6 Guitars - sneak peek based on a Havana preview performance!

Theatre artist and musician Chase Padgett has been traveling with the “6 Guitars” show for a long while. I saw it as a preview at Havana Theatre (its Fringe run is at The Cultch), but this was not a preview from the artist’s perspective.

Although it is called "6 Guitars", but it's really about musical philosophy, as viewed from the perspective of six archetypal American musicians in six genres (Blues, Jazz, Rock, Classical, Folk and Country). I enjoyed the musical philosophy, and the bits of music theory scattered throughout.

This is a theatre artist who loves music, who loves thinking about music, and loves playing music, from a variety of different perspectives. He will play Metallica one minute, and Pachelbel’s Canon the next (or vice versa).

When presenting six genres as represented by six musicians, each with different guitar stories, one runs the risk of creating stock, stereotypical characters. Padgett mainly avoids that. Padgett invokes musicians who span a spectrum of age, color, and race, starting with an 87-year-old African-American blues musician from Tupelo, Mississippi. Cultural appropriation is very much a pressing concern for many, but Padgett plays this character with respect, interest, and joyfulness.

There were moments when I had difficulty distinguishing between the jazz, rock, country, and folk guitar players, perhaps because they were all white males and I missed what the distinguishing accents were supposed to be. Within a sentence or two, it was clear which musician was which, but the transition was not completely seamless.

Padgett (in character as the country musician) engages with the audience, and even improvises a country song on the spot, based on a dialogue with an audience member about his life – and it’s a pretty good song too.

Of course, six American musicians can never cover the complete spectrum of music, but they provide a good cross-section. Padgett sees a unity in music, and across musical styles, and is not willing to say one style is inherently better than the other. What the musician characters say sounds real—much of what they said, I have heard other musicians say too.

Although it is not necessary, reading the six character descriptions on the 6guitars.com website will likely help you distinguish them more quickly. Padgett relies on voice, content, and musical playing style to distinguish the characters, and does not use any visual props to change his appearance. This is a show mainly about American musicians playing American music (of many different types), so do not expect a world music perspective.

I loved the show, and I would happily attend it again, and I hope to attend the regular productions at The Cultch if I can.