Screens are everywhere in Co-Founders, the inventive, tech-centric, Bay Area-set new musical that just had its world premiere Thursday at ACT's Strand Theater. And, just maybe, it presents a vision for how technology will integrate into the musical theater we see produced in the coming years.

Advances in video and visual projection technology have been on display in a number of new plays and musicals that have passed through Broadway and become hits in the last decade. Dear Evan Hansen made liberal use of social media posts and had a set that featured a collage of projections like scrolling cellphones. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child features some stunning uses of projection mapping in its theater magic wizardry. And this season's revival of Sunset Boulevard features a virtuosic, cinematic six-minute sequence that takes lead actor Tom Francis down seven flights of stairs, through the bowels of the theater, out the stage door and onto West 44th Street, live, regardless of the weather, all of which is shown in real time for the theater audience on a 25-foot-tall LCD screen.

For the new original musical Co-Founders, the creative team has taken the screen-laden world that we all inhabit, seen through the lens of a skilled AI coder and would-be startup founder, and projected this onto not only the cyclorama at the rear of the stage, but also onto a transparent scrim that encases the actors from the front of the stage, as if they are performing from inside a computer monitor.

The upstage surface functions as a moving street scene in Oakland when the characters are driving in a car, and as one of several high-above-San Francisco cityscape views, from the Top of the Mark and from a SoMa highrise as tall as Salesforce Tower.

The set that frames and encases all these projections, brilliantly designed by , features Victorian-style bay windows across its top that can light up from within, and a metal framework that itself becomes a projection surface.

In reviewing Co-Founders, all of this design and technical detail feels as important as the plot and characters themselves, so it seems worthy to start off there. But it's also very much a story about people of color hustling in the contemporary Bay Area, which for some now means driving for Uber and DoorDash while trying to scare up Series A funding for their app.

The show was conceived and written by a trio of local artists with deep connections to both the Bay Area music scene and the tech universe, and the book and lyrics reflect this, sometimes with terrific, knowing humor. When a white character asks, "What is hyphy?", it is sure to get a laugh from Bay Area natives and longtime denizens. And when lead character Esata (Aneesa Folds), a Black entrepreneur and self-taught coder, first encounters the evangelical preachings of a famous VC at a startup bootcamp, she gets a big laugh as she quips, "My grandma joined a church like this once and they took all her money!"

Folds is stellar and emanently watchable as the ambitious Esata, and her gorgeous voice gets to shine in multiple numbers including "The One Percent," and "This Is the Bay." (The role will be taken over in the final week of the run by Angel Adedokun.) Playing her mother Deb and multiple other roles, co-writer and producer Adesha Adefela is also phenomenal and hilariously chameleon-like as she switches roles.

Co-writer Ryan Nicole Austin offers some of the most reliable comic relief in the show in the role of Kamaiyah, and several other parts. And Roe Hartrampf is the sleeper surprise as Esata's would-be co-founder Conway DeLouche — whom the other characters immediately start calling LeDouche — when he starts letting his buttery tenor voice loose.

The plot mechanics, involving Esata's quick rise from startup hopeful to mega-money sellout and back again, are almost beside the point but give the show some solid forward momentum. And yes, there is an AI character in the form of Esata's dead father Cyril, played by Tommy Soulati Shepherd, which brings an added new element of surprise, but I won't give away too much about that — only to say that Shepherd is great, particularly when he gets to come on stage in human form (he is actually backstage in front of a camera manning a program that live-controls the projected AI the audience sees, and a snafu with this tech prompted a pause and a restart at Thursday's performance). An Act Two number in which the AI version of Cyril joins in on a couple verses of a song feels, perhaps, a bit forced and icky.

Co-Founders feels very much like an exciting work in progress, with several numbers that are catchy and memorable, and some less successful ones that likely should be cut to tighten up the show's runtime. And like any world premiere, it needs an audience and some time to become what it's meant to become.

But even at this stage it's a highly entertaining piece of theater with a steady stream of IYKYK shoutouts to The Town and the Bay in general, and you'd better catch it quick — it's apparently selling well with just a four-week run, and The Strand only has 283 seats.

'Co-Founders' is playing at The Strand through July 6. Find tickets here. Preview the music on Spotify.