The four teens in ll:Girls:ll ll:Chance:ll ll:Music:ll (and no, I don’t know how to say the title out loud either) are participants in a summer music program in Berkeley, just as Davis herself was as a kid (click here to read more about the real program).
Here all the girls are gifted but as is customary with fictional quartets ranging from Dorothy and her three pals in “The Wizard of Oz” to Sarah Jessica Parker and her trio of besties in “Sex and the City,” each of these girls represents a different approach to music—and to life.
Fax is a classicist, literally: she’s training to be an opera singer and is determined to perform all the notes exactly as they’re written. Margot is a free-spirited drummer who loves to improvise and has an almost mystical relationship with music. Rile is an ambitious pianist and eager to do whatever it takes to succeed. Meanwhile, Clementine, the most musically ambidextrous of the group who plays a variety of instruments, just enjoys playing.
But because they are caught in that confusing middle ground between girlhood and full womanhood, each of them is also dealing with other issues that include eating disorders, sexual identity, suicidal ideation and in one case the search for a birth father.
Although we don’t see their parents, it's clear that they run the gamut from warm and supportive to careless and even remote, and that all are affecting how their children define themselves. As the play unfolds over an intermission-less 1 hour and 45 minutes, the girls come together in various constellations to help one another, to challenge one another, to undermine one another and ultimately to change one another.
Davis and her director Pam MacKinnon set themselves (and their casting director) a big challenge in finding four actors who could really play their instruments and convincingly play youngsters probably a decade younger than they actually are. And they somehow pulled it off.
The entire cast is fantastic—they particularly shine in an improvised jam session about halfway through the show—but I found myself unable to take my eyes off Hillary Fisher, who has the same kind of gawky charm and clarion voice that has endeared Sutton Foster to so many fans.
The creative team is pitch perfect too. Particularly the gorgeous lighting by Russell H. Champa and the all-important sound design by Fan Zhang.
Not everything works. The girls are dealing with so many issues that too many of them get short shrift and it can seem as though Davis, who is currently working with Lin-Manuel Miranda on the upcoming Warriors which is scheduled to debut next spring, forgot to delete unnecessary storylines as she revised drafts of the script.
Still, the central point remains that one of the hardest lessons we can learn when we're young is that there are many ways to define success. And as I’ve learned from my husband and his musician friends, the trick is finding your own rhythm and then marching—or even stumbling through—to the beat of your own drum.
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