She?s Hideous

Feb. 10, 2005 -- When is ugly beautiful? Find out when the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum presents She's Hideous, an original one-act musical written and composed by Eric Dienstfrey.

The performance is co-sponsored by the Department of Music in Arts & Sciences in conjunction with the Kemper Art Museum's Inside Out Loud: Women's Health in Contemporary Art (through April 24), the first major exhibition ever dedicated to that topic. For more information, contact Stephanie Parrish at (314) 935-7918 or stephanie_parrish@wustl.edu,or visit kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu/calendar.

Set in 1920s Vienna, She's Hideous tells the darkly funny story of an expressionist painter (Colin DeVaughan) suffering a nasty case of artists' block. Things begin to look up, however, after a chance encounter with the farcically deformed Wanda (Amy Schwarz), who quickly becomes an unlikely muse.

Dienstfrey, a 2004 alumnus of Washington University, wrote She's Hideous as a senior project and also serves as the show's director and pianist. The score features six original — and often hilariously absurd — songs mixing the rigorous, atonal expressionism of Arnold Schoenberg with the lyrical, pop-kitsch sentimentality of a Burt Bacharach.

She's Hideous received its world premiere in October 2004 in a pair of performances presented by New Line Theatre.