This aesthetic of no aesthetic would need to be applied to the singing, as well. One generalization can be made about it: it all partook of contemporary non-classical usages, which for female voices means microphone adaptations of the belt, which in turn is to say thinned-out, driven versions of chest voice stretched a fifth or so to either side of the register transition (the tenor range, but short on the low end), relieved from time to time by cooing into the mike, perceivable as an undeveloped form of head voice. (I don’t know how any of these women were trained, but some teaching methods devised for the pop/rock/music theatre market have replaced range-determined theories of registration with what they think of as “modes,” i. e., alternations of the above-described sounds within the same narrow range.) Since the songs of The Most Happy Fella were written for unamplified, acoustical voices over a cumulative range distribution that by operatic standards is rather limited but in musical-comedy terms quite wide,^(I)a great deal of transposition and re-arrangement has been necessary to squeeze them down into the miked “modal” framework. And since the original settings are predicated on normative heterosexual voice types (that’s the point), almost none of them are compatible with the sounds heard here, which ranged from a braying, straight-toned belt to a dusky, hollow contralto, with the occasional suggestion of one or two notes available in head voice, with some vibrato, at the top end. The effect, of course, is not only to de-masculinize the music, but to de-sexualize it altogether. The fact that the women are singing in the register dominant in the male voice does not make them sound like men; it only deprives them of sounding like women. So it’s not just that Tony and Joe, et al., are spayed; everyone’s neutered. And I must mention that all these sights and sounds are emanating from that most barren of territories, an empty stage—a space, not a place. Or, if you prefer, a place that represents nothing but itself, evoking an empty warehouse, or perhaps a factory facility from which the machinery has been removed. There was one set piece: a bar from which glittery golden Mylar strips were suspended, suggesting the swinging Mitter curtains of a car wash. They rose and fell, and at one point curled themselves up high in the space. There was some calculatedly unsupportive lighting that included the descent of a couple of glaring panels to an altitude just above the performers’ heads.