Just like its extremely long title, The First Church of Mary, the Repentant Prostitute’s FIFTH ANNUAL!!! Benefit Concert, and Pot Luck Dinner, turns out to be a little too much. The show is set in an evangelical church in Nashville where service is presided by the outlandish Adamenses Huckster (Geoff Davin who also wrote the book, lyrics and score) a corrupt pastor who gets pleasure out of yelling, dressing like a cross between Madonna and Cher (why any conservative Christian would even attend her church is a mystery), humiliating her assistant Charlotte (Megan Murphy Cahmbers), and pocketing donation money to buy herself luxury cars and vacations. The show’s uneven tone has it go from satire, to John Waters-eque grotesque comedy, to girl group revue without ever figuring out what it wants to be. Can it be all of those? Sure, but not when sitting through the show makes one feel as sluggish as when your grandma took you to service as a kid. While the songs are quite good (Jennifer Whitcomb-Oliva and Brooke Leigh Davis took the audience to church in their numbers!) the aimless plot and strange audience participation moments made the show’s flaws all the more evident.
Few works of art are as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa, so in Lisa and Leonardo Ed McNamee (Lyrics and Book), Donya Lane (Music and Book) and Michael Unger (Book) take their shot at deciphering how Leonardo da Vinci came up with it. They imagine the painter as a hunky, misunderstood genius (played by Timothy John Smith) who has problems finishing anything he starts, “art is never finished, it’s only abandoned” he explains. Then he meets Lisa (a fierce Lizzie Klemperer) a married woman who not only inspires him to accomplish work, including the iconic painting, but also steals his heart. To add some historical accuracy, the writers give Leonardo a male lover who’s also his assistant (he’s played by Ravi Roth whose performance is too modern for the tone of the piece) but with this comes a perplexing love triangle that only leads to uninteresting subplots involving bitter baronesses, mustache twirling villainry courtesy of Machiavelli (Cooper Grodin) and way too many cage metaphors. Da Vinci was known for his effortless genius, but in this musical you can see every brushstroke, and hear every click in the machinery.
Jaime Lozano’s score for Children of Salt is overflowing with sounds that we don’t get to hear onstage very often. Accordions, marimbas (from a synth), and a brass section featuring two trumpets, a sax and a trombone, all bring to life delicious Latin flavors that perfectly compliment, but never exoticize the show’s Mexican setting. Raúl (Mauricio Martínez) has returned home to see his sick grandma (April Ortiz) and once there reminisces about his childhood and young adulthood. There were soccer buddies, forbidden affairs, and the one that got away. Lozano’s evocative score suggests a tropical opera that Lauren Epsenhart’s book and lyrics sadly never fulfill. Epsenhart’s fragmented storytelling is too episodic and the juxtaposition of scenes works on a practical level, but never achieves anything on an emotional level. Fortunately Martínez’s endlessly charming performance lifts the show during its weaker moments, he’s the kind of star who makes us believe he’s aged 15 years by simply buttoning his shirt.
