The cast is led by 14-year-old Houstonian Mallory Bechtel, a vocal powerhouse who already has years of experience onstage. Bechtel plays Brooklyn, a girl all alone in the world with nothing to her name but the unfinished lullaby that her mother used to sing to her. She sets out to find the one person who can help her complete the song, her long-missing dad. After she lands in New York (her name is the only clue she has to find her father), the singing starts.
Brooklyn is a musical inside a musical: The show is set on a street corner at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge where a ragtag group of performers known as the City Weeds tell the Parisian girl’s story during a sidewalk performance. Brooklyn is also something of a fairy tale inside a fairy tale. The show’s creators, Barri McPherson and Mark Schoenfeld, had worked together on an album more than 25 years ago. The two lost touch until 2002, when McPherson, by then a mom and club singer, spotted Schoenfeld singing on a street corner in Brooklyn. She took him back to her home in Massachusetts, invited him to live with her family and the two started turning out songs about his life on the streets of New York. Those songs grew into Brooklyn: The Musical, which eventually made its way to Broadway.
There are just six performances of the Bayou City Theatrics production and you’ll want to see the talented Bechtel in BCT’s new and intimate theater downtown. We’re sure, she’ll eventually make her way to Broadway, too.
8 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Through July 19. The Kaleidoscope, 705 Main. For information, visit bayoucitytheatrics.com. $30.
Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Starts: July 10. Continues through July 19, 2014
