Failure, embarrassment come alive with natural comedic charm
“It’s meta! It’s meta!” Katherine Cullen exclaims in the opening number of Stupidhead!, her autobiographical musical starring herself as herself by herself.
She carries the heavy lifting of singing, dancing and storytelling throughout the 90-minute show as Britta Johnson, the co-writer and composer of original music, lends piano accompaniment, a supportive backup vocal or even an encouraging smile.
And Cullen needs it. With no formal training, even she admits singing and dancing is not her forte. So when she says her show is meta, she’s not only making a joke but defending her lack of technical skill before the audience gets too confused.
This is a show about failure, about being embarrassed, about embracing the things that make us imperfect. In Cullen’s case, it’s about how dyslexia has affected her life since childhood.
Cullen’s dyslexia, or rather dyscalculia, doesn’t affect her reading as much as her spatial reasoning and grasp of numbers. She gets lost easily, had to attend learning disability classrooms, and has trouble being organized and making plans. It might sound trivial at first, but Cullen’s natural storytelling ability demonstrates both the absurd humour and the tragedy in these circumstances: from fumbling her way through the Internet (in an angry ballad with a pleading chorus, “What Does That Mean?”) and the dating app Tinder (the upbeat song “Dobermans and Nutella” that will get stuck in your head), to the time she peed herself in kindergarten instead of risking getting lost on the way to the bathroom. There’s no catchy tune for that one.
Part of the success of Stupidhead! relies on Cullen’s ability to get the audience to understand why it’s worth an entire 90-minute show. And though her stories don’t always have a direct correlation to her dyslexia, at least in a way that’s laid out clearly to the audience, we at least buy Cullen, the person and performer.
Her singing and her dancing are so earnest, and her humour so self-deprecating, that it’s hard not to root for her. I mean, she starts the show by re-enacting the time she auditioned for her elementary school musical with Judas’s suicide scene from Jesus Christ Superstar and that’s tough to resist.
Cullen, Johnson and director Aaron Willis premiered Stupidhead! at the 2015 Summer Works Performance Festival, where it was an audience favourite due to Cullen’s natural comedic charm, Johnson’s energetic score and witty lyrics from both.
Now part of the Theatre Passe Muraille season, Stupidhead! has benefited from the extra development time (especially since, as we learn in the musical, Cullen has a tendency to do things last minute).
Johnson, a Dora Award-nominated composer and an up-and-coming voice in Canadian musical theatre, doesn’t create songs that will pander to Cullen’s amateur skills; instead, she pushes her to reach big belting notes, quiet and reflective tones and speedy tongue twisters. She also sneaks in musical Easter eggs according to the cultural references used in Cullen’s stories.
Cullen’s voice gets tired near the end of the show, but the fact she gets there at all is another testament to Johnson’s influence on Stupidhead! and to her collaboration with Cullen. If there’s a flub or a missed note, Johnson subtly guides Cullen back on the right path.
But a show about dyslexia can’t be a seamless experience. Aaron Willis’s dramaturgy and direction structures Cullen’s stories to mirror what we believe her own thought process is like. She starts stories, stops abruptly and returns to them a couple of numbers later. She spends a monologue talking about the Smartwater campaign of fellow dyslexic Jennifer Aniston, only to deliver an entire song about Aniston closer to the end of the show.
While this disjointed structure is amusing at first, as it goes on it’s harder to see where Cullen is going, and several false endings don’t help.
As a mirror for a dyslexic mind, it works. As a method of storytelling, it feels tedious and repetitive. Cullen has already gotten the point across that living with dyslexia isn’t fun and games — or a song and dance.