Director Tina Landau has followed up her brilliant Floyd Collins with an equally astonishing and powerful work, "The Ballad of Little Jo". Anyone concerned about the future of the American musical need only keep an eye on Landau; she couples her own protean writer-director talents with impeccable taste in other people's material. From the opening note of ...Little Jo, you know you're in good hands: that the music will be challenging but accessible, that the lyrics will respect your intelligence, and that the web of song and story will hold. And the story is an epic one, set largely on the frontier in the wake of the Civil War.
The opening stage picture–Jo (the exceptional Judy Kuhn) standing in the shadows, gradually surrounded by others but never joining them–captures perfectly what is to come. Though the plot is beyond summary, in one sense ...Little Jo is a classic Western: the tale of the outsider. But through its female protagonist and its acknowledgment of the violence and racism of Manifest Destiny, authors Mike Reid and Sarah Schlesinger invert the Western myth to display its dark side.
Josephine Monahan of Boston falls for a cad who remembers he's married as soon as he learns she's pregnant. Exiled from her father's house, compelled to leave her newborn, Jo finds herself stranded in Idaho. If this were Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Jo's abandonment would lead ultimately to love and happiness; and indeed, idealistic Jo "sees heaven," in the words of one of her lovely songs. But what she encounters is more like hell, forcing her to hide herself in men's clothing. "Joe" Monahan takes refuge in a mining camp, staking a claim and falling in love with fellow-miner Jordan Ellis (David New, in a strong performance), whose fiancee Sara (Jessica Boevers) falls in love with Joe. Again, the conventions would make this a precursor to love, a frontier Twelfth Night; but as Jo and Sara sing "This man . . . he's just a dream that can't be mine."
There's a purpose to all this disappointment of expectations. The authors and director want to consider not whether boy gets girl but how boy gets to dominate girl, and rich to dominate poor, and strong to dominate weak. Yet if it sounds preachy I've done it a disservice, because the personal story remains completely absorbing. Will boy get girl, and which boy, and which girl? Will Jo get her son back? We fear the answers but are eager to learn them.
Along with Kuhn, whose extraordinary work could carry the whole show, the stand-out in an excellent cast is Jose Llana as Tin Man Wong, the Chinese immigrant whom Jo and Sara befriend. His rendition of "Listen to the Rain" is one of the special pleasures of a top-notch score.
There are flaws. Boevers' contemporary-pop voice sounds jarring in a period piece. The second act taxes our patience with several songs whose import could better be conveyed in dialogue, and with suggestions that Tin Man has a sort of occult wisdom of the East that's a fabrication of the very racism the authors are critiquing. But these are quibbles: the only real problem with ...Little Jo is that there's no cast album.
Don't miss it.
The Ballad of Little Joe runs through November 11.