At a rehearsal of Pride & Prejudice – The Musical in Ross are, from left, songwriter Rita Abrams and actors Carrie Fisher-Coppola, Landers Markwick and Pennell Chapin. (Photo by Jack Prendergast)

Rita Abrams can be a mega-inspiration — for older folks who think their creative lives may be over or for those whose 15 minutes of fame dissipated many years ago.

Abrams, at 79, is deep in rehearsal with the Ross Valley Players for “Pride & Prejudice – The Musical,” for which she created music and super-sweet lyrics. The ex-hippie says it’s going well, particularly due to director Phoebe Moyer’s ability to draw extra humor from the show’s pun- and alliterative-laden tunes by suggesting actors change the tiniest gesture or turn of the head.

From left, Heren Patel, Justin Hernandez and Rita Abrams work on a song from Pride & Prejudice – The Musical.  (Photo by Heather Shepardson) 

The musical opens March 17 at The Barn in Ross and runs through April 16.

It’s a short geographic distance but a far cry from 1970, when the songwriter’s “Mill Valley” became a pop chartbuster while she was in her mid-20s and a teacher in that city. Abrams and her third-grade class at the Strawberry Point School sang her tune on a Warner Bros./Reprise vinyl.

“It was a sudden thing, overnight, they put a rush-release on it, and we were getting calls from all over the world,” she recalls in a recent phone interview. “At first the fame was very exciting, but then I got off-balance. It felt strange to me — the song was my whole life, and it was dizzying. It was hard to handle. If it were now, in the age of social media, I’m guessing I might have been mercilessly ridiculed.”

Rita Abrams (at keyboard) and third graders sing “Mill Valley.” (Photo by Annie Leibovitz, with permission by Rita Abrams) 

After Abrams and her small charges generated a follow-up album, the hit song catapulted her into a lifelong music career. She worked on kids’ records and films, pop and novelty songs, commercials, greeting cards, books and musical theater productions such as the well-received “For Whom the Bridge Tolls” and “Aftershocks.”

She has written songs for “Sesame Street,” collaborated with Elmo (Shropshire), who performed the holiday song “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer,” and worked with John Gray to mount a show based on his best-seller, “Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.” London in 2012, presented by the Ruislip Operatic Society.

“We had nothing to do with the production, and we were barred from it,” she remembers. “They didn’t want the writers anywhere near it because they were afraid that we might change what they wanted. Later, when I watched a video of it, I saw so many things I’d have changed.”

Still, she says, “Emotionally, I really like to sit back and let other people do it. For me, the joy is in the writing.”

San Francisco’s IAM Theatre, now inactive, produced another version, and there was a high school incarnation in Peoria, Illinois, last year. A company in Hong Kong is working on doing a production sometime this year, possibly in the fall.

Brown’s passion for the tale jumpstarted the project, and she convinced Abrams to do the music. Brown isn’t on site for the Ross Valley Players’ rendition, “but she’s accessible by phone or computer” if needed, Abrams says.

“Pride & Prejudice,” of course, is the story of the emotionally repressed 19th century English family, the Bennets. Mother wants to marry off her five daughters and father just wants to be left alone. Enter the iconic love interest Mr. Darcy, and we’re off to the chapel (ultimately).

Ex-Strawberry Point School third graders gathered outside Throckmorton
Theatre on the 45th anniversary of the song “Mill Valley” include, from left, Marisa Tomasi, Kathleen Trudell, Jaina Delmas, Greg Berman, Kelly Martin, Caroline Van Buuren, Cindi Koehn, Scott Garbutt, and Scott Victor. (Photo by Rita Abrams)

Abrams’ favorite song in the show is “‘What Is a Man to Do?” which she calls “a parody that says everything’s a woman’s fault. I like that it has a lot of catchy rhymes and it’s like a tango.”

Currently in a relationship with bandleader-bass player Jack Prendergast, Abrams long ago was married for eight years to a documentarian, and has a daughter, Mia, who was an actor for film and TV in Hollywood but now, at 41, is shifting into a food industry setting.

A few years back, Abrams had to leave the town she helped make famous because she could no longer afford to stay. She says she has no regrets about it: “I love living in a lovely, affordable mobile home park in Novato. And I’m still an honorary citizen of Mill Valley.”

As for what’s next in her future, she says, “I’ve come to the age where the reality is, unless you don’t care if anyone likes it or not, the average time of getting a show from stage to page is seven years, and that’s too hard to deal with. Instead, I want to nurture the shows I’ve already written.”

