Phillyist Reviews... Hung on a Blonde Ponytail

To get the bad stuff out of the way first, because there's not a lot of it: when you are doing a musical, and your instruments are composed of anything more than an acoustic guitar and/or an upright piano, you need to mic your actors. When your band is playing amplified, electric instruments, that's especially true. Neither of the two singer/actors in Hung on a Blonde Ponytail were consistently amplified (handheld microphones were reserved for those scenes in which the duo was playing at a venue), and, if I hadn't been sitting about five feet from the stage, I'd imagine I would have been very annoyed with BCKSEET. It's not that the two actors, G DeCandia and Gregg Pica, didn't have powerful voices. It's not even that they weren't loud. It's simply that the unamplified human voice can't really compete with amplified electric instruments, unless they're in another room. I know that renting body mics is expensive—I was in charge of costing them out for the last show I worked on—but it's well worth the expense, in what the audience gets out of them. If BCKSEET is adamantly against or unable to mic the actors, though, it should consider turning the speakers from the pit way, way down.

It's really unfortunate for the audience, too, that the actors aren't wearing microphones, because they're missing out on what I think might be one of the best original musicals I've seen. You'll notice that that sentence doesn't have a quantifier—that's because I mean "ever." Acoustics aside, Hung on a Blonde Ponytail is, quite simply, phenomenal. It's ninety minutes of compelling, well-crafted plot and solid, gorgeous pop songs. Influences from The Killers to The Who are apparent in the score, and the lyrics (when you can hear them) are complex without being overly intellectual, and consistently interesting. They're also sung amazingly well by Pica, and especially by DeCandia, whose voice was so moving that, especially at the end of the play, it almost hurt to listen to him sing. (He should really stop playing with his hair, though. Yeah, I know rock musicians do it. But he's an actor playing a musician for the purposes of this show, and he just needs to leave it the hell alone. Acting 101.)

Rounding out the cast is Amie Shafer, playing a very sympathetic reporter who has come to interview Pica's character about his new hit album. You quickly learn that the events in the play aren't happening chronologically: it's a series of overlapping flashbacks that the audience is asked to piece together, with the reporter's help, to figure out what happened. (If you paid attention to the "no cell phones" announcement at the top of the show, though, you probably already figured where things were heading, and just tried to figure out why, like I did.) All the pieces fit together nicely, if not at all happily, in the end. And the cast deserves every bit of applause that it got.