‘Nomad Motel’ Continues at City Theatre; Front Porch Musicals has ‘A New Brain’ (Thurs., 5/24/18)

In City Theatre’s production of Carla Chings’s ‘Nomad Hotel,’ friends Alix (Katie Lynn Esswein) and Mason (Christopher Larkin) support one another during tough times. Photo: Kristi Jan Hoover.

1) Google “Nomad Motel” and you’re likely to get a bunch of entries for actual motels, including one reviewed by a visitor as “worst motel ever.” The fictional characters in the new play Nomad Motel, at City Theatre, often find themselves in similar surroundings. California-born playwright Carla Ching has focused the story on a family of so-called motel kids. They’re growing up in the bedbug underbelly of the Golden State, trying to live well as they drift with their mother from one cheap motel to the next. It seems that Mama is a rolling stone—and City Theatre is part of the play’s “rolling world premiere.” Nomad Motel opens simultaneously this month in Pittsburgh, Atlanta, and Kansas City. 8 p.m. Performances continue through June 3. Our production is at 1300 Bingham St., South Side.(MV)

2) Front Porch Theatricals fills an interesting niche in the Pittsburgh theater scene by performing cult musicals. They are ones that don’t win multiple Tony Awards but have earned a following, and are usually somehow unusual. So it is with A New Brain. Composer/writer William Finn is best known for The 25^th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Here, teaming with longtime collaborator James Lapine, Finn wrote a musical inspired by his own near-fatal experience with brain disease. The lead character in A New Brain undergoes the same ordeal, except accompanied by music and humor. He faces a decision whether to have the surgery that could save him or kill him—it’s a tossup—while also dealing with other concerns, such as his troubled gig writing songs for the children’s TV-show host Mr. Bungee, who performs in the guise of a giant frog. Thus, musical numbers in A New Brain range from “Craniotomy” to “Frogs Have So Much Spring” to “Poor, Unsuccessful and Fat.” The show premiered off-Broadway in 1998. 8 p.m. Continues through May 28. The Front Porchers present A New Brain at the New Hazlett Theater, 6 Allegheny Square East, North Side. (MV)

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