Fresh Fruit

Jennifer Childs and James Sugg pit their wits against tacky vaudeville in Cherry Bomb.

by A.D. Amorosi

Michael T. Regan DON’T SHOOT THE MESSENGERS: All-stars Jennifer Childs and James Sugg bring the Cherry Sisters’ story to life, rotten tomatoes and all.

When 1812 Productions premièred an elaborate snippet of its upcoming Cherry Bomb at the Barrymore Awards presentation, you could've knocked me out with a feather. The story of Iowa's Cherry Sisters is an obscure showbiz saga I've long followed — and the chipper sort that 1812 loves to present during the holidays. But this is one lousy legend: For their first collaboration, director/writer Jennifer Childs and composer/noted Pig Iron-er James Sugg cherry-picked the worst act ever to grace vaudeville. Formed in the early 1890s, a family quartet of hammy, saccharine singers, dancers and actresses took to the stage with an act titled "Something Good, Something Sad." With all of the latter and none of the former, the sisters eventually drew producer impresario Oscar Hammerstein I to bring them to Broadway. But the Cherry Sisters couldn't save themselves from scores of rotten-tomato throwers and the wrath of critics. As they prepare to do the sisters' rise to infamy justice, Childs and Sugg ask us to bring it — the tomatoes, not the wrath.

City Paper: So how, where and when did you precious children actually meet, and what had you known about each other previously?

James Sugg: Oh, sweet Jesus. Jen? My first remembrances were in the production of Red Herring at the Arden.... That was where I first saw the immense amount of funny that Jen was capable of.She saw the immense amount of catastrophe I was capable of. That was my first professional sound-design job, and somehow on opening night, I managed to leave several of the playback decks unplugged. First clue of a problem: phones that were to deliver important information to characters just didn't ring.

Jennifer Childs: The first time I saw James was when he accepted his sound design Barrymore for a Pig Iron show. As his acceptance speech, he played something he'd recorded on an iPod or Walkman into the mic. I thought he was inventiveand probably a lot hipper than I was.I didn't meet him until we worked together at the Arden — and that solidified my first impression.He is inventive and much hipper than me.

CP: How has your opinion changed from those first impressions?

JS: Forgiveness is a beautiful thing.It has seemed to be an easy road of respect and admiration for us. I've worked as an actor, sound designer and musician for her company, and we have collaborated on many productions along the way.

JC: My respect for James has just grown. Each time [we work together] he brings something to the table that's completely unexpected. And absolutely right.He expands my idea of what is possible.

CP: Both of y'all have connectivity to particular groups — Jen, 1812; James, Pig Iron. How do each of you feel reaching into each other's comfort zone? Man, that doesn't sound right.

JS: Writing a musical vaudeville is pretty close to comfort for both of us, I'd say. Jen is used to writing quickly, listening to an audience and collaborating with a core group of actors.All of these traits are central to Pig Iron and the way that I work.For me, this process seemed quite familiar — ultimately, you are going into a closet and coming out with something that you put on and test in the harsh environs of a rehearsal room. At that point, if you're brave enough, you tell the truth and you do something to make it better.

JC: It's funny, I never thought about it as "reaching into each other's comfort zone" — it just feels right. It actually feels like familiar territory for both of us.

CP: Sugg, you're doing the music. Jen, you've got the book — but how did the seed of this grow? Whose idea was it and what made you want to involve the other?

JS: This is Jen's brainchild.I know that, as a student of vaudeville, the Cherries have been on Jen's mind for some time. Why she came to me, we may never know.

JC: It was my crazy idea.I've been sort of obsessed with the Cherry Sisters for the past 10 years. I first read about them when I was doing research for The Big Time — our year 2000 vaudeville show — and I've wanted to work their act into one of our shows for a long time.I just thought the idea of performing badly and getting the audience to throw things at us would be very funny and a unique form of audience participation. ... I thought about them more as reality television became more pervasive — why are we fascinated by watching people do bad work and humiliate themselves? American Idol ratings actually go down after the "audition" shows, which feature some of the worst and most embarrassing performers. What is that about? At any rate, when I decided to finally create a show about these girls, James was the first person I thought of. I'm not sure why — I just kind of said it in the 1812 office one day — I want to create a new musical about the Cherry Sisters and I want James Sugg to do the music.

HALF OFF DEPOT

Why live life at full price?

CP: Pre-vaudeville, vaudeville and beyond seems an ongoing concern of 1812 — working backward through time to find the funny now. Why?

JS: "There is no original music!" This was the first sentence uttered to me when I entered conservatory at Oberlin. Everything comes from something else. Comic timing, the straight man or woman, the clown, the idiot, the fool, the absurd — these things never change.Likewise, there are only 12 notes in a scale. You do the math.

JC: We learn a lot about who we are by looking at what we laugh at. So much of what they laughed at back then, we're still laughing at today.

CP: Jen, is there a difference in what and how you write for your 1812 veterans (Mary Martello, Maureen Torsney-Weir, Dave Jadico, Scott Greer) as opposed to its newbies (Megan Bellwoar, Mary McCool, Charlotte Ford)?

