BITTERGIRLS GET DUMPED, ’60s SONGS SALVE THE DESPAIR
Friends turn to each other, and girl-group pop, to lament, move on
I love you, I’m just not in love with you. This is not about us, it’s about me. You’ll always be my best friend. Let’s not have a scene, OK?
Apparently, many women have heard these clichés or their equivalents from many men: the kind of mansplaining that accompanies a dumping. Bittergirl: The Musical lets us hear the wails of pain, despair and defiance from the dumpees, three gorgeous women whose men have unceremoniously left them.
Happily, those wails take the form of self-deprecating humour and great pop songs, mostly from ’60s girl groups. Filtered through the Supremes’ Where Did Our Love Go or the Shirelles’ Mama Said, the blues don’t hurt quite so bad.
Toronto actresses Annabel Fitzsimmons, Alison Lawrence and Mary Francis Moore wrote Bittergirl as a stage play about their own experiences of being left by a husband, partner and boyfriend. They then turned it into an advice book and finally a musical. Theirs may not be 21stcentury feminism — the lives of these women revolve almost entirely around their men — but in Valerie Easton’s energetic Arts Club production, bitterness has rarely felt better.
Lauren Bowler, Katrina Reynolds and Cailin Stadnyk play the nameless women, Diane Lines’ four-piece all-female onstage band provides the music, while Josh Epstein embodies all the smug, narcissistic, adorable men.
He’s the guy who just needs some space to find himself, to get the magic back. He’s got his dreams, right? (While she does the laundry, scrubs the bathroom, takes care of the kid.) Epstein is fabulous, nailing each of his men with perfect comic shorthand. And man, can he sing. When he belts out Love Hurts, you know why these women find it so hard to let him go.
And the women, oh my. Perfectly cast, accomplished singers and dancers, they make misery look fine. They get together at Franco’s, their favourite bar, to drown their sorrows in tequila and share a litany of maudlin maybes (maybe if I’d liked hockey, if I hadn’t talked so much, if I’d faked it), cut with a beautiful rendition of Anyone Who Had a Heart.
They go back and forth between bouts of girl power and girl pathos. In one marvellous sequence, with Carmen Alatorre’s clever costuming and Easton’s terrific choreography, they change their little black dresses for workout gear and absolutely rock the joint with a gym routine to I’m Gonna Make You Love Me and Hot Stuff. In a funny dominatrix fantasy the women handle the man to the strains of Be My Baby.
They also show us the faux sympathy they get from other women, and their own backbiting
and squabbles, especially when drunk (which they do spectacularly well). They lament their situation with the Supremes’ You Keep Me Hanging On, but they’re the ones who won’t let go.
Ultimately, though, “a bittergirl turns yesterday’s heartache into tomorrow’s one liner. It’s how we get through.” They end the show by embracing possibility — there are, after all, Too Many Fish in the Sea to lose heart over one rotten man. In an upbeat medley, highlighted by a superbly rendered Think, Aretha’s refrain of “Freedom!” rings through the house.
It may not be logically convincing, but it’s a lot better than feeling sorry for yourself. And you can dance to it.