The new honkey-tonk musical now running at Red Bank's Two River Theater grafts Anton Chekhov's 1896 psychological melodrama "The Seagull" onto contemporary Music City.
Nashville’s a tough town for an emo kid. Nineteenth century Russian playwrights, as it turns out, also have trouble fitting in.
“Songbird,” a new honkey-tonk musical by Michael Kimmel (book) and Lauren Pritchard (music and lyrics) now running at Red Bank’s Two River Theater, grafts Anton Chekhov’s 1896 psychological melodrama “The Seagull” onto contemporary Music City.
There we find Dean (Marrick Smith), a woefully earnest aspiring songwriter who struggles to escape the shadow of his superstar mother, local-girl-gone-Hollywood Tammy (Felicia Finley). On the fateful night of the play’s opening, Tammy swoops back into town with her new L.A. beau, Beck (Eric William Morris), to watch the debut performance of her son’s song at her old stomping grounds (a saloon meticulously rendered as part of Jason Sherwood’s excellent scenic design).
Accompanied by Mia (Ephie Aardema), the object of his passionate and abiding love, Dean performs a somber, avant-garde (read: artsy-fartsy) tune that sounds absolutely nothing like Hank, Willie or Johnny. Tammy ridicules her son right off the stage, and the brooding begins.
While the rest of the ensemble retreats to a lakeside to drink and sing (and develop illicit romantic triangles), Dean sulks and Tammy tries to overpower her transgression with forced nostalgic mirth. Foreboding threats to the happiness and identity of each individual and the group loom, refusing to dissipate under the power of country music.
The Nashville sound punctuates the entire show, as cast members play their own instruments and sing Pritchard’s originals that would fit right in on any country radio station. Occasionally a couple characters find reason to sing a duet or ballad, but frequently the songs are rollicking full-company numbers backed by several guitars, a fiddle, mandolin and cello. (Dean incorporates a glockenspiel into his debut song, but its time in the spotlight is short.)
The songs are a fine mix of classic and contemporary country with a hint of bluegrass, and the musical interludes (arranged by Kristopher Kukul and choreographed by Marc Kimelman) are often fun and rousing.
But there is a dissonance that “Songbird” never resolves between the foot-stomping, soaring-chorus brand of country/Western that scores this show and its heavy dramatic grounding. Chekhov (who, let’s be honest, invented the emo kid) loved to explore the sort of angst that plagues Dean, especially against the backdrop of mirth on questionable footing, so Kimmel’s instincts that the influential Russian dramatist would have something to say about the life of a fledgling country musician are sound.
Still, “Songbird” cannot seem to resist the temptation of big-hat, big-boot, big-fun country music, and the abrupt shifts in tone undercut the show’s success. It is never entirely clear if we are at a good-time juke-box musical or a heavy psychoanalytic examination of a misunderstood artist.
As the classic country station battles the dark emo station for radio bandwidth, frequently the result is static.
SONGBIRD
Two River Theater Company
21 Bridge Avenue, Red Bank
Tickets: tworivertheater.org. Running through July 1.
Patrick Maley may be reached at patrickjmaley@gmail.com. Find him on Twitter and Instagram @PatrickJMaley. Find NJ.com/Entertainment on Facebook.