Some theater experiences are dignified and serious, exploring the depths of human emotion with gravitas and solemnity. On the other hand, there’s “Young Greg Abbott: A FuQusical.”
“This ain’t a subtle show, just thought you should know,” sang the band leader, King Amy Blackard, at the beginning of “Young Greg Abbott,” a satirical show which saw its first two full performances on October 18 in Austin. “Please save your thoughts and prayers. It’s just Sondheim with swears.”
At this “FuQusical,” the audience was encouraged to sing along, shout, and curse at the cast—especially at the actor, Brently Heilbron, playing the youthful version of our now third-term governor. Heilbron also wrote the script and music. Many middle fingers flew during the performance I attended, among the packed crowd at the downtown State Theatre.
“It’s really fun to take a lot of anger and attach it to musical theater,” Heilbron told the Texas Observer backstage before the show. “This is how my protest comes out.”
Heilbron was first inspired to create the show after the 2021 passage of the state’s six-week abortion ban. “There’s no reason other than cruelty and demeaning women, controlling women. That was the kernel. I think I wrote a song about that because that’s just the way my brain works.” Over time, Heilbron added another 10 tunes. He said initial public readings of the show, in December and February, drew sold-out audiences.
Outside his current role, Heilbron is probably best known as the band leader of Fragile Rock, an emo puppet band. Along with Elle Mahoney, he’s half of Tin Pan Pally, a husband-and-wife team that produced the Abbott show and published the score, which is available on Bandcamp and Spotify. After the October performances, the team hopes to take the show on the road around the state and beyond—with the goal of knocking the governor’s political career down a peg.
“We really don’t want him to have a national profile, and, if he thinks of having one, we want to be in his ear as this very annoying little pesky punk show following him around,” Heilbron said.
The Fuqusical takes its audience back to a time when Democrats reigned in Texas. After the opening number, we meet Heilbron-as-Abbott dressed in boyish clothes, sitting atop his mother’s lap as she sends him on a hero’s journey from Houston to Austin, where he hopes to pass the bar exam and meet with the governor. Along the way, he encounters key figures from our recent political past, like ex-Governor Rick Perry or “1980s Wendy Davis” (whom he spars with while she waitresses at a Waffle House). Ann Richards, “the True Governor,” manifests as a massive, big-headed, big-haired puppet, treated like a deity.
References from the ribald to the obscure come at a rapid pace in “Young Greg Abbott.” Much laughter is generated by Perry’s infamous nickname: “Crotch,” when Abbott meets him at a gay cowboy bar. An actress briefly replaces Heilbron while Abbott wanders lost in the woods, in a sequence that takes the form of a classic theatrical “dream ballet,” a wordless pantomime narrated by the band leader. Later, when Abbott finally reaches Austin, much of the cast dances a jig together while holding giant Matthew McConaughey heads.
“There’s a lot of Rodgers and Hammerstein,” said Kelly Hasandras, the show’s choreographer. “We are ham-fisting, borrowing musical theater tropes.”
As Abbott travels toward his destiny, right-wing figures gravitate into his orbit, like Perry, Senator Ted Cruz, and even consultant Karl Rove, depicted as a toothsome, ravenous creature emerging from a picnic basket to hound Ann Richards out of office. The show’s puppets are vividly rendered in Jim Henson-like style, thanks to creator Chadwick Smith, who also appears in the show as a puppet train conductor.
Of course, one incident looms especially large in Abbott’s early life, the 1984 accident that left him paralyzed. In reality, an oak tree fell on him when he went jogging after a storm; in the show’s perhaps insensitive treatment, the tree has a story arc in its own right, chasing after Abbott in search of “treevenge” after Abbott mortally wounds the tree’s father in a racist graffiti incident. The show reaches its climax when the “Lil’ Tree” finally catches up to young Abbott.
Heilbron admitted that the musical’s tree plotline may be in poor taste, something he embraced: “It pushes my line of what is appropriate, right? And so if I’m offended, it’s usually a good sign.”
As the performance came to a close, and the cast sang the show’s blunt slogan—”Fuck You Greg Abbott”—a final time, the audience erupted into cheers, yet more middle fingers, and a standing ovation.
“Young Greg Abbott: A Fuqusical” doesn’t seek historical accuracy but instead aims to inspire the audience with an alternative vision for Texas. Many of the cast and crew members have deep roots here, like co-director Sonnet Blanton, a fifth-generation Texan descended from Moses and Stephen F. Austin. She told the Observer that younger residents may not remember a time when Texas wasn’t ruled by Republicans at almost every level of government.
“It’s kind of reminding everyone that we have power and we can change it,” Blanton said. “It doesn’t have to be like this.”
