Regional

Must Don't Whip 'Um

 (Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; 240 seats; $20 top)

By QUINTON SKINNER

'Must Don't Whip 'Um'

An Arts at St. Ann's and Accinosco Prods. presentation of a musical in one act with music and text by Cynthia Hopkins. Choreography, Hopkins with Diane Madden, Annie B. Parson and Jordana Che Toback.
 
With: Jim Findlay, Cynthia Hopkins, Susan Oetgen, Jeff Sugg and Gloria Deluxe (Ben Holmes, Kristen Mueller, Reut Regev, Josh Stark, Philippa Thompson, Karen Waltuch).
Video performers: Steve Ciuffo, Aleta Claire Findlay, Cynthia Hopkins, Jony Perez, Scott Shepherd and Gary Wilmes, James Sugg.

 

What we call ourselves can arguably be defined as the story we choose to tell from the raw unsorted data of memory, a slippery notion that Cynthia Hopkins first explored in her 2005 performance "Accidental Nostalgia." "Must Don't Whip 'Um" is a prequel of sorts to that earlier piece, and it's a work that combines Hopkins' songs, her band Gloria Deluxe, video, monologues and dance into a largely winning meditation on sanity, memory and, in moments that approach the sublime, the veracity of reality itself. Following its premiere run at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the show will play St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn Jan. 17-Feb. 4.

Ostensibly the show is a farewell concert by a '70s pop star (Hopkins), in thrall to paranoia that she's under CIA surveillance because of her recent immersion in Islam.

Through voiceovers, Hopkins also plays the singer's daughter as she films a documentary about her mother's subsequent disappearance to a Sufi brotherhood in North Africa.

We're whiplashed back and forth between the concert and the documentary, with Hopkins performing songs in between voice-and-video segments in which the singer's daughter tries to make sense of her own past.

It's a fairly delicate construct, one that could easily crash into incoherence, yet the day is saved by technical accomplishment and Hopkins' understated charisma.

Jim Findlay and Jeff Sugg share the stage as incidental characters as well as supplying the design, and their technical legerdemain jibes nicely with the hall-of-mirrors concepts at play: Characters talk through open doors to projections, then turn to their real-life counterparts, and the mind fairly spins.

Hopkins, for her part, is a knowing and intelligent presence as the doomed singer, and she supplies enough uninhibited boogie with dancer Susan Oetgen to make the case for why an audience would gather for the pop star's show in the first place.

The music is, of course, the spine of the proceedings, and by and large it is excellent. A good deal of ink has been devoted to trying to describe the style of Hopkins' compositions, and one is typically left offering obvious influences: soul, cabaret, country, Tom Waits' eclectic clatter.

Gloria Deluxe is sharp and raw in equal measure, at one point lifting the riff from the Velvet Underground's "Rock and Roll" for an instrumental sequence, later throwing in a phrase from Blondie's "Call Me" as a nod and a wink from the horn section.

None of this would work without Hopkins' voice, which is the primary weapon at play. Hopkins is gifted with an instrument of uncanny tone, almost angelic, and her phrasing at times clips her lyrics with acidic tinges that bring to mind Billie Holiday's combination of aching passion and brains.

It also doesn't hurt that she sings of loss, love and the daily search for redemption writ small and large in the texture of things.

This show ends with our pop star already gone and Hopkins performing a final number reflected spectrally in the mirror perched on her piano. It's a haunting image and number, leaving us appropriately spooked as we step back into the uncertainty of our own stories and memories.

No director is credited.

Sets, Peter Warren; design, Jim Findlay and Jeff Sugg; costumes, Tara Webb; lighting, Jason Boyd; sound, Jim Dawson; production coordination, Aiyana D'Arcangelo. Opened, reviewed Jan. 4, 2007. Running time: 1 HOUR, 35 MIN.
 

Musical numbers: "Back in Time," "Blow It, Mister," "Open Door," "Lazarus," "Horses to the Mountains," "Come On," "Love Is the Answer," "Birdsong for the Birds," "The Teaches of the Leeches," "All the Pretty Crosses."