Freaky Friday: One Act Edition

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Freaky Friday puts a mother and her teenage daughter into each other's bodies the day before the mother's wedding, and gives them until midnight to swap back. Katherine has a ceremony to run. Ellie has a scavenger hunt, an exam and a boy she likes. Neither can fake being the other for long. The swap is caused by a broken hourglass and has to be undone before the clock runs out, but the real machinery is domestic. Katherine, inside a sixteen-year-old, discovers how little she has understood her daughter's grief since the family lost its father. Ellie, running an adult's day, finds out what her mother has been carrying. The comedy comes fast; the reckoning underneath it arrives quietly. The score is by Tom Kitt with lyrics by Brian Yorkey, the writing team behind Next to Normal, and the book is by Bridget Carpenter, adapted from Mary Rodgers' 1972 novel. It reached the stage in 2016. The songs are pop-rock and character-driven rather than pastiche, which keeps the body-swap premise from tipping into pure farce. It is built for two performers to show off, since each has to play the other's mannerisms while singing someone else's music, and the pleasure is watching them commit. The tone is warm and family-facing without being soft; the show takes the daughter's anger as seriously as the mother's exhaustion, and lets both of them be wrong. It works for families with teenagers and for anyone who has argued with a parent and lost. Live, the transformation lands early, two actors visibly changing who they are without changing costume, and the room tends to go with it immediately.