Woody Sez: The Life & Music of Woody Guthrie
Woody Sez: The Life & Music Of Woody Guthrie, devised by David M. Lutken, is performed at the Underbelly Boulevard Soho from 8 to 19 September 2026. Directed by Nick Corley.
Review by Emilia Matyja
Woody Guthrie’s musical biography returns to Soho with a historically soulful zing of joy you can find in a live-music bar. David M. Lutken resurrects Woody Guthrie – a singer-composer of American folk songs that captured simple truths about the American working class and fascism. The upbeat production, with four actors and 20+ instruments at their disposal, creates a foot-tapping, hollering ambience that rides the historical peaks and crags of the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl and WWII.
The actors are completely comfortable from the start. Nyssa Grant begins with a twanging mandolin, and Lutken reassures the audience, “You can talk amongst yourselves; we’re warming up.” A family of string instruments mirrors the audience, encircles the actors, waiting in promise of being played, as if saying, “the only song I’ve ever tried to write down is YOU.” The connection between the audience and actors is electric, reflecting Woody’s life filled with togetherness, from songwriting for Mexican fruit pickers to joining a union in the Merchant Marines as he rambles around the US. Spoken word and music are essential to conveying the story; it’s both hilarious and a transparent political commentary.
In his early radio days, Guthrie rants into a microphone about injustices, while the broadcasting station trembles in fear, worried it’s not the entertainment they desire. Nyssa Grant and Raquel Chavez interrupt Guthrie’s sombre lecture with a perfectly harmonised, slightly awkward but cheerful Pepsi Cola ad. It immediately establishes Guthrie’s position; later, with a slapped-on tag on his guitar reading “this machine kills fascists,” he questions activism and the difference between merely wanting something to end and actually stopping it.
Wordplay is clever throughout: homophones to satirise New York as a “whole” or a “hole”; discussing the term limits of a landlord and the termites in the floorboards. From rabbit analogies about the expanding workers’ union to games of which one of the jolly banker’s eyes is fake—Woody Sez pokes fun at just about anything and everything, with the foundation being a web of communal feelings towards how the working people are treated.
It is hard to forget David Finch’s incidental, one-man performance, using his violin as a crutch to emphasise every movement, every turn in his story, biting his violin to show his hunger, and digging out the food between his teeth with the tight ping of his bow; His wonderfully incredible spoonmanship during the song, “the biggest thing that man has ever done,” had the audience sitting in laughing astonishment, as he pinch-gripped an array of galloping beats on the closest audience leg that leant upon the homely stage of Underbelly Boulevard Soho.
Woody Sez is a big, happy gig set against the backdrop of major social tragedies and family deaths, culminating in Woody Guthrie’s death from Huntington’s disease. All merch sold on the night goes to the Scottish Huntington’s Association. After the shows on 10 and 17 October, the cast welcomes the audience to a Hootenanny, where the audience joins the cast in playing and singing songs—again, reinforcing togetherness and blurring the distinction between actor and audience, in keeping with the great sentiment of “this land was made for you and me.”
Further information: https://underbellyboulevard.com/tickets/woody-sez-the-life-music-of-woody-guthrie/
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