In the early days of his music career, singer-songwriter Ben Folds took a detour into acting and considered giving up his piano for the stage.
Fortunately for his legion of fans, the detour was brief, and in the 30 years since, he has recorded several solo and group albums and written for film, television and symphonic orchestras. But that brief flirtation with theater has served Folds well as a writer whose song lyrics tell vivid stories about his life and those of others.
While jukebox musicals featuring the music of famous songwriters, pop and R&B groups are now as prolific as Marvel movies, they rarely earn praise for their books — mainly because it’s difficult to shoehorn a fictional story around the fixed lyrics of old songs. “Underground” — which made its world premiere Saturday at the Coronado Playhouse — is a rare exception.
Conceived by Amy Cordileone, Donnie Tuel and Rachel Tuggle Whorton, with a book by Blake McCarty, “Underground” succeeds because Folds’ songs have the storytelling style of musical theater. And by setting the musical in a dive bar, where all of the characters in Folds’ songs come to life and interact, the lyrics feel wholly organic.
Joe Kao plays the accordion with the house band in “Underground” at Coronado Playhouse.
(Courtesy of Ken Jacques)
A co-production of Coronado Playhouse and McCarty’s immersive theater company Blindspot Collective, “Underground” is a fully immersive theater experience. The Playhouse auditorium has been turned into a working pub, with audience members seated at cabaret tables and a real bar sells cocktails, wine, soft drinks and snacks to attendees. The cast members play the bartender, waitresses, bar band and the customers who have gathered to watch a football game on the bar’s TV.
Cordileone directed and choreographed the action, which moves with speed and energy all over the theater space. At one point, an audience member gets pulled into the action as the subject of Folds’ song “Steven’s Last Night in Town.”
The musical’s central plot involves bartender Nick and his unrequited love for waitress Annie, who keeps dating losers (“Annie Waits”). Their confrontation in the second act is set to one of Folds’ most famous songs, “You Don’t Know Me,” reworked wonderfully as a battle duet.
Other songs that work successfully as ensemble and solo pieces are “Underground,” “Effington,” “Rockin’ the Suburbs,” “Do It Anyway” and “Dog.” And the breakup song “Belinda” works surprisingly well as a duet for two women, rather than a song of regret by one man. By contrast, “Fred Jones, Part II” and “Still Fighting It” are poignantly presented but seem out of place in the bar setting.
Standout performers in the show are Shane Hennessey as the Stranger, a bar visitor with a bright tenor voice like Folds; likable everyman Dakota Ringer as Nick; big-voiced Amanda Blair as Annie; Joe Kao as singer/accordionist Silverman; and Hannah Bosworth as Belinda. Also featured are Kevin Bradel, Hunter Brown, Sam Castillo, Hero Cordileone, Lu Garcia, Georgia Ladd, Jerry Rodriguez, Sarah Jane Salona, Dacara Seward, Marisa Taylor Scott and the singularly named McKenna.
Tuggle Whorton and Michael Tyree’s musical arrangements for the onstage band are creative and lively, and they bring a different sound to many of Folds’ sparely scored songs.
My only quibble with the show is that the singers move so much around the audience that it’s hard to figure out who’s singing and where they are. A brighter spotlight would help the audience know where to look when each song begins. There’s also a fair amount of curse words in the show, but that’s because Folds uses expletives in his lyrics.
Fans of Ben Folds will love this show, but I was a Folds novice when I attended “Underground” and, with few exceptions, the songs sounded like an original musical score. Folds had no part in the creation of “Underground,” but if he were to pop in for a performance, I bet he’d become a fan himself.
‘Underground’
When: 8 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays; and 3 p.m. Sundays. Through July 30.
Where: Coronado Playhouse, 1835 Strand Away, Coronado
Tickets: $24 and up
Phone: (619) 435-4856
Online: coronadoplayhouse.org