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| Valerie Vigoda and Wade McCollum (photo by Jeff Carpenter) |
Ernest Shackleton Loves Me
Through May 3
A hallucinating new mother/musician conjures explorer Ernest
Shackleton via Skype to help her weather the winter storms of her failed
relationship and her disappearing job in Balagan’s newest show. Ernest Shackleton Loves Me (in a
co-production with both Seattle Repertory Theatre and ACT Theatre) is a tour de
force performance from both of its two stars!
ESLM is well worth
a visit. It’s a dense sound-and-light, rocking, lyrical extravaganza, with a bit
of hootenanny thrown in.
Valerie Vigoda is both the lyric writer (book by Joe
DiPietro and music by Brendan Milburn) and the hallucinating musician who
creates the music right in front of us through the use of automated keyboards,
sound looping, playback, an electric violin, and even an old reel-to-reel tape
recorder! Vigoda is a wonder as we watch her swiftly and deliberately latch on
her violin and flip switches and
sing! She has a gorgeous voice, too.
Perhaps because she does so much already, it is a lot to ask
that she also emote effectively in this frantic realm of creation. In that, she
is over-shadowed by her partner, Wade McCollum, though he has far fewer aspects
to manage, besides mostly being charming, as Ernest Shackleton, silly as Ponce
de Leon, and occasionally playing the banjo.
If you saw Priscilla,
Queen of the Desert, here a couple of months ago, you’ll know already that
McCollum is an amazing musical theater performer. Here, he displays his lush
vocals and a deeply masculine explorer persona with a sunny disposition, even
in the midst of harsh winter calamities.
This is a new musical with a complex and contemporary amount
of technical creation within it. There is a ton of video production for
background eye-candy, along with imitation Skype-ing, a layered and dense and
beautiful soundscape with both recorded and live elements almost impossible to
tease apart, and a complicated dance with plastic snowflakes.
The story involves Kat (Vigoda) who is a composer for video
games and a new mother abandoned by her musician boyfriend when he gets cold
feet about fatherhood. A subplot about her getting fired from her game
composing amps up the pressure, probably unnecessarily. The fact that she has a
colicky baby and has not been able to get sleep for 36 hours as a single mother
surely is enough pressure to heap on her circumstance. That 36-hour deprivation
prompts hallucinations about heroes, whereupon she gets a phone call from
Ernest Shackleton (McCullom).
At that point, Kat relives with Ernest his harrowing journey
to the South Pole where his ship gets stuck in the ice and no one is sure if
they will return home. Even though the musical is fairly short, only 95 or so
minutes, we still really don’t need to go through as many stages of the
Shackleton adventure as are currently detailed. Nor do we need as many reprises
as we get.
The first song of the evening, This Sucks, starts off gorgeously with Kat singing about how 300
beta-test boys love her composition. Within that is woven the event that she
gets fired, but the song is an exultation that her work is admired by a set of admirers,
teen-age boys, that is surprising and empowering. That part of the song is
sublime.
Wading into suggestion territory, the song would work well
if the “suck”y part were removed and she doesn’t get fired. The next song, Pick Up the Phone, focuses on the bad
relationship part, which is another aspect that could be much reduced without harm,
almost removing her boyfriend from the equation. The point is the wakefulness
and the solitary pressure, not the stupid boyfriend. We also don't really need to see him in person, later.
An awkward inclusion of a doll as the baby, is another easy
area to fix. There is so much video already, why not just video a baby so that
when she hears the crying from the monitor, she can switch on a babycam to see
if the baby needs attention? We don’t need to see a physical manifestation of
the baby.
A lot of work has gone into the production, and it is
intelligent and thoughtful and surprises in many lovely ways. There is no
question that it could do extremely well transferring to New York City (the
goal), if a bit more tinkering is done to iron out the few kinks.
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