The American Musical which Broadway has been said to invent has passed away. The current season on the main stem has just ended as award season selects its winners for the summer tourist season, and soon we will know if the critics and the devoted public which relished musical theater weep over its loss into the season ahead and beyond. The new form is something which offers twenty odd songs aiming to be a new Broadway score–all of them using as source material a non musical play, an HBO Special, and a screenplay by Josefina Lopez and George LaVoo. The book to this musical is the work of Lisa Boomer and Nell Benjamin and is the source for the music and lyrics by Joy Huerta and Benjamin Velez. They all have respectable credits, but none as authors of a musical.

The cast (Julieta Cervantes)
The main characters are women who accept their roles in life as strictly low paid laborers in a third rate dress factory that has just received its first ever lucrative offer to design and produce a huge number of dresses in a short time. The cast, including the gifted singers and actors Tatiana Cordoba, Justina Machado, Florencia Cuenca, and supporting players are all powerful; but they are all notable more for their ordinary looks and total acceptance of their very ordinary lives. All of them sing powerfully with similar vocal instruments allowing each one of them to belt that final blasting note which usually brings the screaming big finishes.

Tatiana Córdoba (Julieta Cervantes)
The crowded house reacted wildly to everything the orchestra blasted out at us, but the musical numbers did little to further this coming-of-age story–breaking away from parental control. The female characters were basically identical except in age, The music offered a sameness, created no mood, and was certainly not particularly memorable. I know all this sameness is there to let us know this is a NOW happening, but sorry folks, it’s more suitable for me as fare for a rock club, where no one pays any attention to what anyone says in a musical show. All one wants there is a beat and a dance floor that will respond to an assault. The women in this musical are everything they never were before, and the audience I shared were mostly happy to have found something new created just for them but not for me.