Marin Theatre Company’s Justice portrays first three female judges of U.S. Supreme Court (from left), Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Maria Sotomayor, and Sandra Day O’Connor. Photo by Kevin Berne.

The three Justice singers portraying top-court judges can’t compare to The Supremes, but they’re powerful anyway — if you believe the message can be the massage.

That message, of course, translates into a feminist anthem for equality, with undertones of kumbaya and patriotism.

Justice: A New Musical, which runs at the Marin Theatre Company through March 12, dips into the public and private lives of the first three female U.S. Supreme Court jurists, Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Sonia Maria Sotomayor.

The three sing and talk of being “an unlikely sisterhood,” but also of crossing the aisle politically. Emphasized, as might be expected, is sexism — on the court as well as in the country — and the notion of “we the people,” which is stressed in both opening and closing numbers.

Outstanding is Lynda DiVito, a Walnut Creek resident with off-Broadway credits who depicts RBG in a voice that reverberates throughout the theater, with facial expressions that instantly convey the feelings her words may or may not say.

Karen Murphy, a veteran of multiple Broadway, off-Broadway and touring company shows, plays O’Connor, the trailblazing first female associate justice, and displays her well-earned pride helping repeal Arizona laws that violated the Equal Rights Amendment.

Stephanie Prentice, who outlines Sotomayor, the first Latina justice, is a Bay Area native who’s appeared withy 42nd Street Moon, San Francisco Playhouse, Shotgun Players, and Hillbarn. In character, she’s particularly poignant when delineating the Puerto Rican’s difficult childhood: a father who drank oo much and agued too much with her mom.

Justice contains 17 musical numbers, mostly trios and duets. It’s basically a sung-through, operetta-like presentation. Its one truly melodic song is “Notorious,” an upbeat, humorous entry performed perfectly by DiVito.

When the three together sing the music by Bree Lowdermilk and lyrics by Kait Kerrigan, they’re tight, clearly well-rehearsed. Direction by Ashley Rodbro is likewise tight.

Karen Murphy (left) plays Sandra Day O’Connor while Lynda DiVito depicts RBG. Photo by Kevin Berne.

What’s absent throughout, however, is tension, except when the musical’s book showcases Episcopalian and staunch Republican O’Connor’s deciding vote in the December 2000 Bush v. Gore was that tilted the presidential election, a choice that caused Jewish leftist Ginsburg pronounced anguish. Here O’Conn cops to wanting a Republican president to replace her; in rebuttal, RBG claims the decision means or entire system will suffer a loss in “confidence in the rule of law.”

The book, not incidentally, is by super-prolific Lauren M. Gunderson, the Marin Theatre Company’s longtime artist-in-residence and a playwright with a rep for pushing a feminist agenda. Justice is the fifth play of hers the MTC has mounted.

Most touching moments in it are when Ginsburg and O’Connor deal with their husbands’ dementia — and then when O’Connor, now still alive at 92, must cope with her own. In “When the Mind Goes,” she sings sadly, “You’re inside a china shop and time is a bull.”

Humor is sporadic, but playful. The RBG character draws chuckles, for instance, when she invites Sotomayor to join her twice-weekly gym workouts at 7 a.m. Sotomayor simply scowls at the notion.

Personal moments, for the most part, connect better with the audience than the recitation of key court cases — such as when Justice spotlights RBG andO’Connor’s cancers.

One of the biggest positive outbursts from the crowd comes, however, when, near the end, confirmation of Black female Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is cited.

References to male justices, meanwhile, are skimpy, including that RBG has been “best buddies” with her philosophical antithesis, Antonin Scalia. Merrick Garland’s blocked nomination is referred to only obliquely, namelessly, and there are no hints whatsoever that Amy Coney Barrett or Elena Kagan even exist.

Justice’s two-story-high set is wonderfully creative. Minimalist. Still, it can turn from a bathroom sink (where RBG and O’Connell are humanized as they wash their hands next to each other), into a desk, into a place where justices are confirmed, to another where they render decisions. The backdrop features massive columns and a high space where the names of major legal cases are projected.

Regarding recent cases, Sotomayor laments about being in the minority, about court life being filled with “rejections and rollbacks.”

Every day is disheartening, she bemoans, “when you’re on the losing side.” But the tone decidedly changes when the court affirms gay marriage.

Even though the regional Arizona Theatre Company premiered an earlier incarnation of Justice in 2022, this 90-minute, intermission-less show is still a bit choppy, bouncing from this or that subject and timeframe, and from the legal to the personal and back again.

