While I'm thinking about it

I rarely get so excited about a Madison theatrical production that I go around recommending it to everyone I meet, but Madison Repertory Theatre's Love is the Weirdest of All: The Music of Lou and Peter Berryman is, hands down, the best locally written show I've seen. It's superb, and it's playing at UW-Madison's Mitchell Theatre through Sept. 12.

Go see it.

At the co-op just now I just ran into two of the stars, Marie Barteau and Michael Herold, and I began gushing. They in turn thanked me for my Aug. 27 Isthmus review, which I'm pasting below. "And you're so young!" Barteau said.

***

Wisconsin wry
Quirky folkies the Berrymans get their own revue

There is a short list of musicians who can rightly be called Madison institutions. Lou and Peter Berryman are on that list, thanks to a three-decade career playing music that is, come to think of it, a lot like Madison itself: modest, charming and not a little quirky. He plays guitar, she accordion, and together they compose and sing droll songs about unlikely topics like refrigerators and automobile travel. (He writes the lyrics, and she writes the tunes.) The Berrymans' tunes are as distinctive as their idiosyncratic singing voices, and it's hard to imagine anyone else singing those songs; it's even hard to imagine wanting to hear anyone else sing those songs.

But that's precisely what happens in Madison Repertory Theatre's Love is the Weirdest of All: The Music of Lou and Peter Berryman (now playing at UW Mitchell Theatre), and the results are brilliant. A strong revue of 24 Berryman numbers, the show invites audiences to consider the Berrymans' songs as songs, and this repertoire holds up very well indeed. The four principals (Marie Barteau, Colleen Burns, Michael Herold and Jack Forbes Wilson) have strong show voices, and their solo and ensemble singing does particular justice to Lou Berryman's inventive melodies, as do music director Wilson's tasteful arrangements of strings and piano, played by an ensemble upstage.

It would be enjoyable enough simply to hear this quartet sing these songs, but a clever book knits the tunes together in a loose format: Wilson and Burns, who wrote the book, are husband and wife, and they have invited Wilson's sister (Barteau), and a friend (Herold) for an evening's entertainment at home. The attractive living-room set, designed by Vicki Davis, is the perfect backdrop for the Berrymans' songs, which often are about a sort of benign domestic paranoia, one perhaps induced by owning too many consumer products. But the players dispense with the unifying conceit as needed, so that songs can take place on a horse trail ("Double Yodel") or in a bizarre, junk-food-induced dream ("Down by the Boathouse").

Many of the songs are broadly comic, and Peter Berryman's wry observations and crisp internal rhymes keep the laughs coming. Burns, especially, brings the house down multiple times with hysterical numbers like "A Chat With Your Mother," in which a mom delivers a lecture about a vulgarity she particularly dislikes. But at moments the show turns unexpectedly wistful, as when Wilson smiles sadly and performs the bittersweet "Forget-Me-Not." Or maybe these moments aren't so unexpected: sometimes committed satirists like the Berrymans turn out also to be delightfully incorrigible sentimentalists.