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Forte Musical Theatre’s Buy Me a Drink, Joe is a love story about a man who learns to love himself.
The man in question is Joe Slabe, founder and artistic director of Forte Musical Theatre, who wrote the book, music and lyrics for this autobiographical musical. Slabe also plays the show’s narrator, his pianist, and the older version of the main character.
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As we learn in the show’s third song, Anything, Joe’s parents told him he could be anything he wanted, as long as he was a doctor, lawyer, teacher, or engineer. What Joe wanted to be was a composer of musicals, the art he fell in love with from an early age. They also told him that he must find the perfect girl to marry and start a family. Joe knew how to listen. As we learn in the song Play My Part, he did all the things people said he should, or at least did for the first 15 years of his adult life.
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It’s what happens six songs later on Face Your Dragons that makes Buy Me a Drink, Joe a deeply personal story of having the courage to finally, as poet Robert Frost said, take the road less traveled and make a difference.
Younger Joe is played by Stephen Ingram, who looks nothing like Older Joe, an inspired piece of casting that makes for a great joke. For most of the show, Ingram gives Joe a kind of wide-eyed innocence that really makes the central theme work. Joe isn’t sure if he’s straight or gay, and Ingram makes that dilemma seem so real and possible.
His courtship with his best friend Donna, played by a radiant Allison Lynch, shines with emotion, especially in the song Donna Plays the Violin. Joe loves music. Donna is a great musician. He loves listening to her play the violin, and he assumes that means he loves her, as he tells us in I’m Gonna Become a Man, a happy little tune that doesn’t completely hide the danger of this choice. Lynch is not only a dynamic singer, but he has the performance chops to showcase Donna’s questioning of the changes in her relationship, so Ingram and Lynch make the song Quittin’ Time achingly powerful.
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The fourth character in Joe’s story is David, Joe’s second best friend and also his writing partner. In what is a sly and confident performance, Jason Lemmon helps the audience see what Joe doesn’t. When Joe finally accepts his sexual orientation, it is David who introduces him to the gay scene in the show’s most moving number, I’ll Tap That, a clever tap number choreographed by Jocelyn Hoover Leiver.
Director Valerie Ann Pearson brings a respectful sincerity to her staging. She knows when to bring out the humor, but never at the expense of the characters’ emotional arcs. She creates paintings that say as much as the dialogues and songs.
For his part, sitting at the piano for most of the show, Slabe never loses focus, but his eyes tell you he’s feeling the joy and pain his characters are experiencing.
At the top of the show, Older Joe says that West Side Story is the perfect musical because the songs serve the story and the narrative. It’s what Slabe aspires to, and often achieves, in Buy Me a Drink, Joe. His musical is no different from Tick, Tick….Boom! by Jonathan Larson. which Forte produced two years ago. Just like in that musical, Buy Me a Drink, Joe demands three incredible triple threat artists, which is what Slabe has in Ingram, Lemmon and Lynch.
The play’s hilarious epilogue explains what Slabe means when he says that not everything in the show is 100 percent accurate, but that everything really happened.
Join Slabe and his talented team at cSPACE King Edward through May 5 and let them touch your heart and tickle your funny bone for 90 memorable minutes.
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