Sex! Drugs! & Ukuleles!

Written by Uke Jackson

Music by Terry Waldo

Directed by Victor Maog

Theater for the New City

155 First Avenue

212-254-1109

 

Review by Rayhané S. Sanders

 

Not one for musical theater, I remained skeptical of this latest little engine that could at First Avenue’s Theater for the New City. I couldn’t help but cringe a little while eyeing the poster for the show: Set in a “retro future?” One where the pharmaceutical companies had finally taken over the world? The story of three young activists, ready to take on The Man and restore humanity with nothing but their ukuleles in hand? Oh, boy.

 

Oh, boy is right: Never has a musical been so infectiously delightful as Sex! Drugs! & Ukuleles! I usually flinch each time a cast breaks out into song, but with jazz legend and ragtime scholar Terry Waldo’s amazing compositions, choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall’s campy moves and a cast and chorus that are irresistibly charming in each and every scene, the joy was contagious. My dreaded 80 minutes were a capsule of pure delight.

 

Julie (Meg Cavanaugh), Liz (Lindsay Foreman) and Max (John Forkner) make up a ukulele trio who — not part of the world’s elite “Top 10” — are forced to practice illegally in back alleys. The world around them is a totalitarian regime — part Cuckoo’s Nest (failure to take your meds, or “drug evasion,” can land you in jail), part Fahrenheit 451 (music considered “inspirational” to the human spirit is banned) and halfway to Gattaca, with the “Love Police” shaking and shimmying their way to blanket arrests of anyone who dares to “monogamate,” i.e. go steady. Sex is for pleasure, drugs sustain sanity, and life is regulated to be lived efficiently. Love — and certainly Don Ho-like strumming about love — is not part of the picture. That is, until rebel-to-society Edger (played by the immensely talented Andrew Guilarte) enters the friends’ world.

 

A spoof on the music industry, our increasingly corporate culture and even, in one less-than-subtle dance number, Nazism, Sex! Drugs! & Ukuleles! is a camp tour-de-force that manages, somehow, to also be steeped in American roots music.

 

 

Strung Up: Rebel musicians strum their way through a corporate-controlled dystopia in Uke Jackson’s Sex! Drugs! & Ukuleles!