But it definitely affirms the history of three feminist icons — and underscores the refrain, “When will there be enough women on the court? When there are nine!”

Justice runs at the Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller Ave., Mill Valley, through March 12. Tickets: $25 to $65. Info: 415-388-5200 or info@marintheatre.org.

Woody Weingarten, a longtime member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle, can be contacted by email at voodee@sbcglobal.net or on his websites, https://woodyweingarten.com and https://vitality press.com.

The North American touring company of Six, now playing at the Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco. Photo by Joan Marcus.

Six wives? Holy history, that’s three more than my total.

I didn’t behead any, of course.

Six the Musical tackles that number (of Henry VIII wives) and turns the 500-year-old sorry saga into extraordinary entertainment — replete with fantastic vocal cords and rock chords, fantastic layered metallic costumes, and a fantastic light show.

Henry, we’re told, cut off two of his Tudor queens’ heads and divorced two others. One died of natural causes. One survived.

Despite that bleak-scape, Six the Musical is pure escapism, feminist-style (since its point of view flips from the king to the women). And it gives attendees at the Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco a chance to steer clear of the reality of their own lives while it distorts the reality of what the show labels “her-tory.”

Like Hamilton, this is revisionist stuff. Big Time.

Yesterday’s opening night audience couldn’t care less, however, about evaluations, academic references, or the possibility that the presentation is in a sense a #metoo-ish reaction to Henry’s abuses. The crowd was too busy screaming with glee and clapping wildly after each of the nine tunes — leaping, in fact, to a standing “o” for the finale and the “encore” that followed it with scads of glitter falling from the rafters.

Didi Romero (center) plays Katherine Howard in Six. Photo by Joan Marcus.

It’s clear that the glitzy sextet morphs from being villainous or invisible — and supporting players in royal history — to being 21st Century females who can attain distaff empowerment. Accompanied by lots of clever sexual innuendos and mentions of being “un-friended” and TikTok and other digital entities.

Featured characters are Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anna of Cleves, Katherine Howard, and Catherine Parr. Each gets to hog the spotlight for a soliloquy in song. Each is modeled on modern pop artists that in a sense reflect her personal story (Rihanna, Beyonce, and Alicia Keys, for example).

The gimmick is that they’re competing — even to the point of nasty cat-fighting — to be lead singer of their girl band, ultimately a sisterhood of sassy, joking divas. The supposed test? Who had the worst time being Henry’s wife?

The theme of the plotless, intermission-less, concert-style, 80-minute, touring BroadwaySF presentation is “divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived,” a couplet based on a sing-song melody long favored by British kids.

Lyrics more than once lean on forced rhymes, as when Anna of Cleves contends, “You said that I tricked ya/’Cause I, I didn’t look like my profile pictcha.”

And laugh-lines in Six the Musical aren’t subtle. Consider this interchange: Jane Seymour asks what hurts more than a broken heart? Anne Boleyn responds, “A severed head.” Still, the show shows that beheadings can be funny or entertaining — especially when they’re merely conversational and not as lurid and in-your-face as scenes in Sweeney Todd or Little Shop of Horrors.

On occasion, the subject matter here is cringeworthy. Such as Katherine Howard explaining her molestation at age 13 and desire to be loved — including her attraction to Henry when she was 16 and he was 49, a geezer in those days.

Olivia Donalson (center) portrays Anna of Cleves in Six. Photo by Joan Marcus.

All that considered, the musical is much better than one might expect since it evolved from a concept-album concocted by two Cambridge University seniors, Lucy Moss and Toby Marlow, both triple-threats as playwrights, composers, and lyricists.

Feminists should love that the four musicians on stage behind the six — the “ladies in waiting” — are all women. They’ll probably love as well that Catherine Parr details in “I Don’t Need Your Love” that she managed to fight for female education and wrote books without the king.

The musical, which won 23 awards during the 2021-22 Broadway season, including a Tony Award for best original score (music and lyrics), can’t be taken too seriously. But seriously, you should head down to the theatre — although I strongly urge you check out the lyrics online before going so that they won’t miss a lot of the wordplay that zips by.

Six the Musical will play at the Orpheum Theatre, 1182 Market St., San Francisco, through March 19. Tickets start at $56. Info: 888-746-1799 or tickets@broadwaysf.com.

Woody Weingarten, a longtime member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle, can be contacted by email at voodee@sbcglobal.net or on his websites, https://woodyweingarten.com and https://vitality press.com.