Review: Zach Theatre's The Girl Who Became Legend
World premiere of epic Americana folktale delights young and old
Reviewed by Bob Abelman, Fri., Sept. 22, 2023
Many of us have witnessed and some of us are living proof of the graying of the performing arts audience, the result of one generation of ticketholders not being replaced by the next.
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., has been striving to stem this tide with its New Visions/New Voices program, which serves to stimulate and support the creation of plays, musicals, and operas for young audiences. Since its inception in 1991, the program has showcased and championed 111 new works. Zach Theatre Director of Youth Programming Nat Miller was hoping that The Girl Who Became Legend – a project he developed with playwright and lyricist Sarah Saltwick and musicians/actors/lyricists Helyn Rain Messenger, Amber Quick, and Paul Sanchez, local artists all – would be the next.
Instead, the Kennedy Center offered an unprecedented partnership with the Zach that provided funds for the musical's further development and commissioned a February 2024 production as part of its prestigious Performances for Young Audiences season. But first, Austin audiences get a taste in a world premiere production on the Zach's Kleberg stage under Liz Fisher's always creative direction.
This Americana folktale takes place in the fictional town of Dustbin, where it hasn't rained in years and locals (the aforementioned Quick, Sanchez, and Messenger, along with Jeremy Rashad Brown and Nathan Daniel Ford) have grown despondent, scared, and small-minded. But one day a young girl named Raina (Blakeney Mahlstedt) spies a passing rain cloud in the sky and sets out on an adventure to the Great Wild Unknown to bring it back home. Along the way, after close encounters with the same outlaws and folk heroes that exist in the books banned in Dustbin, she learns lessons about courage, self-resilience, and self-worth, which are as needed in her hometown (and many of ours) as rainfall. And change, she tells the startled community upon her return, can be a good thing.
The Girl Who Became Legend shares the same enchanting bedtime story aesthetic as Rick Elice’s playfully inventive Peter and the Starcatcher, which had recent off-Broadway and Broadway runs, and Pigpen Theatre Co.’s charmingly uninhibited off-off Broadway play-with-music The Old Man and the Old Moon. And it is clearly inspired by their ingenious and infectious low-tech storytelling. Together, they form a rarified canon of highly imaginative youth-oriented theatre that also appeals to older audiences.
Rachel Atkinson provides all the right lighting design – sinister shadows, moonlit nights, backlighting to facilitate a brief moment of hand-held shadow-puppetry – at all the right places to give texture and a timeline to this staging. Scenic and prop designer Lisa Laratta creates a Dustbin cluttered with things discarded – low-end and antiquated odds and ends, timeworn household knickknacks and apparel, and the much-loved playthings of long-grown children.
The team of actors portray a range of lovable characters (abetted by Aaron Flynn's witty costuming) who accompany themselves on string instruments – banjo, fiddle, acoustic guitar, mandolin, and stand-up bass – and make-shift percussion, and they turn the everyday objects that surround them into clever storytelling stagecraft.
But what really grabs the audience's attention and holds it tight is the effervescent, flat-out adorable Mahlstedt as Raina. Her energy propels this production forward and her gorgeous voice adds a necessary layer of harmony to the largely melancholic musical numbers.
The Girl Who Became Legend will soon be heading to the nation's capital. Come see it at the source.
Zach Theatre's The Girl Who Became Legend
Kleberg Stage, 1421 W. Riverside, 512/476-0541
zachtheatre.org
Through Oct. 1
Running time: 1 hr.
