"100 Heartbreaks": Country-Fried Musical Comedy
Entertaining play-within-a-concert on genre's mythology
By Michael Ligot
Dead dogs, money woes, romantic misfires; that's what country music is about, right? Singer/actress/writer Joanna Horowitz took on that perception in her performance piece "100 Heartbreaks" like an urban cowgirl does a mechanical bull. The result? A Monday Bumbershoot audience happily laughing and stomping their Air Jordans and Jimmy Choos to Horiwitz's story and music.
"100 Hearbreaks", a piece Horowitz first staged in 2008 as a one-woman show, sets in a homey country-and-western bar in small-town Montana. Horowitz plays Charlane Tucker, a young country singer hitting the road in search of her Nashville big break. As she and her three-piece band work through the set list, Tucker explains how she wants to sing "real" country; none of that Carrie Underwood or Taylor Swift pop-country stuff. Since country music to her seems to be all about bad times -- "Have you heard of a country song where everything goes good?" her idol once asked her -- she decides to go through some bad times, purposely, to work the authenticity angle.
The method? As a certain music megastar would suggest, she starts looking for a "bad romance" times three digits. Tucker decides she wants to get her heart broken at least one hundred times. That way, she'll have enough material for a career's worth of songs. So Tucker, in the funny song "One Man Closer to Nashville", recounts the myriad ways Cupid's let her down for the sake of her art. At her last count, the spirited singer was at 77 heartaches. Racking up the remaining 23, she reckons, should be a breeze … shouldn't it?
Horowitz seems to specialize in country-themed performances, as she also performed "The June Carter Cash Project" a few years ago at Ballard's Live Girls! Theater. As a musician, she is right at home as Tucker, plucking on her six-string with her fine, back-to-basics band (Jeff Fielder on guitar, Mark Pickerel on drums, and Basil Harris on electric bass) and sometimes duet partner Jason Harber, who also plays the bar owner and a potential paramour. Horowitz certainly has the right voice for country, striking a nice twang with Harber on "Please Baby Break My Heart" but also reaching the needed tenderness with downbeat numbers like "Sad, Lonely and Blue".
Her songs will please both country diehards and neophytes worried about corny lyrics and yodeling vocals, the type of music the show satirizes.
With all the songs, there's not a lot of room for dialogue or acting in the hour-long show, but Horowitz also handles those parts nicely. She steps into the boots of a honky tonk girl with ease, getting the accent and "go-big-or-go-home" attitude right. Even though "100 Heartbreaks" is light entertainment, when Tucker starts to question her heartbreak accumulation goal, Horowitz does engineer a poignancy and tenderness. Harber and even the musicians get some good lines, in particular Harris.
Not too much to complain about with the show as written or performed. The only issues were with the location and audience behavior: The performance started more than 10 minutes late due to staging issues with the Center House Theatre, and the constant shuffling of people in and out of the seats between songs grew irksome. (I'm guessing that's par for the course at Bumbershoot.)
"100 Heartbreaks" offers a nice take on the suffering-for-one's-art angle, and even for non-country fans is a fun experience. Sans getting peanut shells stuck in your soles, of course.
Musical/comedy piece review. Website of show: http://www.100heartbreaks.com/index.html
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