March 24, 2023
In mid-March, I was introduced to a whole new modern world with Lincoln Park’s newest show Shout! The Mod Musical.
The musical follows these five women during the low and high points of their lives throughout the 1960s, with the show being carried by a magazine and classic 60s songs. There’s Orange Girl (Olivia Morrow), a girl who marries a man she loves but gets left behind and starts to drink alcohol. Red Girl (Lucy Palmer) is a schoolgirl who marries young. Yellow Girl (Olivia Huval) obsesses over Beatles star Paul McCartney. Green Girl (Izzy Tepe) is just weird and marries happy. Blue Girl (Ava Bardakos) is gay and beautiful.
This musical had some excellent voice acting done by Adam Woods and Kenna Ambrose; it was stellar and extremely immersive. The dancing was well choreographed and the singing was great. The music was mostly recognizable, and the live band was awesome.
However, all of those attributes were overshadowed by the hard-to-follow plot. The snippets of the girls’ lives don’t fit into a feasible story line.
The onstage lighting didn’t always illuminate the dancers, so it was sometimes hard to tell where your focus was supposed to be. Orange Dancer (Marina Diulus), who did excellent dancing, was not in an orange dress, and it took a while to figure out that it was “orange.”
All the actors, dancers, and singers belong in a spotlight, but Shout! was not the right spotlight, in my opinion.
