Against a backdrop of sepia Depression-era images – broken down jalopies, New Deal tractors, dust storms (a bit Levis Store, to be honest) – four musicians enter and start to play as the audience files in. It’s a statement of intent: this show rightly foregrounds the songs of Woody Guthrie for a gentle, hobo-ish ramble through the singer’s life and times, and the democratising influence of America’s indigenous popular music that he so cherished.
The downhome approach works brilliantly as far as the ‘music for people who can’t afford a radio’ is concerned. David M Lutken, who also devised the show, is an affable Woody, easily moving in and out of narrative duties to perform songs, while his multi-instrumentalist-singer cohorts create wonderfully nuanced musical settings that make a great unspoken case for treating Guthrie’s work and the songs of others he preserved as pinnacles of twentieth-century American culture.
You break that fourth wall at your peril, though, and Lutken’s narky opening aside that they’ll play something while waiting for ‘the other 164 people to turn up’ creates a slightly uncomfortable atmosphere in the half-empty theatre. That it’s also the last moment of real discomfiture highlights where ‘Woody Sez’ falls down. Although the madness, death and despair that clouded Guthrie’s life are mentioned in passing, Lutken’s aw shucks delivery never wavers, and you wonder what kind of audience this show is aimed at if meaty issues such as the singer’s communist leanings and rank selfishness towards his several wives can be so casually brushed aside.
Maybe Guthrie simply doesn’t loom large enough in our Pantheon, but I felt a rethink for a UK audience could have brought a bit of much-needed steel to this piece, though there is a tremendous heart at its centre.