It’s an established fact of human development that most people who grow up to be cool, original people have been geeks for a while.
Case in point: The enchanting Gilles Sobre, best known for her 1995 hiti kissed a girl, and is currently starring in the adorably rebellious autobiographical musical F*ck7thGrade. As she says, her seventh grade was the year it all fell apart.When she didn’t get along with the other girls at her school in Colorado, they were embarrassed to tell her so. did not.
“They thought I was weird because I had Batman’s utility belt and a camera that turned into a 007 gun,” she says, adding that she must have been a darling. I was the only one who wanted to be,” he said with a confused look.
She also dreamed of becoming a rock star and longed for the girl she had secretly been in love with to reciprocate. Didn’t fit the template of spice, and everything great. The girls who were her friends rejected her. One of them threw homophobic slurs her way.
“She didn’t even know what that meant,” says Soble, now 61.
A show directed by Lisa Peterson — at wild project In the East Village — The promotional materials describe it as a “rock concert musical,” which is a bit of an awkward term, but it’s accurate. With Liza Birkenmeyer’s book, it’s truly a musical, with Soblé in the background, musicians Nini Camps, Kristen Ellis Henderson, and Julie Wolfe (who is also the music director) as various characters throughout the 90-minute show. supports a three-piece band playing .
Still, the performance on this small stage feels like a concert, complete with lights for a rock show by Oona Curley. Sobule’s three-piece band is named Secrets of the Vatican, made up of all the girls that only existed in your childhood imagination, and is now made up of all women.
On Rachel Houk’s set, where the wall of lockers is the main feature, Sobule tells and sings the slender tale of her life. It begins with the jubilant freedom of pre-adolescence and the unwavering ode to the bike that we cherished at the time. “Rollie Blue Chopper”
“When I was 12, I was a ferocious little rocker who wanted to be Jimi Hendrix. video For “I Kissed a Girl” filmed 27 years ago. “I never had to tell anyone what I was,” she adds. “I just was.”
But the wider world of the late 20th century wasn’t as welcoming to aspiring female musicians, much less lesbians, as it was in 7th grade. Sobule remembers her conversation about Tracy Chapman and her Melissa Etheridge overheard her own records on her label in the ’90s. She wasn’t, as they deduced from “I Kissed a Girl,” but she wasn’t going to give them a clue either.
“I wanted to tell them all, this is an old gay gay song,” she says. “But I didn’t. I was too scared. I wanted to do something smart. I wanted to be artistic and transcendent, but I wanted to sell records. I didn’t take any, and I couldn’t stand my singing.”
Shorter, sharper, and more theatrical than Ethridge’s current Off-Broadway show, My Window, Soble’s shows are much more intimate in scale, but each is a brief tribute to Godspell’s Day by Day. is sending Matched.
“Strawberry Gloss,” “Forbidden Thoughts of Youth,” “Sold My Soul,” and “Underdog Victorious” are among the songs Sobule sings from his catalog. Ultimately, so is “I Kissed a Girl.”
This is a show for Sobule fans and queer audiences, but also for the many geeks who have grown up to be cool people. It gives me flashbacks to middle school no matter how popular it was. It’s pretty much guaranteed. But it also gives you the cheering squad of Sobre and her very unimaginable rockout band.
F*ck 7th Grade
Until November 8th at the Wild Project in Manhattan. thewildproject.orgPerformance time: 1 hour 30 minutes.