We're just three episodes into the second season of Orphan Black and have already experienced a deluge of wretched, depressing details about the lives of Sarah, Cosima, Alison, and the rest of the Clone Club. But even as they've hurtled deeper into darkness, there has been some light: Alison's star turn in the laughable "it ain't Cats" musical Blood Ties.

Alison, the most straitlaced of the many genetically-engineered clones played by Tatiana Maslany on Black, joined Blood Ties to achieve some small shred of normalcy. After spending much of Season 1 working with Sarah and Cosima to determine their origins and not die in the process, Alison needed a distraction. She found it in a hokey community theater production that had her doing junior-varsity choreography with mops and buckets while singing about cleaning up blood. It seemed like something that could exist only in the delightfully twisted world of Orphan Black.

But guess what? Blood Ties is a real musical. With real blood. And real mop canes. Those über-ridiculous songs? Totally real.

Developed in 2009 by Toronto-based duo Anika Johnson and Barbara Johnston (known as Johnson and Johnston), Blood Ties follows three friends who return to their hometown for a wedding only to find themselves forced to clean up after the apparent suicide of the bride's uncle. It's loosely based on something that happened to Johnston's parents and came to Orphan Black thanks to Mackenzie Donaldson, the assistant to the show's creators John Fawcett and Graeme Manson. Donaldson had helped run the Blood Ties social media campaign during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival last summer and brought the musical to Fawcett and Manson when the pair began searching for the right show for Alison, who watched her presumed monitor Aynsley (Natalie Lisinska) die at the end of last season and has been traumatized in the aftermath.

"I think at first glance we thought [Donaldson] was just being nice and didn't think much would come of it," Johnson and Johnston say. "Next thing we knew, the show had been given the go-ahead, and we were sitting down with the writers to adapt Blood Ties for the screen. It was a total coincidence that the plot and lyrics of our show corresponded so perfectly with the Orphan Black storyline."

For Orphan Black, the pair say they "bumped up the camp" from the original version of Blood Ties, which they describe as more tragic and "darkly comedic" than the ludicrous scenes we see. Fawcett and Manson, they say, asked them to "give the script a real Waiting for Guffman style of excellent amateurism, and encouraged us to create dance moves, staging, and vocal arrangements that were as corny and over-the-top as possible."

As a bonus, Johnson and Johnston and the rest of the original cast were asked to perform the show onstage behind Maslany as chorus members. You can see Johnston, the tall blonde woman in the stripes, in the behind-the-scenes clip above.

As for that "it ain't Cats" gag, Johnson and Johnston made a similar joke in their Indiegogo campaign video. ("No offense to Andrew Lloyd Webber," they add.) However, they say, the Cats slight becoming a recurring gag on Orphan Black is coincidental.

"We love that line and we hope it's attached to the show forever," they say. "It's a great billing: 'Blood Ties: It's not Cats.'"

Want to see the real deal? Check out this trailer for the original play, which Johnson and Johnston expect will be getting a lot more production license requests soon, below.