FOREVER PLAID
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So I suppose one could defend Forever Plaid being produced by a nonprofit, grant-seeking theater like Wisdom Bridge. I’d always thought the point of nonprofit houses was to accommodate shows that might be too risky for a commercial producer; I guess 1950s pop is no more a sure thing than Brecht or Beckett when it comes to dragging audiences away from their TVs and into the theater these days.
Forever Plaid relates the situation (“story” is too strong a term) of the Four Plaids, an aspiring quartet of Perry Como wannabes. Sparky, Jinx, Francis, and Smudge, four nice nerds who met in their high school audiovisual club, teamed up to sing American songs just as the British invasion was getting under way; en route to a gig, they were killed in a collision with a truckful of girls heading to a Beatles concert. (Get it?) Now, some 35 years later, our teen-angel heroes have returned from heaven for a brief reunion in Sparky and Jinx’s “semi-finished” suburban basement cum fallout shelter (nicely evoked in Kevin Rigdon’s detail-conscious set). The rest is history–pop-music history, that is–as, in an hour and a half, the four lads run through 22 songs, broken up by brief anecdotes from the lives they left behind.
