The rivalry between Tonya Harding (Tracy McDowell) and Nancy Kerrigan (Jenna Leigh Green) is part of modern lore, and while the word “musical” is the last thing anyone would think about when discussing the tragic nature of their endless competition, the musical Tonya and Nancy: The Rock Opera is perhaps the most fascinating way in which their story has been dissected to date. The book by Elizabeth Searle (who also co-wrote the lyrics with, score composer Michael Teoli) examines their story through the prism of the eternal class struggle, as we see the middle class Kerrigan dream of becoming the best ice skater in America, perhaps because she knows it’s the one dream that will be the hardest for her to make come true. Inversely for Tonya, ice skating is the only way for her to escape the poverty and instability she has known all her life.

When the two come face to face for the first time in the 1991 U.S. Skating Championship, the musical suggests that they became rivals not only in the rink, but also as sociological cautionary tales, each standing diametrically opposite of the other. It’s a stroke of genius then that the musical finds a common denominator in their mothers, both played by Liz McCartney in a tour de force performance straight out of a suburban revival of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

McDowell and Green are superb in the leading roles, each of them summing up their characters’ essence through economic but never obvious mimicry. McDowell turning Tonya into a hurricane of a woman, who wants so much to stop being the bull in a china shop and finds it hard to go against her nature, and Green who turns Nancy into the poster child for WASP-y hypocrisy. Borrowing cues from Chicago the show also has a lot to say about the way in which the press cannibalizes society and on many occasions, the show directly asks us why we find it so hard to move on from the story of Tonya and Nancy. That it doesn’t pretend to have an answer makes it feel like a champ.