When is ugly beautiful? Find out when the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum presents She’s Hideous, an original one-act musical written and composed by Eric Dienstfrey.
The special, one-night-only performance will begin at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 18.
The performance is co-sponsored by the Department of Music in Arts & Sciences in conjunction with the Kemper Art Museum’s Inside Out Loud: Women’s Health in Contemporary Art (through April 24), the first major exhibition ever dedicated to that topic.
Set in 1920s Vienna, She’s Hideous tells the darkly funny story of an expressionist painter (Colin DeVaughan) suffering a nasty case of artists’ block. Things begin to look up, however, after a chance encounter with the farcically deformed Wanda (Amy Schwarz), who quickly becomes an unlikely muse.
Dienstfrey, a 2004 WUSTL graduate, wrote She’s Hideous as a senior project and also serves as the show’s director and pianist. The score features six original — and often hilariously absurd — songs mixing the rigorous, atonal expressionism of Arnold Schoenberg with the lyrical, pop-kitsch sentimentality of Burt Bacharach.
She’s Hideous received its world premiere in October in a pair of performances presented by New Line Theatre.
For more information, contact Stephanie Parrish at 935-7918 or stephanie_parrish@wustl.edu, or go online to kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu/calendar.