What happens when AI rewrites the cold war as a Broadway musical?

“It’s an absurd idea, which is exactly why I had to do it,” Silverstein said. “The Missile Crisis already played out like bad theater – egos, miscommunication, high stakes. I just gave it the soundtrack.”

The show opened on October 16, 63 years to the day after the crisis began, and runs through November 16. Visitors move through 89 large-scale images, narration and four original songs that serve as the early framework for a planned 35-song concept musical. One scene has Kennedy telling Bobby that the Soviets have put missiles in Cuba, punctuated by a rock-and-roll refrain: “Shit, shit, shit, those sons of bitches Russians.” Another features Khrushchev singing about “throwing a hedgehog down Uncle Sam’s pants.” The musical closes with Fidel Castro promising, “I will outlive them all.”

“It’s history meets absurdity,” said curator Martin Strickland. “You’re laughing, but you’re also uneasy because it’s not far off from how the world still operates.”

A new kind of collaboration

For Silverstein, the project doubles as a creative experiment in how humans and machines might work together without losing artistic intent. He calls it “an ethical middle ground between AI replacement and AI rejection,” using technology not as a shortcut but as a sketchpad.

“We used AI the way a musician uses a metronome,” he explained. “It keeps time, but it doesn’t make the song. It helps me visualize scenes, test lyrics and imagine tone. But the intent, the weird human intent... that’s the part no algorithm understands.”

That tension between machine precision and human chaos is the point. At its core, the piece merges archival black-and-white footage with imagined musical storytelling, highlighting how close spectacle and survival can feel.

“It’s a high-wire act between terror and entertainment,” Silverstein said. “And somehow, it sings.”

Fact, fiction and fallout

Silverstein’s interest in world events as creative material isn’t new. Past projects have turned politics, faith and mortality into visual commentary. But 13 Days feels especially current, arriving as nuclear tension and technological ethics dominate headlines.

“History often reads like satire,” Strickland noted. “World leaders playing a game of brinkmanship with catastrophic consequences – it’s theater whether we admit it or not.”

Silverstein wants the audience to leave both amused and unsettled. “As crazy and absurd as all this seems, nothing was made up,” he said. “It proves again that fact is stranger than fiction.”