The Ballad of Little Jo
Then there was “Little Jo” Monaghan, an east-coast debutant who took literally Horace Greeley’s advice to “go west, young man, and grow up with the country.” According to a 1904 newspaper article, Monaghan gave birth to an illegitimate child as a teenager and left home in disgrace. Adopting a male facade to keep from being molested as she ventured into the rugged frontier, she moved to Ruby City (later Silver City), Idaho, in 1867; there she forged a new life as a miner, rancher, and broncobuster. “His pronounced feminine appearance, the boy’s voice, his delicate build, the ascetic life he lived, all tended to bring his life under discussion,” the article claims. “But never did anyone give utterance to the belief that he was anything other than the man he represented himself to be.” Indeed, Monaghan gained a reputation as a well-liked but reclusive fellow whose only companion was a “Chinaman” who worked on her ranch. Monaghan’s real gender wasn’t revealed until after she died in 1903 at the age of 53.
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Mike Reid and Sarah Schlesinger’s musical The Ballad of Little Jo, receiving its world premiere at Steppenwolf under Tina Landau’s direction, is very loosely based on this offbeat story. The show makes no pretense to historical accuracy; newspaper reports from that era were hardly reliable in any case, so Reid and Schlesinger rightly felt no compunction to hew to the “facts.” Nor did they seek to duplicate the story as retold in Maggie Greenwald’s 1993 movie of the same name, which they call a “departure point” for their version. Reid and Schlesinger wanted to create a folktale in which the west–where an outcast can “make my life my own” and “find a place where I belong,” as the chorus sings in the show’s pageantlike opening–would serve as a metaphor for Jo’s self-discovery through hardship.
All these plot strands finally come together when Jordan, enraged at Jo, reveals her secret to the already testy townsfolk. They in turn descend upon Jo’s ranch to destroy it–and Jo herself, who stands her ground but never fights back. (By contrast, the Jo Monaghan described in the 1904 newspaper article was a quick-draw shootist who, one imagines, would at least have taken a few of her foes with her to the grave.)
Reid and Schlesinger’s choice of theme is admirable, as is their uncompromising seriousness of purpose. But The Ballad of Little Jo too often comes across as a gender-reversing rehash of Wild West cliches rather than a work with something new to say about American history or something new to offer musical theater.
