‘Cold War Choir Practice’ Off Broadway Review: David Lynch Lives in This Wild Reagan-Era Comedy

Without putting any dwarves on stage, Knud Adams has picked up the torch of David Lynch like no other stage director before him. With the same deadpan creepiness lurking just under the wood-panel normalcy of life in America, Adams brings Ro Reddick’s exhilarating “Cold War Choir Practice” to perverse life at MCC Theater, where it opened Tuesday after last year’s world premiere at Summerfest.

What prevents “Choir Practice” from being a simple recycling of Lynch’s tricks is Reddick’s subject matter. If Lynch ever got political in his movies, I missed it. Reddick, on the other hand, is politically charged and takes on one of the political right’s sacred cows.

Deep into the second term of Ronald Reagan, an all-American Black family watches a ton of television, most of it featuring the honey-toned mellifluous voice of the country’s first Orange President. The teenager Meek (Alana Raquel Bowers) sings in one of those conservative vocal groups in high school that believes it can sing away nuclear threats from the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, her father, Smooch (Will Cobbs), and grandmother Puddin (Lizan Mitchell) try to keep alive a roller rink that used to be the epicenter of Black life in Syracuse, New York.

Theirs is a typical Black family except for the fact that Smooch’s brother, Clay (Andy Lucien), heads up national security in the Reagan White House, a job that has made his white wife, Virgie (Crystal Finn, being completely bonkers to great comic efffect), the victim of a cult that wants to learn the nation’s top secrets. 

That’s more than enough plot for one review, and suffice to say that I was totally and wonderfully in the dark with what takes place on stage for the first half hour of this 95-minute comedy. 

Most inspired are the veteran members of Meek’s choir (Grace McLean, Suzzy Roche, Nina Ross, Ellen Winter) who function as a Greek chorus to narrate “Choir Practice” with their singing while also having vague but very sinister connections to young communists overseas who also want to get at Clay’s secrets. 

Across the board, each actor in “Choir Practice” delivers a unique persona while being cut from the same crazy quilt. The legendary Lizan Mitchell has managed over the years to steal every show in which she appears. She’s no less memorable here, but has met her match with this inspired, wacko ensemble.

The Cinemascope-wide stage at MCC is not an easy space to fill. Fortunately, Afsoon Pajoufar’s scenic design uses that enormous width to replicate the oddest basement ever seen in a David Lynch movie.

Reddick’s story delivers so much dizzying suspense (after you’ve figured out what’s going on) that even a huge bomb explosion – Masha Tsimring’s lighting and Kathy Ruvuna’s sound effects make you jump — is something of a letdown. 

“Cold War Choir Practice” is presented by MCC, Clubbed Thumb and Page 73.

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