Storm Large has become an institution in Portland. A frequent guest star, with her band The Balls, at various bigwig events around the city has made this six-foot-tall blonde a bona-fide local celebrity.
Referring to her claim to semi-fame, some have said she is piggybacking off her slight rise of recognition with her appearance on the reality TV show Supernova. Some have said it’s just good business to market yourself by showcasing all of your talents. I have had my foot in both camps for some time. So, when I heard about Large’s one-woman musical show, Crazy Enough, detailing certain experiences throughout her life, I was a little hesitant to get in on the Stormy hype.
I shouldn’t have been. Playing at Portland Center Stage and directed by Chris Coleman, Crazy Enough is at times both a scatological and sincere portrait of an interesting woman full of energy and zest. Her enthusiasm is boundless.
The main plot point of her story revolves around the tense relationship between herself and her mother. A mentally-ill woman, Large’s mother has heavy handedly done a number on Large’s self-image, making her believe that not only did she inherit craziness, but that she is destined to go out in a “flame of glory” because of it.
And some of her life stories do have “crazy” aspects to them. However, apart from the psycho mom and experimenting with heroin, many of Storm’s anecdotes, involving being a loner during childhood, abortion, affairs and grief for a loved one’s premature death, are pretty ordinary and can be found in most everyone’s life.
The difference between her and us is how she coped with those experiences. Instead of trying to make friends in grade school, she opted to pretend to be a werewolf. Instead of grieving with friends and family over the loss of her mother, she went to rapid eye therapy, only to start hallucinating.
She explains all these life events with poise, humility, sarcasm and engaging musical numbers with her backup band. When she’s posing as a model for a dildo company and someone remarks, “Our dicks are just too small for you,” she accepts it and pens a song including the lyric “My vagina is eight miles wide.” In writing, it appears as if such a song would come across as ham-fisted, but it actually is fitting to the type of conversational tone in which Large tells her stories.
What is almost always a conundrum for musicals is the abrupt shift from prose to song. This is apparent in Crazy Enough. Most of the songs in the repertoire do add to the enjoyment and understanding of the preceding story, yet some don’t quite match to what Large was speaking of previously. A beautiful rendition of The Pixies’ “Where is My Mind” was wonderful on its own, but the connection was lost between song and story.
While at times the question of “Why should I care?” came into my mind, it didn’t take away from the entertainment value of the piece. And it is certainly entertaining. You will leave both happy for yourself and happy for Large accepting her so-called “craziness.” Whether or not you will actually become a bona-fide fan is another question.
Perhaps Storm Large will never go beyond celebrity status in the Northwest bubble. She seems to be OK with that. Like a quasar, a distance galaxy wrapped up in controversy and intrigue about the nature of its makeup and origin, Storm Large is one of the most luminous objects in our small sky.