Audiences subscribing to Edgar Allan Poe's conviction that romance lies in tales of young, beautiful, dead women have enjoyed many a good cry over These Shining Lives, Melanie Marnich's docu-tragedy of industrial technology. The expected weeps are also forthcoming in this musical adaptation featuring a score by Andre Pluess and Amanda Dehnert, with the book and lyrics by Jessica Thebus.
Outrage, on the other hand—even with the heightened emotion engendered by incorporation of the most purely visceral of the arts—is a little harder to muster up. Generations living today can recall when footwear vendors boasted in-store X-ray machines and "radiation" was a by-product of war weapons. Whatever we may know nowadays about radioactive hazards, in 1922, barely two decades after its discovery, who suspected the softly luminous silver-blue element called "radium" of any harm, or connected the minuscule amounts found in time-pieces with its accumulative effect on workers coming into contact with, literally, pounds of it over the course of their day—in particular, the clock-face painters who licked their brushes between applications of the mineral powder?
Jessica Thebus's book is not wholly devoted to the quintessentially feminine act of dying, though. Following our introduction to the appropriately diverse factory girls of Western Clock (Ottawa, Illinois) and preceding their uniformly serene departure into projection designer Stephan Mazurak's starry cosmos, Pluess and Dehnert give our damsels a day at the beach where they share the ambitions precipitated by independence fostered through earning power. The melody extolling these sentiments begins in the Broadway mode employed previously but shifts midway into a foreshadowy gospel tone. This prepares us for our doomed heroines' later refusal to accept their fate without a fight. If you are moved by courage expressed in actions, rather than in endurance, you may tear up with a clear conscience at these moments.
The song roster includes a few choruses for bosses, doctors, lawyers, reporters and other obligatory villains, but its predominant focus is to provide a showcase for delicate treble harmonies rendered clean and crystalline under the musical direction of Chuck Larkin. Whether you go home lamenting the sacrifice of helpless innocents to Big Business or championing the groundbreaking reforms perpetrated by brave opponents thereof, no one can deny the charm and expertise of Jess Godwin, Bri Sudia, Tiffany Topol and Johanna McKenzie Miller in narrating this small, but significant, chapter in our nation's history.