JC: For me, it helps to write with people in mind. So yes, it's easier to write for folks like Scott and Dave whose rhythms and abilities I'm really familiar with. But when I wrote Cherry Bomb, I didn't know who the full cast would be. ... The language and personalities were based on letters written by the actual Cherry Sisters. I created characters based on one or two lines they wrote that stood out to me — I wrote a monologue for each sister that sort of encapsulated who they were, and then, asI am much more of an improviser than a writer,I sort of played the characters myself as I wrote for them.

CP: So what is the musical and lyrical focus of the show? I know you're allowing them to be their "terrible" selves; are you staging the mock crucifixions they made famous? Are you portraying them as self-aware?

JS: First and foremost, the show is an entertainment — an evening of The Cherry Sisters, ain't it so terrifically awful. Therefore, most of the numbers do reflect vaud-style songs, patter, soft-shoe, up-tempo barker, styles that serve the comedy.How to see the inner lives of the Cherries, though, and their feelings on the act that they perform, is the play within the play. We all want to know why they kept on performing while being pelted with vegetables and booed from the stage. Did they really think they were good?Were they? Can't take your eyes off that train wreck, can you? I know you watch those William Hung videos over and over. The play and the music find bubbles within this vaudeville to reflect on this strange fascination with "Good! What is Good?" — [which is] the title of the Act I closer.

JC: The other major character in the show is Oscar Hammerstein I, who brought the girls to New York to perform at his opera house and made them famous nationally.The conceit of our production is that Hammerstein has brought the girls back for a limited engagement and is going to tell the story of their lives through a vaudeville show of his own devising.So, in the beginning, we see the girls very much through his eyes. As the show progresses, the girls — who never ever believed or admitted that they were bad — take issue with how he is presenting them and attempt to wrest control of the show from him.In the end, he allows them to perform their original act to prove to the audience how good they are.

CP: What was the worst bit of information you discovered?

JC: Their lives after their 15 minutes of fame were really distressing.After New York, two sisters went home while the other three continued their tour. There are letters back and forth where the girls talk about wanting to come home but not having enough money to make it there — they had to keep performing and keep being ridiculed so that they could earn money enough to go home. They often had to sneak out of hotels as they couldn't pay— it was grim. The circumstances of their deaths are all pretty depressing, as well.

CP: How do you portray that downfall?

JC: Most of it comes out in a spirit-conjuring scene where Hammerstein plays a gypsy who is bringing the spirits of the girls back to talk to us. They report the terrible things that happened to them and then sing a song warning other people about following in their footsteps — it's called "Stay on the Safe Side of the Lights" and is a cautionary tale against going onstage.

CP: Do you think it's tough for such talented actresses to be so bad?

JS: Yes. This is a super-tricky thing. An actor spends much of their time onstage and in a rehearsal room in an educational dialogue with the audience, learning from the responses they get back.If I wait one beat longer, they laugh.If I think about my mother, they cry.Actors base their work on their ongoing relationship to the audience. Inversely, I think the core of "bad" is the inability to make that judgment. These actresses and actors in Cherry Bomb are quite experienced.Finding a way to erase the knowledge of how to manipulate an audience is nearly impossible.Ultimately, the "bad" has to be played just like everything else.

JC: We've had a lot of conversations about this. What is bad performing? How are we bad without commenting on the fact that we're bad?We're still answering those questions.

CP: How about you two? Obviously you're both writing wonkily. How was that process? Or are you both playing it straight?

JS: We've been doing some experimenting with how to write bad.I find that the language of music is fairly set, and therefore breaking the rules is quite easy. We the listener know when a harmony sounds right and tight or a person's voice sounds warm and pleasurable. We also know when things are just a little out of tune or someone is singing higher than God intended, or simply the scansion of a stanza is not falling on the stressed syllable. This we actually found in the original Cherry lyrics, verses that were impossible to put neatly to music. 

JC: There are times when I'm consciously choosing smaller, simpler words for some of the characters, but I think we're being the straight men.

CP: So what's your favorite moment of Cherry Bomb?

JS: Mary Martello doing a soft-shoe number with a rubber chicken.Again, you do the math.

JC: It keeps changing.Every day one of the ladies will do something in rehearsal and think, wow, that's my favorite part.Today it was watching Charlotte Ford eat a bean in a tragic manner.

CP: So what's the point? Presenting the Cherry Sisters as avatars of lousy performing, or the audiences that accept that?

JS: Ultimately, for me, the point is that we are entertained by the oddest things, good and bad, horrific and corny, heartfelt and completely contrived.

JC: The piece has become less about the Cherries specifically and more about the relationship between performer and audience. Who gets to say what bad is? The person making the art or the person paying to see it?

(a_amorosi@citypaper.net)

Cherry Bomb: The Worst Act in Vaudeville for the Holidays, Thu., Dec. 11-Sun., Jan. 4, $17-$35, Plays & Players Theatre, 1714 Delancey St., 215-592-9560, 1812productions.org.