Microsoft, the musical

Sean Dugan is an experienced actor, known for roles including prisoner Timmy Kirk on the HBO series "Oz." But his upcoming part -- portraying Bill Gates on stage in a New York musical -- posed a unique challenge. How does an actor prepare to play the world's richest man?

"I became a billionaire," Dugan joked last week. "I'm finding it really great. Life is good right now."

Dugan is playing Gates in "Nerds," a satirical musical about Gates and Steve Jobs to be featured at a New York festival next month. After seeing number of weblogs (Steve Rubel, Mary Jo Foley, Inside Microsoft, Bink) mention the musical last week, I was intrigued enough to look into it further. I interviewed Dugan and the co-authors of the musical, Jordan Allen-Dutton and Erik Weiner, to get the story behind the musical. Here's a link to the resulting article, published in Saturday's newspaper.

But the best part is the songs: Access clips of "I am Just a Nerd" and "Windows Rap" on this page. The rap line notwithstanding, it's probably safe to assume that "bitch pimp of the software game" won't be added to the official chairman and chief software architect titles anytime soon.