November 08, 2024
Review

Roars galore with the fairer ‘Six’

Northport Music Theater’s latest offering should be seen with a friend. Preferably, your best girlfriend from childhood.

The one you cried with when Bambi’s mother died. The one who told you exactly what was anatomically incorrect about Barbie’s boy toy, Ken. The one you spent prom night drinking with because neither of you had a date.

“Six Women With Brain Death” or “Expiring Minds Want to Know” is a musical revue about what happens when you hit your mid-30s and your brain cells start dying faster than they’re being replaced, and you face the fact that your girlish figure has been defeated by gravity, and you really don’t like your teenagers or your spouse or your life. So, you turn to the places where you’re sure to see lurid lives that are more messed-up than yours – daytime soap operas and tabloid headlines.

If it sounds wild and zany, that’s because it is. Although theatergoers won’t leave the NMT’s converted machine shop on Route 1 humming tunes from this two-act show, the incredible carpet of sound woven by the six actresses’ voices, will envelop and carry them all the way home.

Director Peter Clain and music director John Gelsinger gathered some of the best female vocalists in the midcoast. While the subject of “Six Women” may seem frivolous, the complex score is not.

Savannah Creech, Audra Anne Curtis, Kathleen Hawkes, Kimberly Murphy, Anne Watson and Caitlin Whalen make up the ensemble cast. They are equally adept at the zany material and its challenges, but Curtis as a talking severed head and Whalen as the diva leading a girl group stand out.

The sets for the show are minimal. Kathleen Brown’s elaborate costumes, especially the prom dresses, give “Six Women” some much-needed sparkling pizzazz to the black thrust stage.

Six women and two men developed the show in the early 1980s during a road tour of “Side by Side by Sondheim.” The music and lyrics were written by the late Mark Houston.

The musical was hatched in the wee hours of the morning as tabloid headlines about living severed heads and 18-pound babies born pregnant seduced the cast from newsstands at truck stops and convenience stores. The writers pulled together the revue based not only on the bizarre stories they read on the tour bus but also on their own insecurities.

“Six Women” was first performed in 1985 in Kansas City, Mo., and the irreverent revue quickly gained a cult following. Penobscot Theatre Company in Bangor performed the show to sold-out houses for a month during the summer of 1999.

Clain has updated a few of the references, but younger women who grew up plugged into their iPods, cell phones and Xboxes and IM’ing their friends in their sleep may not get all that middle-age angst spewed out onstage. Anyone who has ever undressed Barbie and Ken, however, will laugh until their sides hurt when the women stage a wedding and R-rated honeymoon for America’s perfect Mattel sweethearts.

“Six Women” may not be the show for people who prefer Rodgers and Hammerstein to Stephen Sondheim. Theatergoers who every once in a while want a show whose tongue is firmly planted in its cheek, however, will adore this production and bond with these women.

“Six Women With Brain Death” will be presented at 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays, through Aug. 25. Matinees are performed at 3:30 p.m.


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