Cowgirls on parade
Matt Pearson

Between The Fringe Festival and I Am Sheherezade, the theatre season in Waterloo is well underway. Laurier students should realize that the theatre community expands beyond the reach of our sprawling campus.

The Waterloo Stage Theatre, located at 24 King Street North, is currently showing a production of Cowgirls.

Cowgirls is a "city-mouse-meets country-mouse-who-shows-them-the-error-of-their-ways" story. The play revolves around the reopening of Hiram Country Music Hall, which has never allowed women performers.

The Hall has been taken over by Jo Carlson, daughter of the original owner, and she needs the first performing group to be a big hit or the bank is going to foreclose on her. It sounds like a country song already.

The group she has hired to perform turns out to be a trio of classical musicians rather than cowgirls. Pretty wacky, no?

The play teaches us that classical music and country music are virtually interchangeable, as the classical musicians become hard-core cowgirls.

The trouble was, I found myself wishing that it would work out the other way. The songs in the production are stereotypical country and western music, and left me hoping that all the country-folk would listen to the city-slickers, and decide to stop whining.

The performers were extremely talented, and their voices were a pleasure to listen to. It was simply a matter of the material they were performing not being able to live up to the ability of the singers. The actresses, Maria Riedstra, Jacquline Sadler and Jane Armitage, who played the classical musicians, are all highly-trained vocalists. It was a delight to hear them sing, but I would have preferred something other than "From Chopin to Country."

It makes one wonder what type of course the London Academy of the Performing Arts, in England, offers in order to teach actresses to perform the song, Don’t Call Me Trailer Trash.

The performances of the small cast went a long way towards making a dull script watchable. It demonstrates the quality of theatre in Waterloo to see the credits of the cast and company include performances at the Stratford Festival, The National Arts Centre, alongside Toronto Concert Singers, as well as many local theatre productions.

One problem with the script was that it lacked a real focus or theme. It wandered back and forth between the idea of country music as an expression of everything important in life to the more plausible issue of women’s empowerment. The story wanted to be more about cowgirls than women.

As one character relates, "These are cowgirls, ladies. They didn’t play by anyone’s rules but their own. They found out for themselves… blazed their own trail. That is where I come from. And I am here to tell you-ain’t nobody going to take that way from me! And they ain’t gonna take it away from you either!"

It’s a great message, but the script focused too much on the country aspect and not enough on the basic women’s rights issue.

The classical musicians seemed unable to express themselves until they put a twang in their voices.

Without a doubt, the most memorable part of the evening happened at intermission, when Strub’s Pickles, a sponsor of the show, told audience members that everyone was welcome to a free ‘Pickle on a Stick.’ This struck me as a bit strange, but what the hell.

It was disappointing, though, when my friend and I got to the front of the line, only to find they had run out of pickles and were trying to pass off pickled eggs on sticks instead. We said no. We had our dignity. When it comes to the bottom line, Cowgirls isn’t bad. The cast is talented, the Waterloo Stage Theatre is a beautiful setting, and the cuisine was pickled.