Exposure's COLLEEN GRATE lends her voice to 'THE MARVELOUS WONDERETTES' at the American Heartland Theatre

Marvelous singing carries American Heartland’s ‘Wonderettes’

By ROBERT TRUSSELL

The Kansas City Star

One of the mainstays of commercial regional theater is the jukebox musical, a genre that holds few surprises. But for a golden-oldies show, the American Heartland Theatre’s production of “The Marvelous Wonderettes” is a superior piece of work — cleverly written, well-acted and inventively directed.

Speaking as one who can actually remember the 1950s, I’m not sure why writers insist on presenting that era as “innocent” because it was, in fact, a decade permeated with Cold War paranoia and marked by racial segregation. Presumably, the market for a musical that showed us the dark side of the “Nifty Fifties” would be rather limited.

The audience for “The Marvelous Wonderettes,” on the other hand, may stretch to infinity — at least as long as baby boomers with a taste for uncomplicated entertainment are still kicking.

As constructed by playwright Roger Bean, the show does offer a faint suggestion of social consciousness by contrasting the ‘50s and the ‘60s. Act 1 is set in 1958, and four high-school girls — Cindy Lou, Suzy, Missy and Betty Jean — are performing at their prom as the Marvelous Wonderettes. The music is facile and blithely free of calories as the girls run through a set of unapologetically superficial tunes, including “Mr. Sandman,” “Stupid Cupid” and “Lipstick on Your Collar.”

Act 2 depicts the 10-year reunion, and the music is a little looser, a bit more worldly and more expansive as we get renditions of “Heat Wave,” “Son of a Preacher Man,” “Respect” and “Rescue Me,” among others.

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