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Magnetic Electric is a musical, but not in the kick line, chorus, big-production-number style of traditional musical theater. Instead, it’s diegetic.
“The music exists as music would in the world,” playwright Mikki Gillette explains. “It’s not just suddenly breaking reality.”
Magnetic Electric, co-written with Katherine Goforth, opens at The Back Door Theater on Oct. 9. The musical takes audiences into a small-town college bar where liberal arts students and a minority of progressive patrons find a haven from an otherwise conservative landscape. And in typical Gillette fashion, the story is told through the revelatory and deeply relatable lens of the transgender experience.
The Cabaret is a dimly lit, exposed-brick dive bar with a Lichtenstein-esque mural and a jet-black runway stage. Celine (Alexis Pilo), its owner, is a trans woman who performs her original music—with lyrics written by Gillette and tracks produced by hyperpop luminary Ash—to a local crowd of like-minded queers and alt-pop aficionados. The crux of the show’s drama comes from Celine navigating a love triangle between her cis partner Cole (Michael Hammerstrom) and the college’s new nonbinary heartthrob adjunct professor, Rain (Cosmo Reynolds). Based on a dress rehearsal performance ahead of its premiere, Magnetic Electric is more than the sum of its parts. The musical takes juicy relationship drama, contemporary culture war battles, and an arresting original score, using these throughlines to hold a mirror up to the literal (and figurative—more on that later) audience.
On its face, the triangle occupies an engaging and familiar trope, but there it bears a particularly meaningful subtext; on Celine’s one hand is a calm, quiet, status quo–enforcing heteronormative love. In the other is a radical, revolutionary, foundation-breaking, barn-burning love, unrestricted by obsolete gender norms. The implications feel universal: looking away from strife for the sake of comfort versus boldly confronting inequities and standing on business, regardless of the consequences. The stakes are heightened when a young white nationalist provocateur, Archer (John Bruner), violently harasses The Cabaret, putting Celine in the difficult position of becoming a reluctant mouthpiece in the center of a firestorm while juggling lovers and making music.
Magnetic Electric opens with the song “Autodestruction,” with Pilo in the spotlight at the top of The Cabaret’s long stage, her velvety alto voice over a hyperpop arrangement reminiscent of both Pacific Northwest grunge of the 1990s and SoundCloud bedroom bops of the 2010s. Her vocal energy resonates, sending goose bumps through the room. Coming from a trained singer and erstwhile touring musician, Pilo’s chilling delivery of Gillette’s sometimes macabre, sometimes surreal lyrics is powerful from the first breath. She offers a potent, at times breathtaking vocal performance, capturing the raw emotionality of Gillette’s lyrics and giving depth and breadth to what might otherwise come off as delicate coffeehouse poetry.
Pilo’s voice has both edgy energy and tender authenticity. The song’s chorus—“Was the mountain ever as lustrous? Incandescence, auto destruction.”—is an immediate earworm. It not only begins the show with a commanding demonstration of the performances to come, but sets the stage for Celine’s internal chaos. During the runtime, she builds and breaks relationships with not only her suitors—the politically connected but ethically disconnected Cole and the empathetic social justice champion Rain—but also her confidant and bartender, Tassel, played with pitch-perfect comic timing by Damian Lichtenstein.
First-time director Ruby Welch infuses the production with a comfortable sensibility, an achievement considering the show’s stacked meta layers. The Back Door Theater’s audiences are also The Cabaret’s patrons. As such, swooning over Celine’s riveting vocal performances is performative yet sincere. Reynolds also proves a capable duet partner, harmonizing effortlessly with Celine for a single song—the sole divergence from Celine’s onstage musical performances. Similarly, audiences may feel invested as they wonder whether Archer is seated next to them in the club. It’s a captivating and immersive take on musical theater that’s both a warm and chilling snapshot of trans, creative and overall marginalized experiences at this time in history.
“People are under attack, especially because trans stories aren’t getting told very much in the mainstream,” Gillette says of the production. “This was written in 2023, and the things that Archer is saying are basically like the Trump administration, which is scary because in the play the characters wonder, do we really have to worry about this guy? He’s just this guy who makes, you know, hate videos.”
“But now,” Gillette concludes, “he’s probably running the Civil Rights Division.”
SEE IT: Magnetic Electric at The Back Door Theater, 4319 SE Hawthorne Blvd., fusetheatreensemble.com. 7:30 pm Oct. 9–11, 16–18, 30 and 31 and Nov. 1. 3 pm Oct. 12, 19 and 26 and Nov. 2. $25 suggested donation.
