Quick Take
Local musician and writer Laura February Strange is taking her satirical musical "Karen With a K" from its home turf at the Corralitos Cultural Center to the Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz.
If you’ve just arrived from 2007, first, welcome to the future. A couple of things you should know: Yes, that “former president” title preceding the name of the spray-tanned guy on “The Apprentice” is legit … long story. And, the otherwise respectable name “Karen” has become a joke, even a slur, aimed at those — almost exclusively women — with the temerity to want to “speak to the manager.”
Not since perhaps “Katrina” has a previously anodyne proper name been so thoroughly rebranded for the worse. And now, the durable and often mean-spirited Karen meme reaches an intriguing new stage in its history. “Karen with a K” is the name of a satirical stage show, a “garage-band musical” as it calls itself, that takes the Karen conceit and really flies with it. It’s not a play, not a rock band, and not an improv sketch, but rather an unholy hybrid of the three. And weirder still, it has risen from the remote hamlet of Corralitos near Watsonville.
On Sunday, April 28, “Karen with a K,” the brainchild of musician Laura February Strange, arrives in Santa Cruz, to be staged at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center. It is the maiden voyage of the show outside its home turf of the tiny Corralitos Cultural Center which has served as its laboratory. Strange likens the show to the famously gonzo “Beach Blanket Babylon,” which alternately thrilled and annoyed San Francisco audience for decades.
Like “Babylon,” “Karen With a K” is a musical revue. Also like “Babylon,” said Strange, it might never be in a “finished” form, instead always open to topical jokes and tweaks.
“It’s very theatrical,” she said of the show she first conceived during the pandemic, “but at the same time, it’s not polished. It’s kind of slapdash and spontaneous, and there’s a lot of improv in it.”
The show is not so much a story as variations on a theme. Three separate performers play different Karens, all of them assertive, even aggressive, and all of them a little too certain of their own righteousness for their own good.
“Karen is pretty multifaceted,” said Strange, “aside from the fact that she’s a disagreeable character. I think all of us can be Karens. So I want to lampoon everybody out there.”
At the heart of the show is a four-piece rock band called the Strange Bedfellows in which Strange herself plays guitar and sings. Others include drummer Scott Kail, bassist Jojo Fox, and guitarist Jack Hanson. On top of that is a narrator, played by Orbrad Darbro, and the three Karens: Judy Appleby, Bonny June and Stephanie Madrigal.
The idea emerged shortly after the pandemic shutdown began to open up. Strange had been part of a small group of theatrical folks who would come together for weekly open-mic nights at the Corralitos Cultural Center. From that emerged a band called the Karens, then some songs that struck at the Karen meme. A concept took one step closer to something solid every week. And now is the time to get the show out of its small home theater and to a broader local audience that might not venture out to Corralitos otherwise. Even so, the coming-out Santa Cruz show, said Strange, will still stick to its anything-goes ethos.
“It’s a dynamic production,” she said. “We’ll be changing as we go. There has never been two performances that have been the same yet. A lot of people are exasperated with me for adding new things, but that’s the ‘Beach Blanket Babylon’ part of it.”
“Karen With a K” has a lot of over-the-top costumes, but a minimal stage design. It aspires to be a kind of provocative, self-consciously garish song cycle, a la “Hedwig & the Angry Inch” (for those of you fresh from 2007). But at its heart, said its creator, it’s sympathetic to a figure whom the meme-obsessed online world has delighted in savaging for several years now.
“It’s a pressurized culture that we live in,” said Strange, “and really, I am very forgiving of the whole idea of snapping and becoming a Karen. Though there are certainly Karens out there that I can’t apologize for at all, and I don’t want to. Also, I want to point out the political divisions within this country, which plays a part in all this. I present equal opportunities for leftist right-wing people to be Karens. So we lampoon everybody.”
“Karen With a K” plays the Kuumbwa Jazz Center on April 28. Showtime is 5 p.m.
Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.