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Regional Reviews: St. Louis Big Machine
Take all of your money out of half-hearted, musicalized remakes of popular movies, and put it into Big Machine, a new musical written by Colin Healy at Fly North Theatricals in St. Louis. You won't be sorry! (Signed) Your pal, Me Seriously, I've seen two Broadway-bound film-to-stage musicals this year (in Chicago) and neither one could hold a candle to Big Machine. It's astonishingly good. Beautifully directed by Bradley Rohlf, the two and a half hour (with intermission) show is an instant classic, which means it's also a bit of a throwback. File it between Urinetown and The Cradle Will Rock, for bracing agit-prop tragicomedy. It's the fourth collaboration between director Rohlf and Healy (music, book and lyrics), a high-style musical and astringent social commentary billed as the "soft opener" to this year's St. Louis Fringe Festival. It's so good that, during the show, I began to worry it might just be one of those brilliant little pieces, secretly touring the country, popping up in a calculated way to snatch fringe awards wherever it goes. But it's a world premiere. And it turns out I don't know every talented actor in St. Louis. And most importantly, there are still great musicals being created, even out here in the land of Tennessee Williams, William Burroughs, and Mark Hollmann (Urinetown). Big Machine began its life in 2022 at the Center of Contemporary Arts here, as part of their COCAwrites Festival. A sraged reading followed this past April at Fly North Theatricals. In the show, Parker Miller plays the pensive and haunted Ernest, who's lost his wife and brought their daughter to the fictional town of Bay of Fortune, Indiana, in 1923, where he has found work at an oil refinery owned by the General Motors Chemical Company (yes, that General Motors). Much later, Mr. Miller will reveal the full beauty of his powerful singing voice. Maliah Strawbridge is a pint-sized Audra McDonald, playing his ingenious eight year-old daughter Grace, who has a fascination with mechanical devices, which leads to tragedy. Right before their arrival, a chemical engineer for GM lands at center-stage to announce a new, improved version of gasoline. "Ethyl" (embodied by a slinky showgirl played by Mack Holtman) will make the newfangled automobile run much more quietly, thus making the horseless carriage ubiquitous. Al Bastin plays the indefatigable future GM vice president, Thomas Midgley Jr., later branded as "the man who harmed the world most" for introducing lead into gasoline to reduce premature ignition and to soften the percussive roar of the internal combustion engine. His chemical compound made engines run smoother, but filled modern cities with a new plague of air pollution. Most importantly, though, it helped sell cars. So the rest was history. One of the best big production numbers in Big Machine comically traces the emergence of lead in various societies throughout the ages: from Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa of Rome (played by choreographer Jordan Woods) and his lead-lined aqueducts to Elizabeth I (Emma Giltner) and the pasty white make-up she favored to a jealous 19th century Prussian chemist, Carl Jacob Löwig (Michael Reitano). It's a show with polish and swagger to spare, that also spans nearly two thousand years in a single, razzle-dazzle number. Christopher Plotts is the harried manager of the oil refinery, and Lili Sheley is the crafty, lefty union organizer, backed up by a romantic co-worker (Corrinna Redford). The whole cast is effortlessly excellent, and torrents of song pour from each of them. The sets by Caleb Long are simple but effective, and the costumes by Eileen Engel are shockingly good. The expert music direction is by Healy himself. The collective pull of Communism, under the unbearable conditions of an oil refinery, is balanced by a strange new sense of psychological isolation here. And, through the elements of the story, we are forced to conclude that aloneness will spread in tandem with the colossal rise of private transportation, along with a societal numbness heightened by lead poisoning. It's a huge and subtle equation, doomed to end in misery, but elegantly laid out. And while the union organizers don't come off scot-free, today's popular hatred of corporations also finds a powerful new outlet in Big Machine. Fly North Theatricals' Big Machine runs through August 18, 2024, at St. Louis Fringe Festival, Marcelle Theatre, 3310 Samuel Shepard Drive, St. Louis MO. For tickets and information, please visit www.flynorthmusic.com. For more information about the St. Louis Fringe Festival, please visit www.stlfringe.org. Cast (in order of appearance): Band: Production Staff: * Denotes Student, Fly North Theatricals |
