Baltimore Center Stage’s new artistic director Stephanie Ybarra gets off to a dynamic start with the winning, women-centered musical, Miss You Like Hell, which celebrates the passion and pain of Latinx women but generously embraces all people in search of a community where they belong and are lifted up.
This storytelling musical by Quiara Alegría Hudes (In the Heights) and folk-rock musician Erin McKeown centers on a cross-country drive between a mother and daughter trapped in a ramshackle red truck for a week with their past resentments and abandonment issues.
What could go wrong?
This estrogen-fueled variation on the American road trip allows two rich, juicy roles for women to dance in the headlights. While the musical’s detours have varying degrees of success, as long as Miss You sticks to the main road it is bright and riveting.
Beatriz (Lorraine Velez, ravenously personifying a free spirit) travels from California to Philadelphia after she reads suicidal thoughts on her teenage daughter Olivia’s (Stephanie Gomérez, a wonderful tangle of teenage angst and heartache) blog, which is titled “Castaways,” to give you an idea of Olivia’s sense of being unmoored, unmothered.
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Beatriz is an undocumented Mexican woman facing deportation after decades in the U.S. She shows up at Olivia’s house, where she lives with her father (the two never married), in the middle of the night proposing a mother-daughter bonding experience. Olivia, scarred and scornful, blasts a round of blistering teenage girl attitude before caving into her need and hopping into the truck.
It is soon revealed that Beatriz’s motivation stems from more than concern for her daughter’s depressed state. She needs Olivia to testify on her behalf, something the girl would rather eat rusty bolts off the truck than do what her mother asks. En route, the pair unload a carload of emotional baggage, and while we’re not entirely clear why Beatriz left her daughter to go to California, one thing we do know is that Olivia was traumatized by being left behind. She wallows in books, poetry, too-big clothing and sexual precociousness as a way of acting out her pain.
Beatriz, on the other hand, is concerned about her daughter and wants to give her what she needs, but she is always looking over her shoulder and has an almost animal-like instinct for danger. The musical takes place in 2014, but when the ICE immigration officers show up, you shiver thinking what it meant then and what it means now.
Heavy stuff. But the trip is lightened by Beatriz’s Latin-inflected joie de vivre, which is pretty hard to resist, even by a sullen teenager. The pair also encounters some oddball and offbeat fellow travelers, including a gay couple (Michael Medeiros and Raphael Nash Thompson), who are spending their retirement years getting hitched in every state. While they are as sweet as hell, and their song “My Bell’s Been Rung,” is a tuneful tribute to the love that back when dared not speak its name, they kinda stick out like a sore thumb in the musical’s structure and you wonder why you need this distraction, lovely as it is.
Same goes for meeting up with a soulful tamale salesman, Manuel (Ceasar F. Barajas), a man who can cook and express his feelings, as evidenced in the stirring song “Tamales.”
Miss You Like Hell closes October 13, 2019. Details and tickets
Manuel is a dreamboat, but again, why do we need men to pop up like signposts along Beatriz and Olivia’s journey? There’s more than enough rich territory to mine without diversions and distractions.
The road to California is represented by a dandy red truck cutaway on wheels that bobs along, the ever-present yellow lines reminding Beatriz to stay on the right side of the divide. An eight-piece folk orchestra sits at the back of the stage, prompting the cast to break into hearty dance steps at any given moment.
One side trip that actually works is Pearl (Jaela Cheeks-Lomax, a shining presence with a voice like a prayer), one of Olivia’s fervent blog followers who encourages the girl to stop on by Yellowstone on her way west. Pearl is a luminous and bolstering presence throughout the musical, her texts giving Olivia the bravery she needs to open up and accept her mother for who she is. And as corny as it sounds, Pearl also urges Olivia to choose life rather than fetishize death.
The final destination in Miss You is not what you think, and instead of a happy ending, the denouement is bittersweet but ripe with possibilities. Mother and daughter touch palms and sing “You are the bread/I am the hunger,” physically not together but sharing one heart.
Miss You Like Hell . Book and Lyrics by Quiara Alegría Hudes . Music and Lyrics by Erin McKeown . Director: Rebecca Martinez . Featuring: Gisela Adisa, Anthony Alfaro, Ceasar F. Barajas, Jaela Cheeks-Lomax, Jana Eiland, Stephanie Gomérez, Calvin McCullough, Michael Medeiros, Rachel Stern, Raphael Nash Thompson, Lorraine Velez. Music Director: Tiffany Underwood Holmes. Choreographer: Alex Perez. Set Designer: Reid Thompson. Costume Designer: Harry Nadal. Lighting Designer: Elizabeth Mak. Sound Designers: Charlies Coes and Nathan Roberts. Resident Stage Manager: Danielle Teague-Daniels. Produced by Baltimore Center Stage . Reviewed by Jayne Blanchard.
