LOS
ANGELES TIMES
November
14, 2003
THEATER
REVIEW
By Rob Kendt
Musical
talent has been a ticket out of dreary small-town life ever since Bach packed
up his clavier for the Weimar court. For the Shaggs, though, music was a chore,
not a choice, and talent never entered into it.
Needless
to say, they didn't escape. Instead, the three New Hampshire teen girls made
strange, terrible music to placate a tyrannical father and left it to posterity
in a historic 1969 recording that's become a cult classic.
The
Shaggs' insistent, discordant songs thankfully don't supply the score for Joy
Gregory and Gunnar Madsen's terrific new musical, "The Shaggs: Philosophy
of the World." We do hear a few idealized, smoothed-out versions of Shaggs
tunes, and the title song's resigned chorus, "You can never please/Anybo-ody/In
this world," is a telling refrain throughout.
More
impressive are a series of original songs that manage to capture the voices of
these sad, shut-in girls better than they did themselves.
"If
there's no magic/You make your own magic/That's the only magic in New
Hampshire," sings rebel Betty (Sarah Hays) as she tries to seduce a
sensitive local nerd (Rob Moore). Dot (Jamey Hood), the dutiful daughter who
writes and sings the group's loopy songs, pleads with guileless affection
"Don't Say Nothing Bad About My Dad." And the sisters have a gorgeous
a cappella trio late in the show, turning their humdrum lives into mournful,
beatific poetry: "The sky is the color of water/Used to wash our
socks."
The
rest of "The Shaggs" plays more or less like a typical birth-of-a-band
backstager, though with unsettling undertones of domestic abuse and unspeakable
horror--"School of Rock" as conceived by David Lynch. The authors may
indeed have gone overboard with father Austin (Steven Patterson), portraying
him as a holy terror consumed by primitive rage and resentment, then awkwardly
positing him as an archetypal thwarted dreamer, a Tom Joad for losers.
Director
John Langs' production artfully walks a line between knockout professionalism
and knockabout simplicity, with a rickety, cluttered set (Brian Sidney
Bembridge), witty sound design (Robbin E. Broad), perfectly unflattering period
costumes (Dianne K. Graebner), versatile lighting (Lonnie Rafael Alcaraz),
loose-limbed choreography (Ken Roht), and punchy music direction (David O).
The
cast is flawless without being showbiz glib. Towering over the show despite her
tiny frame is Hedy Burress as Helen, the Shaggs' hapless drummer and the most
traumatized of the girls. Burress' heart-rending performance, which alternates
mute indirection with powerful speech and song, gives a redemptive glow to the
show's creepier undercurrents.
By
turns hilarious and troubling, celebratory and darkly ironic, "The
Shaggs" moves on its feet as surely as it moves us. Seldom has so-called
"outsider art" struck so close to home.
"The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World," presented
by Powerhouse Theatre Company at [Inside] the Ford, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd.,
Hollywood. Thursdays-Saturdays 8 p.m. (no performance Thursday, Nov. 27);
Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends Dec. 14. $18-22. (323) 461-3673. 2 hours, 20 minutes.