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Shout! The Mod Musical
If you like the music of white female pop artists of the 1960s, Shout! The Mod Musical might be your cup of tea. If, on the other hand, you love the music of those women singers, Shout! is a steaming teacup full of ammonia. An eye-shattering Day-Glo beehive of a revue coated in so many layers of shellac it can’t possibly move, this misrepresentation of girl-power rock—sounds that bridged mainstream postwar consumerism and a thrumming counterculture of liberation—might be passable in a theme park. In an honest-to-God theater, though, it’s something of a joke.
Theoretically, the hurdle this production has to clear is the canned, decades-late feminist humor that’s meant to skewer the magazines that told women which color frock would help a single girl bag a respectable bloke. But the producers’ real error is treating their five comely lasses like robots rather than vocal artists. The reason the songs featured here deserve a revue is that, like all bulletproof pop tunes, their catchy melody lines and punchy, memorable lyrics invite singers of every generation and genre to take them out for a spin.
But in these truncated, shrill versions, the singers sound like neither the original artists nor, sadly, themselves. Other than “To Sir, with Love,” as earnestly belted by Megan Long, and Maggie Portman’s ribald take on “Son of a Preacher Man,” none of the 29 songs in Bradley Vieth’s hackneyed, blandly homogenized arrangements get the treatment they deserve. Like the fabled boots of Nancy Sinatra, one of several Americans ground into this “British” mash, Shout! walks all over a good thing.
