Performed on a stage as unadorned as its subject’s own life, Woody Sez is less of a musical and more a tribute to the remarkable Woody Guthrie, who fled the Depression-era dustbowl of Oklahoma, armed with nothing more than his guitar – adorned with the legend “This Machine Kills Fascists” – to become the voice of Americans who had no voice of their own.
Performed with great love by a quartet of accomplished musicians and actors, led by the show’s writer, David Lutken, as Woody himself, Woody Sez is part biography and part hoe-down. It’s at its best when the songs tell the story.
And it’s quite a story. Born in the Mid-West shortly before the outbreak of the First World War and named after Woodrow Wilson, Guthrie battled censorship on the radio, saw his father set on fire and his mother Nora
(a perfectly cast Helen J Russell) taken to an asylum.
“So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You”, he sings “for Herbert Hoover and Republicans everywhere”, as he treks from his home to California in search of work. The loudest applause is reserved for the “Jolly Banker”, who demands: “Just bring me $2 for every $1 I lend you”, and “Do Re Mi”, with its refrain of “If you ain’t got the dough…” Darcie Deaville is excellent as the irrepressible Lefty Lou.
Above all, Woody Sez is an age-old story of immigrants, worklessness and debt. Rather like David Cameron’s Britain, America during the Great Depression was no place for sissies.
“The Gambling Man is as Rich as the Working Man is Poor”, laments Lutken over his fiddle, before Andy Teirstein proves surprisingly adept on both the Jew’s harp and the spoons.
From the outset, Woody Sez is performed at a cracking pace and there is little time for the audience to reflect on the everyday tragedies of the working man recounted in Guthrie’s songs. But the fact that he left us these songs, before ironically losing his own voice through Huntingdon’s disease, is in itself a cause for celebration, as is the cast’s rendition of Guthrie’s American hymn, “This Land is Your Land”. A small jewel among the current London West End bling, Woody Sez is not to be missed if you like musicals which remain with you long after the last note has been sung.
