Sometimes the only way to repair a parent-child rift is a long, literal (and metaphorical) drive. The Guilt Trip, the 2012 Barbra Streisand-Seth Rogen flick where a mother and son make up their differences by long-distance motoring, is one example. Another is the just-opening Miss You Like Hell, with book and lyrics by Quiara Alegría Hudes (Pulitzer Prize for Water by the Spoonful) and lyrics and music by Erin McKeown.
In this one, a mother and daughter take an incident-heavy journey from Philadelphia to the West Coast—stopping at various national parks—to ease their estrangement. Mom is Beatriz (Daphne Rubin-Vega) and daughter is Olivia (Gizel Jiménez). They were harshly separated four years earlier when, as Olivia sees it, Beatriz didn’t argue strongly enough to win custody of the young girl.
Now Beatriz shows up unexpectedly at Olivia’s Philly home to make up for lost time and lost love, dictating that she and Olivia can now overcome any animosity by crossing the states in her ramshackle vehicle. Resisting for only a minute or two, Olivia packs her bags and sets off with Mom.
Though plagued by setbacks—Beatriz gets in trouble with the law, there’s an accident in which the car is nearly totaled and a turtle is mortally wounded, deportation rears its ugly head—the two combatants see the error of their ways. Audience members, of course, knew they would from the outset, which is fair enough.
Their slow reconciliation is achieved in large part by singing the lively songs Hudes and McKeown have written –as well as some of the less irresistible ones—and Danny Mefford sometimes choreographs. Of the 16 or so ditties (with a few nice reprises), the outstanding ones are “Now I’m Here,” “Dance With Me,” and the title tune, a true audience-rouser. Cody Owen Stine conducts a strings-heavy band that underscores the score’s charm.
Perhaps most responsible for the tuner’s alluring effect is director Lear deBessonet, who keeps racking up one Public Theater winner after another. At first she scored with the company’s Public Works/Labor Day musicals (songwriter-actor Shaina Taub was a huge help). Since then artistic director Oskar Eustis, recognizing deBessonet’s value, has been giving her even more impressive assignments.
She’s placed Miss You Like Hell is the round—really in the square—with the audience sitting around three sides (the auditorium the larger side) of a playing area that set designer Riccardo Hernandez has arranged with a blue-green-yellow color scheme that Henri Matisse favored for his beloved “Jazz” series. But whereas Matisse sparked his images with yellow stars, Hernandez dispenses white doves on the upstage wall and on the capacious floor.
An eight-person contingent supports Rubin-Vega and Jiménez, unobtrusively playing many roles and serving as prop-changing facilitators. They’re Marinda Anderson, Danny Bolero, Andrew Cristi, Latoya Edwards, Shawna M. Hamic, Marcus Paul James, David Patrick Kelly, and Michael Mulheren. When they’re not involved in scenes—as for instance, Anderson often is—they perch on the upstage mixed-and-matched Matisse-green chairs.
But it’s Rubin-Vega and Jiménez doing the lion’s share of the work—or, since one reprised number is called ‘lioness,” they do the lioness’ share of the work. Rubin-Vega—whose wavy hair is brown at the crown and heavily red-tinted at the bottom (could this be termed radical ombre?)—is an angst-ridden, determined, hopeful firecracker. In other words, she’s doing what she always does best—and did best not to long ago in Hudes’ Daphne’s Dive. Jiménez is also a thinly veiled stick of combustible dynamite. Initially wound up in skepticism and mistrust, she eases believably.
There’s a larger context in which to view Miss You Like Hell. (Hudes does mean her title not simply to imply the “like Hell” phrase in its usual way but the domestic hellishness of the situation.) The musical arrives at a time when women’s problems are under a big magnifying glass.
Nowadays, there may be no more standard problem than the all-too-frequent mother-daughter alienation during the daughter’s adolescence. It’s often quite a spectacle to witness—and certainly worse to live through. Viewed in this manner, Miss You Like Hell could have the appeal for mothers and their adolescent daughters that Wicked has for parents and their pre-adolescent daughters. Not a bad commercial prospect.
Miss You Like Hell opened April 10, 2018, at the Public Theater and runs through May 13. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
