A bit lost on ‘ The Way West’
It isn’t billed as a musical, but Mona Mansour’s “The Way West” hits its best notes when it sings. A clash of Old West myths and modern financial reality, “West” has plenty of good moments between its fairly plentiful songs, in the Marin Theatre Company West Coast premiere that opened Tuesday. But it plays more like a light farce morphing into a cautionary parable than the dark comedy it seems to want to be.
In a dying Central Valley town, feisty old Mom ( a comically flinty, fervent Anne Darragh) holds fast to her notions of the pioneer virtues that won the West as she sinks further into debt and debilitating illness. Her daughters aren’t much help, beyond listening to her half- baked stories of wagontrain perseverance through calamities.
Michele, called Meesh ( an engaging Rosie Hallett), has been mooching off Mom in a big way through a succession of short- lived dead- end jobs. Amanda, called Manda ( a terrific Kathryn Zdan), taking time off from a high- pressure job in Chicago, is frustrated by lack of cooperation in sorting through Mom’s finances. And her own are in a more perilous state than she knows.
Mom’s entrepreneurial best friend, Tress — a fine, bubbly, starry- eyed turn by Stacy Ross — has helped her dig herself into this financial pit. Not that Darragh’s eternally optimistic, impulsively generous Mom would ever blame Meesh or Tress. She’s most fulfilled having listeners for her stories and singing nonsensically upbeat (“Hope, hope, hope, then you’ll be hopeful”) trios with her daughters to catchy tunes by Sam Misner and Megan Pearl Smith ( the duo Misner & Smith).
Hayley Finn stages the action with a light, comic hand, making smooth segues between its sitcom and vaudeville elements on a cleverly metaphoric set by Geoffrey M. Curley that looks like a living room inside the skeleton of a Conestoga wagon. But despite those efforts, the delightful songs and some scenes — including a wellplayed, truncated semi- romance between Zdan and Hugo E. Carbajal as a former boyfriend — add up to little more than padding to try to turn a good, meaty skit into a full play.