Shaun and Abigail are personable singer-songwriters and sometimes (especially Shaun) droll storytellers, but they are clearly not trained actors nor experienced dramatists. To view “Hundred Days” as anything but a concert, or at most a song cycle, however – to accept it as a musical, or judge it as a work of theater – I must then acknowledge the frustration of trying to follow a story that is often vague in its details and mumbly in its presentation. The band gives a tuneful, soulful concert of The Bengson’s original folk-rock songs. Jo Lampert, best known as the heroine in last year’s Joan of Arc: Into the Fire, is not just a strong singer she turns out to be a mean accordion player. ![]() For this latest version of the show, their band features four musicians besides the couple, and they are all great. “Hundred Days,” which has been in development for years and was presented in somewhat altered form as part of the Public Theater’s Under the Radar festival in January, is best appreciated as a live concert by The Bengsons, which is the name the couple gives not just to themselves but to their band as well. Their relationship terrified both of them – shy Shaun because he feared Abigail would leave him anxious Abigail because when she was 15 years old she had had a dream that she would meet the love of her life, but that he would only have 100 days left to live.Ībigail’s dream explains the title, and it even somewhat justifies the description of the show by the New York Theatre Workshop as a “raw story about….loving as if you only had a hundred days to live.” But one might get a misleading impression about “Hundred Days” based on that description, as well as the venue, and the theater professionals involved in it, including playwright Sarah Gancher, who’s given credit as the co-writer of the book, and Anne Kauffman, a first rate director whose most recent shows include Mary Jane on the same stage, and Marvin’s Room on Broadway. ![]() In “Hundred Days,” a musically engaging autobiographical concert by The Bengsons, Abigail and Shaun Bengson tell us they met one another at “the first rehearsal of a massive anti-folk folk-punk old-timey neo soul band,” and they were married three weeks later.
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