I’ve  found myself in a very lovely, very priv­ileged, and deeply uncom­fort­able space.  I’ve seen three pre­vi­ous Red Scare Theatre Com­pany shows, and I’ve genu­inely loved them all.  I will have to enlist one of my ‘Ista com­rades to review their shows in future, to pre­clude claims of bias and shame­less fangirl­ing.

Each of those shows has been dir­ec­ted by Cas­sandra Tse.  She’s a power­house, and I think a real asset to Wel­ling­ton theatre.  Tse has a del­ic­ate hand as a dir­ect­or; great com­ic tim­ing, a good sense of the dra­mat­ic, but more import­antly, a deep empathy for both her char­ac­ters and the act­ors play­ing them.  These days, that’s rare and pre­cious.  But, that makes her a truly great dir­ect­or.

I was really excited to see Tse in a one-woman show, actu­ally per­form­ing.  I ima­gine it helped that her Red Scare part­ner James Cain was dir­ect­ing, and I can­’t ima­gine any­one would under­stand her vis­ion for the show, and how to sup­port it, bet­ter than him.

Fur­ther dis­claim­er – I know Katie Mor­ton, the music dir­ect­or, and I actu­ally own their albums.  Katie is, and I can­not stress this enough, a geni­us.  They were a bril­liant choice to arrange and orches­trate the music.

About the show.  Cas­sandra Tse fol­lows the time-hon­oured for­mula of mono­logue-music-mono­logue, with her only prop a large play­book.    Tse speaks of the music­al theatre back­drop of her child­hood, and wryly notes that she was a bit of a pre­co­cious show­boat.  She describes her need to show­case female and non-bin­ary writers, who are not well-rep­res­en­ted in music­al theatre, and often only find a plat­form to write and dir­ect once they’ve estab­lished them­selves as per­formers first.   Their shows aren’t well-known, and Tse admits that some of the num­bers were new to her when she star­ted research­ing.

Oh yes, she researched like a mofo, and the mini-bios she gave us for the vari­ous women and enby writers and shows she chose to shoi­w­case were inter­est­ing and delivered with great affec­tion and respect.

The sound was a bit shonky to start, with Ellie Stew­art’s back­ing vocals and viol­in mixed too loud, and per­haps a bit too much reverb on both mics.  It came right pretty briskly, though, and the sound and light­ing respon­ded intu­it­ively to the ten­or of each anec­dote and song.  Tse looked incred­ible, in a deep green off-the-shoulder dress.  Fin­ger waved hair, red lips.  She was every bit a head­liner and when she talked about singing in New York, I could eas­ily ima­gine it.  She was centre-stage on a little riser, with her band of four excel­lent musi­cians in a semi-circle around her.  The lights were speak-easy moody, with occa­sion­al nightclub flash.

I did­n’t know the shows, and I did­n’t know the writers.  And I was NOT expect­ing Cas­sandra Tse to have a belt.  (That’s on me.)   Her voice was bloody mar­vel­lous, a rich and force­ful con­tralto with loun­gey swing when the song needed it.  She was less power­ful in the upper register but that gave those moments a sweet fra­gil­ity.  Her accent was for the most part, Amer­ic­an, but as she said, music­al theatre tra­di­tion is to adopt the accent of the show’s set­ting.  The songs were var­ied and lovely; songs by women about women’s exper­i­ences.   I came home inspired to listen to Hadestown, Fun Home, and Wait­ress, and I’m grate­ful for the intro­duc­tion to those incred­ible shows.

There were a couple of weak­er num­bers, but that’s a mat­ter of per­son­al taste.  Oth­er people might find them won­der­ful.  And every num­ber was per­formed with emo­tion­al sens­it­iv­ity and integ­rity – Tse shrugged effort­lessly into each song’s nar­rat­or one after anoth­er, rather than just singing as her­self.  But there was a little of her in each one, too, as she has clearly con­nec­ted deeply with each num­ber she’s chosen.

The final song (apart from a well-earned encore) was one Cas­sandra Tse wrote, espe­cially for the show.  It was a grat­it­ude, and an encour­age­ment, and a trib­ute to all the women who write but hide it away, because life is busy and it’s “just a hobby”.   And this show in its entirety is a love let­ter to women who decided that they deserved to stop hid­ing and let their writ­ing out into the world.   It was enga­ging through­out and I wept on more than one occa­sion.  Thank God the lights were dimmed.

This was sup­posed to be the devel­op­ment sea­son for That’s All She Wrote.  How­ever we live in uncer­tain times, and the rest of the per­form­ances have been can­celled due to the Cov­id-19 level change.  Red Scare are look­ing into digit­al options, but that raises poten­tial issues in terms of licen­cing for the songs.  I wish them all the luck, and hope the show can go on, albeit at a later date.  It’s really good, guys.