On The Stage

Shaggs Forever

A new musical interprets the true story of an unlikely girl group

Anne Kelly-Saxenmeyer
   Mirror Theater Critic
  
   John Langs, director of the new musical, The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World, remembers the first time playwright Joy Gregory played him the album that the show is named for: “My jaw just hit the floor,” said Langs. “I was like, This is a joke, right? This can’t be a real band.
   “You hear that story a lot,” Langs continued. “We’ve uncovered thousands of Shaggs fans in the three years we’ve been working on this project. We mention it and they’re like, ‘Oh my god — that girl group out of New Hampshire? They’re insane!”
   The Shaggs were born in the 1960s when the three Wiggin sisters — Dot, Betty, and Helen — were pulled out of school by their father, Austin, and sequestered in rock-band rehearsal, the idea being that they would become famous and rescue the Wiggin family from mediocrity. Their grandmother had prophesized that the girls would be the family’s salvation.
   Culturally isolated in their hometown of Fremont, New Hampshire and without musical training, The Shaggs came up with a sound that has been described as aboriginal, earnest, refreshingly guileless, and just plain bad. Because of the very strangeness of what they created, their short careers have enjoyed a rich afterlife in the American consciousness — on the internet, in mainstream and scholarly publications, now on stage, and soon on screen (their life stories have been optioned by Hollywood).
   Gregory’s interest in The Shaggs, whose music she’d heard in college, was rekindled by Susan Orlean’s 1999 story about them in The New Yorker. After exploring the material for some time, Gregory discovered that the worst girl band in history might actually be a great subject for a musical.
   “The Shaggs couldn’t play music; they couldn’t get it out of them in the way they heard it in their heads — at least that’s what I project onto them,” said Gregory. “Theirs is also such an iconic American story to me, and when I say iconic I mean that there’s this dream, this prophecy, this sense of promise and entitlement that the father has; he believes that his family will be saved in some way by celebrity, fame and success … The musical being this indigenous American expression seemed the ideal form to tell this story.”
   One of the early choices about the musical, which brings together the talents of composer Gunnar Madsen, musical director David O., and choreographer Ken Roht, was that subjecting audiences to hours of Shaggs music might not be the best route. Madsen has created original music that “honors the Shaggs in some very specific ways” while calling upon a variety of genres.
   “We used a lot of different styles to reflect the internal workings of the characters, and I think it makes for a widely enjoyable evening because we’re sort of all over the place, joyfully and admittedly,” said Langs, who noted songs as diverse as “Career Day,” a “1950s rage against society” anthem, and “Impossible You,” which is riffed off “Cherish” by The Association. “It’s clearly a play between the music people hear in their heads, in the most hopeful corners of themselves, and what the world heard when it came out of these awkward girls.”
   Running through some really entertaining musical numbers (I sneaked a peek at a rehearsal) is a true story that could’ve been plucked right out of Greek drama, and Gregory and Langs agreed that the Wiggin family lore is what intrigued them most about the project.
   “It was certainly my goal as a dramatist to sail right past the whole issue of whether or not we’re exploiting them, whether we’re laughing with them or at them,” said Gregory. “I just wanted to tell the story of three girls who are held captive by their overbearing father’s vision — it almost becomes tragic in the classic sense, that we have Cronus devouring his children and ancestors making prophecies from beyond the grave. But in human terms, I tried to stick pretty realistically to what it might have been like to not be able to get your voice out and to be trapped by someone’s need for you to save them.”
   Said Langs, struck by the “divine strangeness” by which his production has become a chapter in the Shaggs saga: “I feel very much as the curtain comes down each night that we’re a part of whatever this prophecy was. We are the torchbearers for it in some bizarre way because here we are in 2003, telling their story to hundreds of people, continuing to create the legend of the Shaggs as it was told by Austin’s mother years ago.”
   The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World presented by Powerhouse Theatre Company at [Inside] the Ford, 2580 E. Cahuenga Blvd., Hollywood. Thursday-Saturday 8 p.m. Sunday 7 p.m. November 7-December 14. $20-$22. (323) GO 1-FORD or www.fordamphitheatre.org.