That’s What She Said!
Los Angeles performers Amy Turner and Kathryn Lounsbery are such good company, and their original songs about lesbian life are so blithely inviting, that it’s easy to overlook how well-trod is the material that often informs them. That’s What She Said! marks their SF debuts, and is a fairly rare lesbian-specific offering from New Conservatory Theatre Center.
Over the course of 60 minutes, and in about 10 songs, Turner and Lounsbery sing about the ubiquity of fanny packs on lesbians, the need for upper-body strength in lesbian sex (I didn’t quite understand that truism), finding your soulmate on the Internet, and an affinity for U-Hauls. The songs are mostly chirpily tuneful, and the surprises they hold are not in their specific subjects but rather in the inventiveness that often infuse the lyrics, arrangements, and minimal movements.
One happy example comes in a song about mix tapes, a familiar topic based on a nearly antiquated technology, but that still amuses as the song’s narrator explains that she made the tape for her girlfriend to play in the car as she helps an ex-girlfriend to move. After this sung set-up, we get to hear the entire mix tape via brief snippets of well-known songs pointedly chosen to remind the on-the-road girlfriend of her lover back at home.
Ex-girlfriends are the subject of another song, as the narrator operates a kind of hotline for former partners in need of advice, be it romantic or technical, but the joke wears thin. The humor is better sustained in an operetta-tinged number about an Internet hookup, and while a rapped paean to U-Hauls treads on the trite, it is playfully constructed and performed.
Turner handles most of the singing, and her voice is strong and pleasing. Lounsbery provides vocal accompaniment from the keyboards, at which she is a master. Or mistress.
Bob Koherr has staged the show with few frills but a fast pace that is likely to keep you smiling even as you think you’ve heard it all someplace before.
That’s What She Said! will run at New Conservatory Theatre Center through Oct. 11. Tickets are $15-$25. Call 861-8972 or go to www.nctcsf.org.
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