We’re way into Act II when the proverbial ad men in their gray flannel suits seem to have soaked the lyrics of Five O’Clock World in testosterone.
“…Up every morning just to keep a job. I gotta fight my way through the hustling mob…”
How perfect that as they sing this famed song from the 60’s, they do a dance in their rolling swivel chairs, manspreading all through the song. Are they mansplaining too?
It’s one of many moments in A Sign of the Times when we are treated to famous 60’s anthems re-purposed and perhaps hijacked in service of the musical’s storyline.
In this story we follow Cindy (Chilena Kennedy), a girl from Ohio, leaving behind a conventional life to become a professional photographer in New York City, a place described early in the script as “ten years ahead of wherever you came from.” She encounters sexism, gets a short and tailored-for-Broadway ultra-lite course on racism, and fears her one-time boyfriend has been lost in the senseless Vietnam War.
We join Cindy on the decade’s trajectory, or at least its midway pivot from ’65 to ’66. The audience is thick with men and women of a certain age whom one imagines learned the show’s songs holding a transistor radio to their ears for Casey Kasem’s Top 40 Countdown. Indeed, when our lead character breaks out in You Don’t Own Me, there was at least one gray-hair feminist in the crowd crooning along.
A SIGN OF THE TIMES Bottles a Slice of 60’s Sounds
There are more than two dozen 60’s top hits in this show, all given a dramatic vignette scene in the script or letting the song serve as a reminder of the 60’s zeitgeist. The feminist revolution bubbling up to the surface is first defined by a small ensemble of power girl golden chords in The Boots are Made for Walking. We feel to our bones the PTSD of veterans about to return home when Justin Matthew Sargent playing Cindy’s Ohio boyfriend dramatically sings Eve of Destruction as he writes from Vietnam. We love Edward Staudenmayer’s portrayal of an Andy Warhol knock-off — one of many quick comic cameos he pulls off with panache — as a chance for the lyrics of The ‘In” Crowd to crawl back from memory banks to newfound life.
Powerhouse vocal talent abounds in this production. In Act II, when Crystal Lucas-Perry is unleashed to show the Gospel roots of soul we quickly develop a thirst for her to grab the mic again. Kennedy is so Petula Clark that we might forget that Clark hailed from Britain, and not Ohio. Sargent’s range is electrifying making his presence seem larger than the three songs of his role.
