Life-Giving Illusion

By Laurencel I. Barrett

MOTHER EARTH Music by TONI SHEARER Book and Lyrics by RON THRONSON

Here we are in the all too near future, when pollution is so thick that skywriters engrave their words with hammer and chisel. Population is so dense that the authorities sponsor a killathon, in which patriotic citizens dispatch themselves in diverse ways. The last California redwood has been replaced by a plastic memorial. Prize dogs compete not for ribbons, but for virgin asphalt on which to relieve themselves.

A bit collegiate, you might say. Add to this some medium-good rock music and the droning message that the young and clean must save the world from their dirty elders and you have the superficial non-appeal of Mother Earth.

What snatches Mother back from the brink of tedium is the talent and unpolluted enthusiasm--of its young ten-member cast. Kelly Garrett, all bangs and boots and big, big eyes, sings from somewhere deeper than the thorax. Each time her small frame produces that large voice it is a surprise, and after a while the listener understands that there is more than physical equipment and technique at work here. Garrett somehow has the illusion that in pleading the environment case, she is delivering word that is not only vital but fresh. Carol Kristy, another pixie with astonishing gusto, shares this illusion, which provides the revue with its life. She sings about the lost wonder of Xanadu, the time when man could think of no limit on his life but death, as if she had just flown in from there in time for the curtain.

That kind of zest allows Mother Earth to orbit well above its material; the audience is able to forget that the writing was done with an instrument rather more blunt than that skywriter's chisel. qedLaurence I.Barrett

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