‘The Nightman Cometh’ should cometh live to Philly again. For America (but mostly for Philly)

At a live taping of The Always Sunny Podcast at the Mann Center in 2023, members of the cast were asked to pick what they thought was the greatest episode ever of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

I remember thinking it was an impossible question. Even if Charlie Day, Glenn Howerton, and Rob Mac (formerly McElhenney) each had a favorite episode, them agreeing on the best one seemed as likely as Cricket having a banner day.

But in short order, they did just that and proclaimed their season four musical finale, “The Nightman Cometh,” champion of the sun(ny).

While it’s not my personal favorite — I’m a wild card, it’s “The Gang Solves the Gas Crisis” for me — “The Nightman Cometh” is undoubtedly one of the most universally beloved episodes. Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda is a massive fan, people have recreated the musical to propose to their partners, and it consistently makes every list of the best episodes of the show’s 20-year run.

A 2009 stage version of “The Nightman Cometh” is also, to my knowledge, the only live public performance the entire cast of It’s Always Sunny has put on in the Philadelphia area. As someone who had the pleasure of attending it — as a fan, not a journalist — methinks the time hath cometh for the gang to do it again.

And there’s no better moment for it than next year, when the show comes of legal drinking age and everybody will be coming to Philadelphia for the World Cup and the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It’s time not just for Charlie, but for the entire gang to go “America all over everybody’s a—” by staging one of the most perplexing and disturbing musicals ever written (Sweeney Todd and Audrey II have nothing on the Nightman).

Part rock opera, part extremely fractured fairy tale, and 100% unhinged, the episode is about Charlie’s quest to stage a musical he’s written called The Nightman Cometh. While never spoken of in the show, the title appears to be a nod to Eugene O’Neill’s play, The Iceman Cometh, a tragedy about a group of alcoholics who hang out at a bar.

But of course, Charlie’s production doesn’t take place at a bar, it takes place at a Philadelphia school. His musical is about a princess/coffee shop waitress (Kaitlin Olson as Dee Reynolds) who falls in love with a “tiny boy, little boy, baby boy” (Howerton as Dennis Reynolds) who’s held captive by a troll named Antonio (Danny DeVito as Frank Reynolds).

The troll allows the evil Nightman (Mac as Ronald “Mac” McDonald) to visit the boy for a fee, resulting in an extremely unfortunate phrase that fans of the show are now cursed with recalling — and reciting — whenever they hear the words or :

“You gotta pay the troll toll if you wanna get into that boy’s hole.”

(In the episode, Charlie is adamant he wrote in the script, but Frank is either incapable or unwilling to pronounce it correctly.)

“A rape joke is not remotely a funny thing; a man writing a musical that he thinks is about self-empowerment, and not realizing that all his lyrics sound like they’re about a child being molested, is a funny thing,” Day told GQ in 2018. “The joke is coming from confusion and misunderstanding, which are classic tropes of all comedy.”

The boy is eventually transformed by “the strong, musky power of love” into a “champion of the sun” called Dayman (“AAAaaa! Fighter of the Nightman. AAAaaa!”). He defeats the troll and the Nightman through gun violence, karate, and a bare-knuckled heart extraction and wins the affection of the princess.

After touching on themes of incest, child molestation, and murder, the play ends with a marriage proposal. Take that, Shakespeare.

The episode premiered in 2008 and the following year, the gang held two live performances of it at the Troubador in West Hollywood, Calif., adding a few additional songs like “I’ve Got a Troll in My Hole” and “It’s Nature, Sh— Happens.”

The production was so popular they were approached by Live Nation to do a 30-city tour in 2009, but the cast negotiated it down to just six stops, including two sold-out performances at the Tower Theater in Upper Darby on Sept. 19.

I was there that night. I wish I could remember it all, but what I do recall is what it felt like to be with other It’s Always Sunny fans, singing along with the cast, who seemed to be having just as much fun being there with us.

In multiple interviews, the cast said it was by doing those live performances — where fans knew every word of every song — that they realized how popular the show had become.

“It was like The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” DeVito said in a 2011 interview with the Television Academy Foundation.

People who hadn’t heard of the gang from Paddy’s Pub yet started paying attention, too. It was after The Nightman Cometh tour, according to DeVito, that networks started talking about syndicating the show.

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia grew in popularity after that and became more than something that belonged to just us weirdos or Philadelphia. Today, people who were in diapers when the show premiered are discovering it through streaming services. Depravity always finds a way.

But as an early adopter of It’s Always Sunny living in the city where it’s based, I never felt more connected to the show than I did in those first few seasons and, especially, during that live performance at the Tower Theater.

I got a little flashback of that night two years ago at the Mann Center, 14 years after the Tower Theater show, when Day, Howerton, Mac, and Olson ended the evening with a “Dayman” sing-a-long. For a few minutes, it felt like the cast was connected to — and connecting with — Philadelphia again.

While much of the early seasons were filmed in Philly, It’s Always Sunny hasn’t shot here for years, and it shows. Using Los Angeles as a stand-in for Philadelphia in exterior shots is insulting (to Philadelphia, if that wasn’t clear), and nobody in Philly would ever change their name because it was difficult for folks to pronounce. Philadelphians like giving people a challenge, and a hard time.

The gang needs some real Philly street cred and the quickest way to do it is to perform The Nightman Cometh live for us during our birthday party for America next year. I’d even encourage Day to sing his American rock anthem “Rock, Flag and Eagle” as an encore.

For as Frank Reynolds once said: “I don’t know how many years on this earth I got left. I’m gonna get real weird with it.”