Review: Front Porch Theatricals' "WORKING" Blends Humor and Dignity

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Front Porch's season opener runs through May 24

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Front Porch seasons follow a predictable pattern: a lesser-known and rarely-produced show first in the season, often a revue or anthology format, and then a better-known and larger show later in the summer. Even with this framework in place, it's never easy to guess what their next shows will be. When they announced Working , directed by Daina Michelle Griffith , I assumed I was probably the only person in the room who had ever seen or performed in a live production. It's a deep cut among deep cuts, whose only major revival was in London, but it boasts a murderer's row of Broadway and non-Broadway songwriters. Craig Carnelia , Stephen Schwartz , Mary Rodgers , (new material by) Lin-Manuel Miranda , and then the reason the show has acquired such a cult reputation: additional music by James Taylor . With talent like Front Porch, and composers like that, who needs plot?

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What little plot there is is established in direct-to-the-audience exposition: in the 1970s, journalist Studs Terkel interviewed everyday Americans about their lives, their work, and how the two intertwined. He updated this a few times over the years in his doorstopper of a book, "Working," which was soon adapted into a musical. Like the book, the musical is a series of mostly unconnected scenes, songs and monologues about America at work, but though the original production took a New-York centric presentational style, the Front Porch Working is made somewhat site-specific, doing as much as it can to suggest that the city being portrayed is not NYC, but Pittsburgh. Local color abounds: the millworkers and steel men have Yinzer accents, the Uber Eats man is working at Primanti's instead of a generic fast food place, and so on.

Griffith, a Front Porch regular as performer and director alike, stages these scenes to move fluidly in and out and interact physically if not textually, creating something that feels much more like a book musical than the cabaret piece it seems designed to be. Six central performers (Cadee Valesquez, Melessie Clark , Vanessa Reseland , Matty Thornton, Dylan Pal and Stefan Lingenfelter) shift between roles with aplomb, creating wildly different physical and vocal characterizations of their diverse roles. Each has a time to shine, both in monologue and musical number. Matty Thornton bounces, with his big Zillennial working-man's beard, gets laughs as a rowdy, horny, pill-popping trucker, but his Yinzer steel worker, who is smarter than people give him credit for because of his accent and his job, catches you off guard right from the start. Cadee Velasquez wrings gentle, resigned pain from the show's best known song, James Taylor 's "Millworker," then later duets with Dylan Pal on Lin-Manuel Miranda 's "A Very Good Day," as two underpaid immigrant care-workers who send their money back to their families while caring for other people's families here. Pal has a natural aplomb for accents, which enables him to move with great fluidity through the show's designated "man of color" track in a natural way; trust me, in the hands of a less skilled dialect and accent performer, this track could be extremely cringeworthy. Pal's dry, droll wit (familiar to anyone who saw him as a jazz musician with OCD in Bandstand ) lends itself well to the role of an introspective call-center worker, but late in the show, Pal lets loose to chew some scenery in the role of a sociopathic Gen Z intern.

Yes, the show has a few bad guys, in monologues that seem less rooted in documentary and more in satire. Stefan Lingenfelter plays a few of these, including a wonderfully sleazy venture capitalist, but he also plays the show's most idealistic figure, a community organizer who fought Big Oil and actually won. In one of the show's biggest chameleonic shifts, Lingenfelter later plays a retiree in the early stages of dementia, who shuffles through his days and only comes alive when he retreats into fading memories, and must be cared for by Dylan Pal's previously mentioned care-worker. This tragicomic figure shares much DNA with the stay-at-home mom played by Melessie Clark , who loves her small life but wishes the world understood her choice not to be a career woman. Clark plays a number of other colorful characters, from an overworked and under-appreciated office manager to a cleaning woman in what may well be the same office building. She also shares the show's most famous book scene with Vanessa Reseland , Clark as a teenage hustler and sex worker and Reseland as a wealthy socialite. The two characters explain their lives to the audience in rapid juxtaposition, with Clark's matter-of-fact hustler clearly coming across as more virtuous and less self-deluded than Reseland's parasitic social climber.

Reseland excels at the more complex characters in the piece. In one moment, they play a frustrated school teacher who has been let down by the increasing class numbers and lack of resources at her public school. Audience sympathy is instantly on this teacher's side... but then she starts revealing a racist, anti-Hispanic sentiment at the heart of her grievances. She's still a victim of the system, yet our sympathy is instantly drawn into question. Later in the show, they play a waitress whose pride in her job and her skills borders on self-delusion; as the waitress dances around the room, bragging about her skill and the passion she holds for service, the ensemble play the restaurant's patrons, who are very clearly NOT being well-served by this self-proclaimed queen of waitresses. Reseland disappears physically and vocally into these characters, and when she goes full sketch-comedy with the waitress, her wide eyes and freewheeling physical comedy instantly call to mind Kate McKinnon 's character work.

Music director Douglas Levine and his quartet make the show's score sing, even stripped of the string section, tin whistles and funky disco horns of the original. Less is more sometimes, and the stripped-back presentational style lets the show's unvarnished honesty shine through. Working often feels contemporary, but more often it feels like a slightly varnished relic of a time that no longer exists: there's a fair amount of 1970s New Yorkism baked into the dialogue, as well as casual uses of Yinglish ("you oughtta see the nice aroma," for one) that plant many of these characters in a firmly pre-digital age. Then again, many of these characters work in jobs on the verge of disappearing, whether to AI, to technological upgrades, or simply as victims of the economic downturn. The world of work is changing, but for one night, we get to hear these stories without a screen, a screed or a talking head to intercede for us. Pray it's not the last time that Working , or even working, remains relevant in Pittsburgh.

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_Originally reported by [BroadwayWorld](https://www.broadwayworld.com/pittsburgh/article/Review-WORKING-Mixes-Humor-and-Dignity-at-Front-Porch-Theatricals-20260519)._