‘Getting Their Act Together’ at Playhouse

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Singer, songwriter and minor pop star Heather Jones is turning 39, a senior citizen in the world of pop music, at least as a woman. But not only does she want to make a comeback after raising a family, she wants to veer off stylistically from her previous bit of commercial success. She wants to be true to herself at last, writing edgy songs that have nothing to do with love and self-sacrifice.

Laguna Playhouse’s new show running through Nov. 1 looks at ageism and sexism through the characters of a rock band.
Laguna Playhouse’s new show running through Nov. 1 looks at ageism and sexism through the characters of a rock band.

So begins the first act of “I’m Still Getting My Act Together and Taking it on the Road,” a musical that premiered in 1978 off-Broadway and opened at the Laguna Playhouse on Saturday for a month-long run.

It’s both raucous and melancholy, humorous and filled with insights. Given when the first act was written by Gretchen Cryer and set to music by Nancy Ford, it sounded like passages from feminist manifestos that evolved into prophetic, persistent truths. Cryer also directs.

While rehearsing with the Liberated Men’s Band in some obscure bar, Jones is visited by her former manager, Joe Epstein, who would rather have her rehash old material. Luminously portrayed by Erica Hanrahan-Ball, Heather won’t have any of it.

Things really get lively when her back-up singers, Cheryl (Erika Schindele) and Alice (Jennifer Leigh Warren) tell their own stories about finding their identity, making unorthodox choices and striking out with members of the opposite sex. There is softness and rage, defiance and hope, all with an overarching theme of aging is a bitch and being single doesn’t help.

The show also gives men their due. Follow the trajectory of Joe, young, brash and in love with all the wrong women during the first act, and older, mellowed but only slightly wiser in the second.

The character is conveyed by Rex Smith, who makes a deft transition from intrinsically well-meaning jerk to successful older entrepreneur with conventional views about an “older woman.” He started his career as a teen idol back in the late ‘70s (“You Take My Breath Away”) and then segued into Broadway musicals (“Pirates of Penzance,” “Grand Hotel,” Scarlet Pimpernel”) and television and movies.

A bright point arrives in the persona of Jake, embodied by an engaging Jesse Johnson, 15 years younger than Jones. As he helps take care of her teenage kids, he endearingly declares himself to her and, in spite of all the grousing about ageism among men, she turns him down.

The second act picks up 30 years later with Heather, now played by Cryer, and really a senior citizen, wanting to take her band and hit the road again.

Added on 40 years after the first act was written, it raises questions whether older women rockers can, at best, do the rest home circuit while their male counterparts fill stadiums, and must women beyond a certain age be resigned to hooking up with staggeringly deficient men. The sequence dealing with suggestions of women bedding men with actual physical disabilities appears contrived, an unfortunate flop. Also grating was the appearance of Heather’s daughter, Bonnie, as the grown-up, disaffected brat ready to relegate her mother to a rocking chair while whining about a non-storybook childhood. Despite skillful embodiment by Hanrahan-Ball, the sequence will not quite ring true to anyone who has raised millennials, more prone to complaining about baby boomers having had all the economic breaks.

But, there was much mirth and many knowing sighs among an audience pretty evenly comprised of women and men, and with the later gamely laughing and applauding along with their companions.

Tickets are $41 – $66 and available online at www.lagunaplayhouse.com or by calling (949) 497-2787.

 

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