Last night I caught “Inner Voices: Solo Musicals” at 59E59. As the umbrella title indicates, the show is made up of two solo pieces, “Mosaic” and “Whida Peru: Resurrection Tangle.” Each was a relatively short one-act, but I’ve seen nine-hour shows that felt zippier than this 100-minute evening.
I was lured by the presence of Heidi Blickenstaff and Judith Blazer, two performers I’ve enjoyed in the past. But those musicals are a high price to pay to see them. The only interesting thing is that the shows take two different roads to end up in the same place: disappointment.
With a score by Georgia Stitt and Cheri Steinkellner, and a book (if you can call it that) by Steinkellner, “Mosaic” consists of a singer-songwriter named Ruth (Blickenstaff) procrastinating in front of her laptop. The screen is projected behind her so you can watch as she checks her emails, listens to her own stuff on iTunes (“I love that song!”), checks up on her YouTube count, and looks up photos of herself. The line between self-reflection and navel-gazing is trampled over and over, and the obligatory “circle of life and death” narrative feels particularly hackneyed. It doesn’t help that there are no songs to speak of, so the music feels like mere underscoring. Caveat: You may enjoy “Mosaic” more than I did if you own Lululemon apparel.
Blazer has the rather more complex title role of “Whida Peru” but David Simpatico and Josh Schmidt’s look at a grieving transsexual is a tangle, all right. Encased in a black lace microskirt, Blazer (who must have prepped by watching Sofia Vergara in “Modern Family”) does the best she can to balance the show’s odd mix of over-dramatics and under-plotting. Schmidt’s score has intriguing elements that I’d like to hear developed with more than just a piano (especially in the way it suggests a ghostly netherworld), but “Whida Peru” is unnecessarily padded, with not enough songs to sustain its cumbersome length and a narrative that goes round and round until it abruptly rushes to a conclusion.