Beehive: The ’60s Musical
Mac-Haydn Theatre, Chatham
I bet I can guess your age by which current Mac-Haydn musical revue you like better.
By Andrew Andrews
The 1960s is widely regarded as a decade of change in America.
Perhaps nothing reflects that change as readily as the music, from early songs about teenage girls’ frustrations with boys, to later numbers about young women’s frustrations with equality and politics.
Mac-Haydn’s production of Beehive: The ’60s Musical chronicles that progression of pop music with excerpts from over two dozen hits by female artists and groups.
Tied into a loose narration by a character named Wanda and five of her friends, the cast performs numbers from The Name Game to Make Your Own Kind of Music, interspersed with anecdotes and reminders of events that were important to a young woman coming of age over the course of the decade.
Closing out the theatre’s season, Beehive runs concurrently with another musical revue, The World Goes ’Round, and it’s even possible to attend both productions on the same day, as I’ve just done!
Beehive may be a musical revue, but there’s a lot more to it than just the music.
Along with what seemed like a hundred costume changes, you’ll experience period dances, recordings, projections and, of course,
Having just been impressed by the matinee performance of The World Goes Round on the same set, I was a little let down by this one for a couple of reasons:
Firstly, whereas the earlier show’s sound was well-balanced and fully-functional, the volume of the band for this production frequently drowned out the vocals of the
Secondly, even when we could hear the singing, it was regularly shallow and a little flat. While some of the numbers were covered very well, others sounded more like a high school talent contest or open mic night. Compared to the performers in the earlier show, the lineup for this production seems a little more “junior varsity.”
The strength of Beehive is in its sense of nostalgia, and if you grew up during the 1960s, that might be all it takes for you to be completely satisfied by this production.
Perhaps because I was just a baby at the end of that decade, I would sooner indulge in the highlights from Kander and Ebb, which stretch from the sixties to the early 2000s.
Andrew Andrews attended Beehive: The ’60s Musical at Mac-Haydn Theatre in Chatham on Saturday, September 11, 2021 @ 7:00pm to write this review.
