Review: 'folk wandering,' a wistful musical full of story and searching

“I am 13 and smarter than you,” she says firmly by way of introduction in Jaclyn Backhaus and Andrew Neisler’s new musical, “Folk Wandering.” And because Rosealia is both arrogant and charming, we tumble instantly into her world: 1911, the poor immigrant tenements of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, whose genuine horrors she is more than willing to embellish for the sake of a good story. Maybe her article needs a touch of leprosy, or a dead child on the lawn?

“We don’t even have a lawn, Rosie,” her sweet, awkward neighbor Harlan objects.

“I’m lifting our families out of the gutter with my journalism,” Rosealia (Lena Hudson) thunders.

This stomping self-righteousness and dreamy ambition are comic and somehow enchanting — not just to Harlan (Dan Tracy), who’s a little smitten with her, but to us, too. In a show that snakes like a vine through tales and time, telling three unrelated stories, hers is the most heart-catching and fully developed.

But “Folk Wandering,” which clocks in at just over 100 intermission-less minutes, is a very busy musical. Conceived by Backhaus and Neisler, who directs, it’s an experiment in collaboration that has, at final count, 10 credited composers, eight lyricists and one book writer: Backhaus, best known for her rollicking, gender-bent river ride through history, “Men on Boats.” Seven years of development have led up to this show’s premiere, presented by Pipeline Theater Company at A.R.T./New York Theaters.

With a cast of 11 and a five-person band, it’s a friendly musical, wistful and searching, and it has strings to make you swoon. But its sheer abundance of story and song, and its fast cuts from one narrative to another, can make it feel like a tasting menu of enticing small plates matched with lovely flights of wine — except that the chef keeps swapping out the dishes and grabbing the glasses away when you’ve only had a bite and a sip.

There’s nostalgia in the gorgeously played songs, full of yearning and exuberance and affection for eras we can hold at a safe distance now. Backhaus’ stories, vivid with the colors of human experience, are a vital defense against sentimentality. So are the actors, with not a weak link in the bunch, some of them doubling as musicians. (One, Nicole Weiss, also roller skates, amusingly.)

“Folk Wandering” is set partly in what Backhaus calls “an attic full of neglected treasure,” and this is what the audience sees at the start of the show: a room of sloping beams, jumbled with picturesque Americana. A group of players walks in and rummages, and from this the stories arise: the one about Rosealia out of a box of papers; another, about a pair of 1950s musicians at a romantic crossroads, from the empty jacket of an old LP; a third, about a woman and her daughter scrabbling to survive in the desert during the Great Depression, from a photograph by Dorothea Lange.

This narrative frame feels forced, though, teetering between earnestness and self-consciousness without solving the problem of uniting the three different plots. Whenever the show returns to it, the momentum stops dead.

“Folk Wandering” seems to want to be a collection of stories with fierce women at their centers, and it only partly succeeds. The most frolicsome of its tales is set in small-town Indiana in 1955, where a handsome young New Yorker (Adrian Blake Enscoe) shows up, his girlfriend, Hannah (Morgan Siobhan Green), in hot pursuit. When the locals mistake him for James Dean, he’s tempted to stay. The story is meant to critique a certain kind of guy — reckless, selfish, floating through life on good looks and charisma — but in its music and its staging, the show falls for both him and the retro fun of his era. Hannah plays sidekick to his star.

The slenderest story is set in the Utah desert, where a desperate widow (Kim Blanck) who’s turned to crime meets the vagabond writer Everett Ruess (Andrew R. Butler). But it’s Jordan Tyson’s turn as the widow’s 7-year-old, Alma, who makes it memorable. Poignant in her reluctance to hurt Everett, she is hilarious as his small, serious inquisitor.

Rosealia’s story is the richest, not least for the family that surrounds her, including her boisterous father (DeMone) and her soon-to-be brother-in-law, Joey, played by Seth Clayton in a tender, funny, heart-rending performance. These characters inhabit a minimusical so beautiful that we want to stop, sink in and stay awhile, but there’s no time for that inside this frame. Maybe Rosealia and her fellow Lower East Siders ought to break out.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.