As mainstream musicals go, Hands
on a Hardbody is
something of a Rorschach test, at least among my fellow musical dramatists,
among whom it has been the cause of some lively (and happily always respectful,
anywhere I’ve been around to hear or share in the discussion anyway)
controversy and disagreement.
Based
on a documentary film, it’s about an annual Texas competition, in which a bunch
of mostly working-class people from various walks of life, gather together to
win a new hardbody truck. The competition is simple enough. You put on work
gloves (so as not to mar the finish) and put your hands on the car. At least
one hand has to stay in contact with the car at all times, except for official
periodic breaks of about 15 minutes to eat and take care of other necessaries.
The competition goes on for as many days as it needs to until all but the
winner fall away. It has a lot in common with marathon dancing…and weirdly,
with A Chorus Line (a group of
variegated people gather, each in pursuit of the same objective)…so little
wonder it has inspired a musical.
The
controversy has arisen over a number of things.
First
are the collection of characters: Anytime you deal in a gestalt objective shared by many, you are perforce also dealing
with characters who have to be painted in quick, bold strokes. That naturally
takes you to archetypes. By definition, the only thing you can do to make an
archetype fresh is offer particularization. Even so, the milieu presents its
own challenges. There’s no question that the group in A Chorus Line is more compelling than the group in Hardbody,
but much of that has to do with the nature
of the group itself. The performers in ACL are all renegades from society (nobody “normal” goes
into show business), and though it is their dreams of acceptance that inspire
universal appeal, their world is not instantly familiar to the lay audience,
and the archetypes of that world, even all these years after the show’s debut,
can still be seen as discoveries. But in Hardbody, the Texas types are all familiar: the bigoted macho
guy (Hunter Foster); the middle-aged husband trying recklessly to
reclaim his manhood after a debilitating, life changing heart attack (Keith
Carradine), the poor black woman who needs
the car for her family and knows Jesus will provide if her faith never wavers (Keala
Settle), the blonde bimbo (Kathleen
Elizabeth Monteleone) and etc. and etc.
(All wonderfully portrayed by a strong and terrific cast.) You can see them as
anything from a collection of clichés in a redneck fest better suited for life
on the road, or as a cross-section of blue collar America and a poignant
sociological portrait of poor and disenfranchised dreamers in a country that
should do better for the less fortunate. I’ve heard both assessments and a lot
in between.
Then
there’s movement. Director Neil Pepe and
choreographer (though he’s credited only with “musical staging”) Sergio
Trujillo don’t keep all players strictly
tethered to the car during the contest portions—but they exhaust just
about every conceivable trick for moving around a truck and moving with a
truck (it’s on a turntable and can move forward and back), as well as stretch
the limits to which individual characters in the spotlight can separate from
the truck “poetically” in order to take stage, while we understand we’re in
their minds…but always “buttoning” their segments by getting pulled back to the
car as if by slow gravity. And similar to the above, you can see all of this as anything from what-were-they-thinking dull and
repetitive to a brilliant experimentation on the notion of finding (as
Stravinsky put it) freedom within restriction.
Finally
there’s the score. There are those who hear it as standard issue deep country.
But if you accept that it ain’t gonna sing you anything you haven’t heard
before, you can pause to appreciate how co-composers Trey Anastasio and Amanda Green and especially Ms. Green as sole lyricist have
managed the rare (and perhaps in my experience previously unencountered) trick
of getting some pastel character shadings out of a musical genre that
relentlessly expresses itself in primary colors.
As
a consumer advocate I can recommend the show in the way I’d recommend any show
that takes an interesting shot at a target with dignity and creativity. But as
to offering some definitive assessment: I don’t think there’s one to be had.
Where do my personal feelings about Hardbody lie? Oh, right in the middle, I’m afraid. I had a very good time and
admired the show as a whole, but it didn’t rock my world. I found it mostly
interesting and forgave the brief stretches where it wore out its welcome
because it stayed on point with savvy and style. I left happy enough, but not
juiced. Though the Saturday night audience with whom I attended sure was.
In
short: Hardbody, more than most
debate-worthy musicals I can think of, is very much in the hands of the
beholder…
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