He’s going to speak with the ushers, too. “They’re like 60 years old, up to 80. They come out and tell you, “‘You’ve got to sit down!’ and ‘You can’t do this.’ ‘You can’t do that.’ It’s like having a schoolteacher.” Mr. Buffett wants his ushers to understand that this show is more like “Rocky Horror” than a conventional musical. “There’s an opportunity here to give people a really great, full experience,” he told them. “They’ve paid money to be here. They deserve it.”

Recently, he went to the Springsteen show on Broadway, where ushers double as military snipers, ready to do whatever is necessary to shut down phone usage or singing along. Onstage, Mr. Springsteen, whose working class anthems made him rich, revealed that he’d never been inside a factory. It’s an easy thing to admit to people who paid up to $850 for a seat. They’d assumed the factory thing was a metaphor anyway.

Mr. Buffett may no longer be Jimmy Buffett, but at one time he was. Most of the songs he’s famous for aren’t about love. They’re seemingly simple songs about how we spend our lives. But listen closer. “A Pirate Looks at Forty” is about a middle-age crisis wherein a man’s skills become obsolete before he’s ready to retire. “I have been drunk now for over two weeks” seems like a party lyric but it’s not — it’s a crushing one. “Cheeseburger in Paradise,” which he wrote after a precarious sailing trip, is about a cheeseburger, plain and simple, with a euphoric bridge that is just a list of condiments he loves. Where are our simple pleasures now, it asks without asking? Why has everything become so complicated? Why is life filled with so many things we don’t want and so few things we do?

But “It’s 5 o’Clock Somewhere” — a song he didn’t write but recorded with Alan Jackson and took out on tour — man, that one’s the real heartbreaker. Take away the jaunty island beat and you’ll find a song about a man who is so miserable that he can’t bring himself to return to work from his lunch break. “I’m getting paid by the hour, and older by the minute,” it goes. “My boss just pushed me over the limit.” The guy hasn’t taken a vacation day in a year. He knows that there will be consequences tomorrow, but he doesn’t care. He can’t face it for another afternoon. Just keep pouring those Hurricanes.

Has any pop star identified this particular strain of existential crisis better than Mr. Buffett? Who has been such a dedicated balladeer of the T.G.I.F. class? Who has been such a folk hero of workaday boredom and 9 to 5 drudgery? The knowledge that if we allow ourselves to think hard enough about our lives we will realize that they are spent in service of making someone else rich while we merely scrape by? Mr. Buffett may be rich, but he wasn’t always. He has grappled with dark thoughts about time and existence. He saw from the stage that we had, too. So he gave language to it: There has to be something more to this. There has to be a way to exist that isn’t quite so compromised. The ocean is often so far away. But a T-shirt that says “No Shoes No Shirt No Problem?” That you can take with you.

You know, he could be rewatching “Game of Thrones,” like he wants to, enjoying it even more now that he can tell the characters apart. He could be watching “Narcos,” which he loves, and vaping all day. He could be flying from house to house and kayaking and surfing. He could never work another day in his life and still dive like Scrooge McDuck into a swimming pool full of money. He could splash his name across the marquee of the Marquis and never care for a second if the musical you got was something that felt real — that really delivered escape. This is America, and poor-quality licensed products are our birthright.

But Mr. Buffett won’t give you that. He still remembers who got him here. He still shares the existential worry of how to spend a day. He protects your experience of the lifestyle he sells in a way that someone living that lifestyle should be incapable of. Look beyond the MAMA NEEDS SOME WINE sign in the Margaritaville gift shop. Look beyond the beer cozy that says “Fins to the left, fins to the right.” This is no longer a business. This is a cause. Can you hear its anthem? You can hear the Parrotheads singing it from beneath their feathers; you can hear it in their hums.

Mr. Buffett arrived at the rehearsal space. He spotted Mr. Nolan and complimented him on his tan.