Playwright: Joy Gregory/book,
Gunnar Madsen/music
At: Lookingglass Theatre Company
Phone: (312) 337-0665; $15-$57
Runs through: June 13
In 1996, Rolling Stone named The Shaggs one of the 100 Most Influential Alternative Releases ever and third of 50 Most Significant Indie Records. Well, bullshit. Rolling Stone likes satire of which their Shaggs placements are examples. A band isn't influential if other bands don't listen to it. Has any retro-rocker said, 'We owe it all to The Shaggs?'
That's not to dismiss this new Lookingglass show, an off-beat winner with riveting wiggy performances by a girl trio and muscular playing by Larry Neumann, Jr. as their driven dad. But it's not about bands; it's the tale of a stage mother, only this one's a stage father. August Wiggins was obsessed with a vision of his children's show-biz success, like Pops Jackson or Old Man Osmond except that Wiggins knew nothing about music and his daughters were without talent. The Shaggs were doomed by their mediocrity and Wiggins' ignorance. Had he not died in 1975, the girls would have walked.
In the interests of drama, author Joy Gregory manipulates facts and compresses time, reducing four sisters to a trio and eliminating their equipment-hauling brothers. She keeps Helen, Betty and Dot high school age or just beyond when they really were in their 20s when Pa Wiggins kicked. Gregory's choices concentrate the story on Dad, a good-hearted loser enraged at life's dismissal of him, convinced of his own shrewdness and capable of driving his girls on with implacable patience. Obsessive and delusional, he doesn't know how bad The Shaggs are. Indeed, we actually hear how good they sound in Daddy's ears vs. how bad they sound to everyone else.
This neat inside/outside musical trick uses snatches of The Shaggs' actual songs and recordings, but they aren't the musical focus. Chiefly this play with songs (it isn't a musical) uses originals by Gunnar Madsen and Gregory that reveal character and mood. Highlights are two jazzy, intense numbers for non-singer Neumann and a fine trio lullaby, 'The Night Before.'
Hedy Burress as semi-autistic Helen, Sarah Elizabeth Hays as Betty and Jamey Hood as Dot Wiggins discombobulate their fine musical abilities to bring The Shaggs to life. We never know if these curiously passive girls buy into their father's dream, or why they work his will. Rather, they are tightly bonded, clearly longing for other (especially sexual) things and melancholy with an undirected despair. Burress, Hays and Hood show this complexity despite minimal words, a compliment to John Langs' perceptive direction. There's warm supporting work from Christine Mary Dunford as Mrs. Wiggins and Rob Moore as Helen's odd-duck boyfriend, but the stage belongs to the always-forceful Neumann and his girls.
Quirky and dark yet entertaining, The Shaggs is an American dream gone nightmarishly bad.
