Review by Alex Brooks
Hubbard Hall has opened a new musical called Wayward Home, a world premiere of new work.
It was written by two young women, Clara Strauch and Maizy Broderick Scarpa, and performed by them with a third young woman, Abigail Wahl, to music written by Clara Strauch.
[private]The show is a riff on American history which manages to include portraits of the hardships of both factory workers and western pioneers. It is also a portrait of a marriage that doesn’t survive those hardships, of a couple haunted by a child who died in a flood.
Clara Strauch is a talented musician, and there is a lot of fine music here. Abigail Wahl is also a fine musician and singer. There are many beautiful songs in this show.
The show is a bit uneven. There are moments of wonderful lyric poetry interspersed with moments that fall a bit flat. There are moments when the harmonies are gorgeous and the language is luminous and moments when a passionate delivery flirts with being screechy. It seems like a work in development, a story that hasn’t yet been shaped to its full potential.
Hubbard Halls’s Executive and Artistic Director, who is also Co-Director of this production, acknowledges the nascent quality of this material in the program notes: “Over the past few months these artists have been working to bring the story forward. Many conversations, music rehearsals, a weeklong residency, staging experiments and design elements have all contributed to the story and a show that is growing more each day.”
That is the charm of this story – three talented young performers/musicians/writers discovering their artistic vision. There is a certain informality in the staging which often makes us, the audience, feel like collaborators in this creative process, bringing our own imaginations to bear filling in the spaces where details have not been specified.
Wayward Home will run every weekend in November through the 29th, Fridays at 8 pm, Saturdays at 2 pm and 8 pm and Sundays at 2 pm. The show will also tour to local schools and retirement communities throughout the month of November.[/private]