Pittsburgh stages aren’t the only places where Western Pennsylvanians can catch Broadway-caliber talent in action this weekend.
Three actors with decades of stage and screen experience will be in Latrobe Saturday for two concert performances of “The Crinolynns,” a new musical written by Somerset native Scott Logsdon.
The cast consists of Donna Lynne Champlin, a Carnegie Mellon University alumnus who recently spent four seasons portraying Paula Proctor on The CW’s “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”; Tony Award nominee Sally Mayes; and Valerie Wright, another veteran theater performer who played Meg Ryan’s sister in the 1993 film “Sleepless in Seattle.”
“The Crinolynns” follows a 1960s girl group as they reunite after 40 years apart and regale the audience with all the twists and turns their lives have taken. Think “Forever Plaid” meets “The Golden Girls.” Anyone interested in checking out “The Crinolynns” at Saint Vincent College’s Carey Performing Arts Center can secure tickets for either the 2 or 7 p.m. show via stagerightgreensburg.com.
“We’re a bunch of women of a certain age,” Champlin told the Post-Gazette. “We’ve been through stuff. We have a certain amount of knowledge and a sense of humor, and I think the show captures that really well.”
Everything about “The Crinolynns” starts with Logsdon, a Cumberland, Maryland, native who spent most of his adolescence in the Laurel Highlands.
From 1989-2000, Logsdon traveled the country as part of the first nationally touring company of “Les Misérables.” He eventually decided to start “catching up on being a human being” and spent the next two decades writing and directing. Logsdon co-wrote the 2020 musical “Stick & Stones” that ended up getting derailed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
About two years ago, Logsdon found himself going down a rabbit hole of “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” music videos. One song in particular caught his attention: “Maybe She's Not Such A Heinous B**** After All,” a season-three number in which leading lady Rebecca Bunch (Rachel Bloom) ponders why her mother is being so uncharacteristically nice to her. It’s a twisted riff on 1950s and ’60s girl-group pop that inspired Logsdon to discover through research that “most of [those groups] didn’t have such happy lives.”
“They did not live the dream they were selling to the American public,” Logsdon said. “I thought, ‘Maybe there are the seeds of a show here.’”
He wrote some preliminary song lyrics and sent them to his friend, Aaron Gandy, who loved the idea of a girl-group show about “how their lives really evolved and turned out” and quickly set Logsdon’s words to music. Gandy ended up composing “The Crinolynns,” which Logsdon explained draws its name from a combination of era-appropriate crinoline skirts and his desire to make the show’s main trio biological sisters with the middle name “Lynn.”
The duo ultimately came up with a collection of songs for “The Crinolynns” that are playful yet biting spins on tunes from girl groups like The Ronettes and The Dixie Cups. They’re both hoping that folks in Latrobe get a kick out of songs like “Oh Mr. Locksmith,” a naughty ditty reminiscent of The Marvelettes’ “Please Mr. Postman,” and “Headin’ to the Courthouse,” which replaces The Dixie Cups’ excitement about getting hitched in “Chapel of Love” with a cycle of marriage and divorce.
Logsdon and Gandy organized a public reading of “The Crinolynns” last year in Greensburg that Logsdon said “played better than anything I’ve ever been involved with.” The concert version in Latrobe on Saturday has been refined and will now be performed by Champlin, Mayes and Wright — who, based on the zany chemistry they displayed over Zoom last week, will have no trouble playing sisters with a shared professional history.
Wright has known Mayes for years and had worked with Champlin before, but “The Crinolynns” was the first time all three of them collaborated on anything. As Champlin put it, they’re all at the point in their lives and careers “where we fear absolutely no one and nothing.” Mayes had a hunch that once they were all in a room together, “there would be chaos, and it would be wonderful!”
“As soon as the three of them got in the room and clicked, the energy was delicious,” Gandy recalled. “We had to force ourselves to rehearse because the stories just started flowing.”
Champlin, Mayes and Wright were able to tamp down their giggles long enough to get serious about what it means to do a show centered around women their age. Mayes said she isn’t sure how much longer she’ll want to sign up for projects that require eight shows a week, so a one-off event like “The Crinolynns” “is even more precious” when it comes her way.
Champlin lamented how “the structure of musicals themselves have changed so much” since she started out in the theater world and said she feels bad for a younger generation of Broadway actors who are often in shows without any elder statesmen. For her, “The Crinolynns” serves as a necessary reminder that performers like her “have lived through many a thing and we have a lot to share.”
“So much of Broadway and theater is, for lack of a better word, young,” Wright added. “It’s just a young world. So I’m sort of excited for our audience who may be excited to see gals like us up there doing it – and doing it hopefully strongly and with just as much energy and spirit as ever.”
In Logsdon’s ideal world, “The Crinolynns” would “turn into a little cottage industry” that could be performed anywhere with only a few actors and minimal bells and whistles.
He thinks it has a chance to really resonate thanks to “women seeing themselves represented in the show” and urged Western Pennsylvanians to check out “three of the most talented Broadway actresses in the world” bringing “The Crinolynns” to life in Latrobe.
“You’re going to walk out humming a song,” Logsdon promised. “It’s funny, heartfelt and tickets are only a couple dollars more than what you would pay for a Coke and popcorn at the movies today. ... Come on, who wouldn’t want to see that?”
Joshua Axelrod: jaxelrod@post-gazette.com and Twitter @jaxelburgh.
First Published: September 28, 2023, 9:30 a.m.
Updated: September 28, 2023, 6:10 p.m.
