History repeats itself in ‘American Deal’
“There is nothing more to be done,” flashes a famous quote by Herbert Hoover about the economy of the 1920s, but it could just as easily be right now to the pessimistic. Even the cheeky program lists the setting as “2009 . . . or is it 1933?”
Road Less Traveled Productions’ “American Deal,” which also happens to be its first-ever musical production, is most certainly about the latter decade, but as stories unfold about the arduous task of merely staying alive during the Great Depression, the parallels to our nightly news become almost startling.
THEATER REVIEW
AMERICAN DEAL
Three stars (Out of four)
Musical drama presented through Nov. 22 by the Road Less Traveled Theatre at the Market Arcade Film and Arts Centre, 639 Main St. For more information, call 683-1260 or visit www.roadlesstraveledproductions.org.
These parallels are intentional, made clear right from the start of Jon Elston and Tom Naples’ new musical. Through digital projection, our first images are of the recent demolition of Buffalo’s Memorial Auditorium, and how its destruction is indicative of the recent past literally crumbling before our eyes.
“American Deal” is an amiable memory lane mood piece, very close in design to “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?,” a regional fave that tells similar stories in a looser revue style.
Kyle LoConti’s sleek one-act production frames various prewar stories, many of them regarding impoverished Buffalo citizens, using the text of real-life letters of the era. A four-person cast (Diane Curley, Phil Knoerzer, Mary McMahon, Gordon Tashjian) enacts snippets of them, with the aid of the period-appropriate folk songs, notably tunes by Bill Cox, Jim Garland and the guitar-slinging poet of the underclasses, Woody Guthrie.
Guthrie also is a character here, affably played by Knoerzer with a nicely understated command of Guthrie’s homespun philosophies. We also interact with Frances Perkins, FDR’s secretary of Labor, who answered hundreds of letters from disgruntled Americans and sought to reform the creaky system that disenfranchised so many. One woman, surprisingly, speaks well of the time, and she nabbed a decent wage and even a husband during the tough times. But most stories are closer to harrowing.
Despite a repetitive tone that compounds the similarly repetitive cadences of these period songs, “American Deal” mostly scores as a musical travelogue. Creators Naples and Elston, the former doubling as the evening’s main guitarist, have created a sturdy structure upon which to hang these stories and tunes, though one wishes that director LoConti might have encouraged more movement in the piece—songs are often performed by the cast in a decidedly untheatrical mode.
But what songs some of them are, from Guthrie’s anthemic “This Land Is Your Land” to Goebel Reeves’ gorgeous “Hobo’s Lullaby” to Garland’s edgy “I Don’t Want Your Millions, Mister,” the stirring undercurrents of feeling beneath them — paired with a spirited ensemble — easily carry the evening through.
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