On The DL

Have a Nice Life

by Mark Cofta

Runs March 8-23, $18-$20, Mum Puppettheatre, 115 Arch St., 267-909-3309, nicepeopletheatre.org

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You might suspect that Nice People Theatre Co., whose production of Have a Nice Life opens this Saturday at Mum Puppettheatre, is just choosing titles to fit its feel-good name. But the local company's first musical, which premièred at the 2006 New York Musical Theatre Festival (where composer Conor Mitchell won the Excellence in Musical Theatre Writing Award), looks like a winner: Co-written by Matthew Hurt, Have a Nice Life unfolds as a real-time psychotherapy session. Six colorfully mixed-up characters — a macho male, a mama's boy and four women who are, respectively, belligerent, obstinate, clingy and deceptively normal — unload their problems on a harried therapist with the sort of unrestrained, raw emotion that makes group therapy so volatile and freeing — all set to music! Nice People calls the songs "an amalgam of Stephen Sondheim and Kurt Weill."

Director Bill Felty, who founded Nice People with terrific young performers Nicole Blicher and Miriam White (their mission is to celebrate theater's collaborative nature and "play nice"), has been working with Hurt and Mitchell on revisions for the show's Philadelphia première. As they showed with their energetically kooky Fringe show, Killing Women, these Nice People aren't afraid to get naughty, so expect Have a Nice Life to live up to the title's sarcastic bite.