*** A BIG FAT SPOILER ALERT ***
I saw it on Tuesday night and Carmen Cusack is everything she has been advertised to be! She is a great singer, but perhaps an even better actress. There is a wonderful moment mid-song in Act I where her character transforms on stage from mid-40s to about 20-years-old. Yes, they change the set and her costume, but the real transformation is in Cusack herself. I could swear she literally removed lines from her face without ever leaving the stage! It took my breath away and was a piece of stage magic I will never forget. She has another such moment in Act II when she finally learns a piece of very bad news. No costume or age change, but she hardens visibly under the weight of the ultimate defeat, again without seeming to move a muscle.
The rest of the cast sings very, very well and A.J. Shively is a marvel! I'd never seen him before so that was a very pleasant surprise. Act/sing/dance--the guy does all three like a genuine star-on-the-rise, IMO.
The music is mostly catchy--if you can stand bluegrass, which I can, thank you very much. The lyrics, however, are pretty lazy. A nice line or couplet here and there, but a lot of the words seem random or cliché. All this I knew beforehand from the cast album.
But the book--WTF?! I sat with my mouth open for 2.5 hours. Suffice it to say there are two plot lines: one belongs in a Greek tragedy; the other is a rom-com about a young Southern writer finding himself as a man and as an artist. The two plots come together and are resolved in a final scene straight out of Restoration Comedy.
The mixture of the two styles is utterly tone-deaf (in the non-musical meaning of the word). I simply can't imagine WTF they were thinking! Every time they dropped the tragic mood to go comic, I was offended (aesthetically not politically) at how little respect and commitment the writers showed toward their own material.
And the thing is I LOVE Southern Gothic. My favorite fiction writers are people like Williams, Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, etc. I grew up in the South and, in the 1970s, even lived for three months in the mountains where the show is set. I don't mind dark and I know Southern fiction has an ironic sort of humor to it. But don't show me a brutal atrocity and then follow it with a hoedown and expect me to clap along.
That being said, the audience at the Ahmanson loved the show and began to holler and hoot even as the lights first began to dim. Bless their cotton-pickin' hearts!
Updated On: 11/3/17 at 09:17 AM
while surrounded by the entire cast playing
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