perfect writes musicals for a living, which means he spends his life in rooms most people never see. The rehearsal spaces on the upper floors of Midtown buildings. The piano rooms where a song gets torn apart at eleven at night because it is not landing. The diners on Eighth Avenue where stage managers eat between a matinee and an evening show. He wrote the score for Beetlejuice and earned a Tony nomination for it, wrote King Kong before that, and he knows New York the way a working composer knows it, from inside the machine rather than the front of the house.

What he keeps coming back to is that the shows people love are built by hand, by a small number of people, under enormous pressure, eight times a week. Most audiences never get near that. For one week, Eddie brings a small group into the rooms where it actually happens, and stays in there with them as a collaborator, not a guide.