Coal Miners' Sons

Forget what you may have heard about new musical The Burnt Part Boys, a co-production between Playwrights Horizons and Vineyard Theatre: Having undergone a rocky preview period, during which it saw its running time slashed from over two hours to an intermission-less 100-minutes, the show is in fighting form.

A risky musical about the legacy of a coal mining disaster in West Virginia during the 1960s, The Burnt Part Boys is unlike anything in recent memory. When the local mining company announces the imminent reopening of a mine that collapsed years before and killed several miners, including his father, teenaged Pete (Al Calderon) sets out with dynamite to blow it up and save the site as a memorial, while his brother Jake (Charlie Brady) and Jake’s friend Chet (Andrew Durand) chase after him. This is not the stuff of musical comedy. But that’s what makes The Burnt Part Boys such a welcome breath of fresh air.

Eschewing glitz and glamour for a raw, Harlan County-esque grittiness (most of the cast spend the show with their faces covered in grime), Marianna Edler’s book is about grief as much as Pete’s infatuation with the heroics of the John Wayne film The Alamo, the heroes of which appear to him along his journey to lend encouragement. Joined by his friend Dusty (Noah Galvin) and a devastated girl named Frances (Molly Ranson), who fled town for the safety of the woods after her father died in the mine, too, Pete is forced to come to terms with loss.

Blessed with a bluegrass-tinged score from Nathan Tysen and Chris Miller, and a cast that can sing it, The Burnt Part Boys’ one flaw is that the songs—19 of them, in all—rarely propel the plot. Most of them establish character and motive with flair (especially the songs written for Davy Crockett, Sam Houston and Jim Bowie, all of whom are played with panache by Michael Park), but as they pile up, they begin to suffer from a sense of sameness. We have Dusty singing alone in the woods, lamenting his lack of courage; Frances singing about her gun as Dusty and Pete rifle through her lean-to; the entire cast singing about family as they finally approach the mine. The songs do distinguish themselves by featuring intricate harmonies, something that’s been sorely lacking in recent musicals, but one or two more songs moving the story forward would not have been remiss.

What the songs lack in uniqueness, director Joe Calarco makes up for in his staging. Using only a series of ladders and chairs from designer Brian Prather—not unlike Susan Stroman’s staging for The Vineyard’s Scottsboro Boys—he evokes collapsed bridges, barbed wire fences and obstacle-riddled roads. In a stunning moment of pure theater, the cast reassembles the set in total darkness, creating the caved-in mine in only a few moments of concentrated teamwork. With thrilling moments like that, The Burnt Part Boys turns out to be a welcome end-of-season gift.

The Burnt Part Boys

Through June 13, Playwrights Horizons, 416 W. 42nd St. (betw. 9th & 10th Aves), 212-279-4200; $70.