OIL CITY SYMPHONY
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
From her singlemindedness as she heads into a drum fill to the toothy, approval-seeking smile that takes over her face when she gets through a song with no mistakes, Vaughn-Raney has the Karen Carpenter wannabe down pat.
Vaughn-Raney’s wonderful performance is only one example of the perfectly detailed comic incongruity that informs Oil City Symphony. The play is set in a southwestern hick town’s social hall–the theater is festooned with pictures of trophies, prize pigs, and Future Farmers of America banners, and cookies and punch are served in the lobby after the show. Oil City Symphony mixes shrewd theatrical caricature and impeccable musicianship to create a brisk evening that, if not exactly deep, still contains enough subtlety to keep the audience believing in the characters and laughing both during and after the performance. The Oil City Symphony, we are told, is a group of people who played together as high school kids some 25 years ago and have now come together for a reunion concert in honor of their beloved music teacher. Though their adolescent innocence is long gone, the players are still the awkward but talented misfits they were as teenagers, treading a dangerously thin line between nostalgia and arrested development. Mark, the pianist (played by music director Joel Raney), is a music master at the local Presbyterian church, and his benevolent smile and Mr. Rogers gentleness cloak a closet Jerry Lee Lewis rebelliousness. Mike, (George Tenegal), the synthesizer player, is an LSD casualty now making pretty computer-generated sounds and singing idiotic tunes about flowers. And Mary, whose virtuosic violin playing blends country-western and Gypsy influences (played by Mary Murfitt, the show’s coauthor and original New York lead), is a spinster music-appreciation teacher with a prim half smile that registers a lifetime of disappointment.
