“Maggie” at the Goodspeed Opera House
Robert Schneider in East Haddam, Connecticut
17 September 2024
This new musical by Scottish-born country star Johnny Reid in collaboration with Matt Murray and Rob Foster, has got a lot going for it. The music is tuneful without quite becoming catchy, the lyrics make sense without any forcing in the direction of wittiness. The storytelling, in Mary Francis Moore’s very capable production at the Goodspeed Opera House, is fluid, swift and true. It’s impossible to find fault with the manner of telling so audiences are likely to receive Maggie according to their assessment of the importance of the story being told.
Photo credit: Diane Sobolewski.
The title character is a devoted, hard-working mom in a small town in Scotland. When her husband is killed in a mining accident, she’s left to bring up her three sons on her meagre earnings scrubbing the floors of local schools.
Furthermore—as the opening number makes clear—her case isn’t unique. It’s women like Maggie who hold the town together, caring for their homes and keeping their menfolk from spending their weekly pay packet in bars to which women not admitted. Maggie and her sisters are tremendously important but irredeemably banal. Many of us know a Maggie. Indeed, the marketing department at the Goodspeed has worked up giant Post-it notes headed “Who is your Maggie?” The corridor leading to the bar is covered with audience responses nominating everyone from actual grannies to teachers, mentors, spouses and children as their ‘Maggie’. All of us, it seems, owe our salvation to someone. All of us are beholden to someone for order and coherence in our lives, to our lives, but is there a musical in it? Is Maggie a character or a whole class of characters?
Originator Johnny Reid offers the play as homage to a grandmother he reveres. In an interview, however, he goes further, describing her as emblematic of all of Scotland: “Maggie celebrates not only my gran and her life, but also an entire generation of women who fought through some tough times by keeping faith, hope, love, family, friendship and humour close to heart.” The musical bears him out; it describes passages of inner and outer turmoil, social upheaval and family struggle. Secondary characters have their own stories to tell. The mood and direction of the town are always present.
The action lands in four significant years: 1954, 1968, 1974 and 1976. The town of Lanark, like much of Scotland, undergoes deindustrialization, labour unrest and sectarian troubles. The mines close, people move away, hope dries up. Through it all, Maggie feeds and clothes her sons, supplies them with moral and practical advice, and tries to protect them from violence and generalized despair. She’s only partially successful. At the final scene of reunion, one son is missing, a welcome note of realism.
There’s no question that Maggie is a character in her own right and not just an anchor and a beacon to the other characters. To the extent that she becomes an icon of her region, however, she loses some of her individuality. Icons, by their very nature, are never quirky.
Of Scotland, Maggie sings: “It’s where I was married / It’s where I’ll be buried …” which seems to state her whole case. She never considers emigrating, but most of the other characters do, including all three of her sons. Like Scotland itself, Maggie is centrifugal: everybody eventually flies off—just as Reid’s family did, moving to Canada when he was 18. But if Scotland is retrograde, impoverished and homophobic (as one of the characters discovers), why not leave?
Christine Dwyer pours her heart and soul into the title role, imbuing Maggie with a vibrancy that makes us wonder how her character could spend her life cleaning floors. Terra C. MacLeod, Sophia Clarke and Kennedy Caughell do double duty as Maggie’s friends, but also function as a chorus of the town’s womenfolk.
As a still-young widow, Maggie has wooers and potential mates, one of whom, Geordie Parven (Brian Michael Hoffman) likes to parade around town in a Speedo. Although excentric, Geordie has undeniable charm, but Magie’s devotion to her dead husband is unshakeable. The other potential matches blend into a male chorus of sectarian troublemakers and striking miners, at one point echoing the marching-in-place determination of the revolutionaries in Les Miz.
Matt Faucher, playing the head troublemaker (and abusive husband to one of Maggie’s friends) has a thrilling baritone voice. His character manages to recruit Maggie’s eldest as an apprentice troublemaker. Maggie’s brother-in-law, ‘Uncle Charles’ (Ryan Duncan) is a window-dresser and is gay. He flees the ultra-masculine vibe of his birthplace and lands a job at Harrods in London. Only in a musical would such a character feel nostalgic about Lanark.
Director Mary Francis Moore rounds out all these smaller stories in a montage of mimed vignettes in the second act. Some get married, some have children, some stay single, some leave town.
Emily Rebholz’s costumes constitute a sampler of what working people wore in Scottland over a twenty-year period. She resists the urge to editorialize. Like the rest of the costumes, Maggie’s plain brown handbag isn’t flashy, but it’s spot-on for the character.
Likewise, EJ Boyle’s choreography, while nodding several times in the direction of clog dancing, takes up the more interesting challenge of turning laundry day or an evening at the pub into compelling movement.
At some point I expected Beowulf Boritt’s fissured rear wall of a set to unfold into something more spectacular, but it never happened.
Maggie was something of a hit at the Goodspeed; the audience warmed to the title character and her town in the throes of change, not too unlike the mill and factory towns of New England that now seek rebirth as tourist destinations.
