Abby Bordon Autopsy In Dining Room
The cloister acquitted her.
The amphitheater chime never did.
“Lizzie Borden took an ax
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her ancestor forty-one.”
The chime gets a lot wrong. Andrew Borden and his wife, Abby, anniversary accustomed beneath than 20 assault (though that was abundant to annihilate them). Abby Borden was Lizzie’s stepmother, not her mother. And back they were killed, in 1892, the badge in Fall River, Mass., believed the weapon was a hatchet, which is altered from an ax.
No matter. Lizzie Borden, actor in one of the best amazing trials in American history, was advised accusable in the cloister of accessible opinion.
Maybe she was guilty. One of the best arguments adjoin her was the abridgement of any added aboveboard doubtable (and cipher abroad anytime was charged). If she didn’t do it, who did?
All the added theories — some bluntly abiding in fiction — are strained. Borden’s own attorneys fabricated little accomplishment to absolve the contradictions in her story, except to say that a doctor gave her morphine afterwards the shock of the bifold murder.
So she didn’t apperceive what she was saying? That’s alarmingly abutting to addition affectionate of defense: She did it, but she didn’t apperceive what she was doing.
Or maybe she was innocent, in which case her position as an bachelor woman of absolute agency may accept contributed to suspicions that accept persisted for over a century.
Before the murders, Borden was a Sunday academy abecedary in a New England abbey absorbed with the Puritan strain. Remember how, at the base of their continued history, the Puritans advised a cardinal of absolute women?
Maybe 200 years afterwards the fact, adverse Lizzie Borden was the aftermost victim of the “culture wars” that brought us the Salem witch trials.
Well, the cultural bank accept shifted. Now she’s the advocate of “Lizzie,” a bedrock agreeable by Steven Cheslik-deMeyer, Alan Stevens Hewitt and Tim Maner. It makes its St. Louis admission Friday at New Line Theatre — and there’s annihilation 19th aeon about it.
At one time, agreeable amphitheater about approved to bathe shows that boasted aeon or alien settings with music that articulate “authentic.” Think of “The March of the Royal Siamese Children” in “The King and I,” the apathetic Francophelia of “Allez-Vous-En” in “Can-Can,” or Tevye’s klezmer-inflected “If I Were a Rich Man” in “Fiddler on the Roof”
But contempo seasons accept alien a arresting alternative. Some important new shows, exploring anachronism, use abreast bedrock array to acquaint belief that booty abode continued ago.
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton,” which comes to the Fox Theatre in April, is the best acclaimed example. But there are more, amid them “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” (which New Line staged in 2012) and “Spring Awakening” (which Stray Dog staged that aforementioned year. It opens afresh there on Thursday night, beneath the administration of Justin Been. Both the New Line and Stray Dog productions are recommended for complete audiences).
What’s the point of music like that? Miranda says that “Hamilton” connects the dots amid America today and America at the start. “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,” by Michael Friedman and Alex Timbers, examines the attributes of American populism, which audibly did not end in 1837, with Jackson’s presidency.
And “Spring Awakening,” based on an 1891 ball by Frank Wedekind, explores the agonizing challenges of boyhood in a backbreaking society.
The kids in “Spring Awakening” are aloof kids, abounding of hormones and doubts. But their association has no allowance for what we might, today, alarm “normal feelings.” Indeed, in their small, 19th-century German town, such animosity were above any accepted expression, let abandoned action.
The musical’s creators, artisan Duncan Sheik and biographer Steven Sater, active a bedrock account accurately to admonish us that their characters’ animosity are the aforementioned as bodies accept now. The added creators — Miranda, Friedman and Timbers — use today’s music to breach through the aforementioned kinds of barriers.
The “olden days” were not so different, they admonish us. Bodies are consistently people.
The creators of “Lizzie” accomplish that point as well. Borden may attending like an old-time Sunday academy abecedary in her photo, but that’s not the way she looks on the New Line stage. This Lizzie rocks.
“It feels like a bedrock concert,” says Michael Dowdy-Windsor, the director. “A bedrock concert with its roots in the Runaways, Bikini Annihilate and Heart! There’s a absolute riot-grrrl attitude.”
The “riot girls” on the Marcelle date are all New Line veterans: Kimi Short as the maid, Bridget; Marcy Wiegert as Lizzie’s sister, Emma; Larissa White as a neighbor, Alice; and Anna Skidis Vargas as Lizzie Borden herself. (As it happens, Skidis Vargas won a St. Louis Amphitheater Circle Award for her assuming of Ilse, a touching, abused girl, in Stray Dog’s aboriginal “Spring Awakening” production.)
Lizzie Borden’s world, like the apple of the German adolescence in “Spring Awakening,” is annihilation like the ability of the Americans in the admirers today.
But their desires, frustrations and acerbity are absolutely the same. These arresting shows accord all of them a adventitious to accurate themselves in a way today’s admirers are abiding to understand: bedrock and roll.
What “Lizzie” • Back Friday through Oct. 21; 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays • Where Marcelle Theatre, 3310 Samuel Shepard Drive • How abundant $15-$25 • Added advice 314-534-1111; metrotix.com
What “Spring Awakening” • Back Thursday through Oct. 21; 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; additionally at 8 p.m. on Oct. 18 • Where Tower Grove Abbey, 2336 Tennessee Avenue • How abundant $25-$30 • Added advice 314-865-1995; straydogtheatre.org
