Udderbelly Cow Barn

This enthralling show on the life and music of Woody Guthrie makes you wonder why more works haven’t been made about the pioneering folk singer.  The answer hits you from the opening scene as Guthrie scorns commercial sponsors on his radio show and breaks into the rarely-heard last verse of This Land is Your Land, denouncing capitalism and its discontents.

For the uninitiated, Guthrie invented the modern protest song, fusing old folk rhythms with scathing political comment on the dust and squalor of the 1930s US.  More than that, he birthed a mythical image of the musician as wandering romantic, which Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan would emulate, gadding through middle-America with empty pockets and a guitar on his back.

The show seesaws between words written, recorded by and attributed to Guthrie and the songs he performed, suggesting both how the life shaped the music and the music shaped the life.  The four-piece cast-cum-band strike just the right balance between paying tribute to the legend and keeping the material fresh.  Guthrie’s guitar chords reverberate with new life on the violin, double-bass and kazoo, emphasising music’s universality, against the classical elitism of the day.

David Lutken cuts a taller, deeper-voiced figure than Guthrie fans may recognise, but he captures the man’s style and stage presence brilliantly.  He welcomes us with the amusingly anachronistic request that we switch off our mobiles, laughing in the face of theatrical formalities.  It’s easy to forget you’re sitting in a classically structured theatre as Woody’s companions take to the floor and drum their spoons across the knees of the front row.

The music is accomplished, with top-notch renditions of favourites like Bound for Glory, Dustbowl Blues and Do Rae Me.  Devotees may judge the soundtrack cursory, but it’s a wide spread of Guthrie’s work given all the characters, humour and pathos they cram into an hour-long slot.

Guthrie’s songs radiate an infectious optimism, which jars with the grim details of his life.  He lost his mother to mental illness, lived for years in abject poverty and spent his last decades in hospital, paralysed by Huntington’s disease.  The show’s biographical slant adds further layers of poignancy to the songs, reflecting not only the suffering Guthrie saw around him but his personal tragedies as well.  Yet, for all this misery, the music never feels elegiac.  It promises rebirth and redemption, angry at the injustice on our doorstep but steeled by the conviction that a better world is possible.  The message could not be more relevant today.

Woody Sez

Udderbelly Cow Barn

13:35 Til 27th August