After the applause and the final bows Saturday night for Trustus Theatre’s World Premiere of Lemonade: A Fresh Pressed Musical (Jesse Corbin – playwright, composer, lyricist) my friend who attended the play with me looked at me and said, “What did we just see?”
To be candid, I’m still trying to figure that out, but here are some of the pieces of the puzzle we’re working with.
We saw a beautiful set, far more complex than we typically see for a late summer Trustus production; the unofficial time when the theatre typically stages its biennial Playwrights’ Festival for new works. Kudos to USC-based theatrical designer Jim Hunter for this lovely work. (Note: the Trustus website explains that the next Playwrights’ Festival returns in 2027.)
We heard an elaborate and highly professional score, stunningly executed and punctuated with tight harmonies and exceptional vocals.
We witnessed the well-done work of a roster of some of Columbia’s best behind-the-scenes artists including Chris Harre, Marc Hurst, and Colleen Kelly.
We read from a playbill that listed an assortment of additional SC-based theatre artists mixed into a large pot of non-local Equity actors, all of whose performances were almost flawless.
But it’s the final two puzzle pieces that still leave me scratching my head and trying to figure out what we saw. For one thing, we saw fine actors working from a script that, surprisingly, seemed to have been written for an audience of adolescents sometime during Reagan’s 1980s. I sincerely hate to use such harsh words to describe any piece of art, but the ones that come most easily to mind are vapid and platitudinous. As for the second confounding puzzle piece, we witnessed the results of apparent advice from director Marlo Hunter that must have asked those fine actors to lean into the awkwardness of the early teenage years with as much geekiness as they could muster.
The quality was there but the framework upon which all these fine attributes were draped was so far removed from the typical Trustus faire of incisive, cutting-edge, and thought-provoking performances that, scene after scene, it felt more and more off-balance and out-of-place.
Here’s why.
The story of Lemonade: A Fresh Pressed Musical is simple. Very simple. Two friends fresh out of the 8th grade plan to continue their tradition of running a summer lemonade stand but, this year, they are also competing for the award of being the best of the area’s summer youth businesses. These are the Good Guys.
Their nemesis is a Mean Girl who cheats, generally plays dirty, and who has forcefully recruited two newbies to her team selling “homemade” cookies and giving away free milk. They are the Bad Guys.
After a few minor confrontations, the Good Guys start to play dirty, too, just like the Bad Guys, but ultimately they give in to their collective moral compass and suggest a compromise with the Bad Guys, who immediately agree to work together. And then the play is over.
Well, there are actually a couple of undeveloped, nonessential subplots that, further developed, could lead to a more interesting and challenging play.
In the first, the Mean Girl has two rich dads (hello 21st century) who we never see and know little about except that they can afford a “priceless Baccarat” platter because they got rich off of milk money and, big reveal, they are getting a divorce.
The second subplot involves the lead character’s dead dad and his widowed mom who has recently re-entered the dating scene. We do see and hear from this parent, but always in relation to her role as the parent. We know little about her life or desires or the nebulous Mike with whom she occasionally goes out.
That’s it.
Throughout the play, my friend and I waited patiently for the added conflict, the complexity, the twist, the deeper metaphor that would make this story more compelling. Unfortunately, it did not come.
What did come our way was a stellar cast (kudos to USC grad Taylor McCullough who returns to the Trustus stage after a successful run in Urinetown: The Musical), many of whom surely must have been directed to take the gawkiness of being an 8th-grader (or the parent of an 8th-grader) and turn it up a notch, or two, or three. Think Andy Samberg portraying a 13-year-old in an SNL sketch that is supposed to make us laugh at the character. It was odd, a little off-putting, and staggeringly out of place on the Thigpen Main Stage, and I couldn’t help but wonder how founders Jim and Kay Thigpen would have responded to this play. (Happily, Trustus opens their season with the always-spicy Cabaret in September, followed by such titillating titles as The Niceties and Dear Evan Hansen later in the year.)
Sadly, Lemonade just didn’t work for this reviewer despite the best and successful efforts of the cast and crew.
Still, as always, congratulations to Trustus Theatre for facilitating and producing new work. This doesn’t happen enough, especially not in SC. Clearly, a lot of financial and physical energy went into bringing Lemonade: A Fresh Pressed Musical to the stage. But having been beaten over the head throughout the evening with the banality of the singular old adage, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade,” a saying that many if not most of us respond to with annoyance, the script and its message fell on battered eyes and ears. The problem with the repetitive application of this exhausted metaphor in Lemonade: A Fresh Pressed Musical is that while there was little added sugar in the mixture, there was more than enough saccharine to go around.
See Lemonade: A Fresh Pressed Musical at Trustus Theatre through August 30th For tickets visit the Trustus website at TRUSTUS.ORG.
