The Ugly Girl:  In the House of the Moles

DaDa Fest Interview

Transforming House of the Moles into The Ugly Girl

Download three songs from the play here.

The Ugly Girl is Born

After two weeks in Liverpool, workshopping her play In the House of the Moles with five equity actresses with disabilities, Galloway ended up with something new – a musical...The Ugly Girl: A Musical Tragedy in Burlesque. 
Synopsis 
PEG, a woman in her later years, has spent the last half of her life endlessly revising “The Ugly Girl,” a musical written to avenge the death of her adolescent love. She believes her play to be a tragedy of atonement. In reality, it’s an inadvertently comic mix of vaudeville, Punch and Judy, melodrama and English music hall-- in short, a tragedy in burlesque.

Her four daughters INGA, BOAZ, JINX and WARK and her boarder/lover SCHULTZ have felt compelled –once happily but now reluctantly-- to enact Peg’s “masterpiece” through every stage of its development.

Having completed her latest draft in the wee hours of the morning, PEG unexpectedly dies, leaving her daughters and Schultz in a quandary –what is left for them beyond Peg’s musical?

Choosing not to examine that question they embark on one last performance, in part because it seems a fitting homage; in part because they secretly share Peg’s own mad obsessions with thwarted happy endings, blighted love, clandestine sex, brute oppression and sweet revenge.

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Review: DaDaFest International 2014

This was my event of the year. I haven’t seen anything like it to match its sheer brilliance and innovation.

Peg, mother to a dysfunctional family, dies in front of the audience after she finishes writing her play. Who would keep a corpse on stage for the whole performance? Only Terry Galloway would and it works!

Discovering she has ‘gone’ her dysfunctional family, yes I have said it once and believe me it’s worth saying again, her dysfunctional children are shocked and they leave the sanctity of their rooms to act out the play in Peg’s honour… in front of her!

Perhaps this may set the scene for what is to come for the result is true mayhem! Penny Dreadful meets the Wizard of Oz colliding with a burlesque West Side Story into Alice in Wonderland.

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