But Cowley loved working at 9th Avenue Salon, a neighborhood beauty shop that seemed a world apart from the city's fashionable salons. The goings-on at the shop, frequented by the shampoo-and-set generation, inspired Cowley's first play, "Shear Luck," a new musical comedy that opens this weekend at the Grand Theatre.
As the now former hairdresser reminisces about the place where she worked while gaining her chops as an actor, she makes Michael Adamson's salon - a place Adamson has owned for 28 years - sound as welcoming as the TV bar on "Cheers." Cowley describes a place where regular clients had weekly appointments and didn't need to identify themselves when they called on the phone. "It was a place where women brought in cookies every day," she says, "and everybody got their hair done whether they could afford it or not."
A trio of women, ensconced under the helmets of hair dryers, serve as a Greek chorus in "Shear Luck," a play about a scattered hairdresser named Julia, who secretly dreams of being an actor like her well-known mother. The musical's broad comedy, with a plot revolving around the time-worn theme of following your dreams, is powered by fairy-tale logic.
"I knew that I knew hair and I knew acting and I knew fear, and I had a pretty good grasp of comedy," Cowley says. "And I loved the little twist of something magical happening, the magic shears. I just thought that was funny."
Cowley wrote the first draft of "Shear Luck" during a playwriting workshop at Salt Lake Acting Company. Along the way, Julia, the main character, kept breaking into song, letting her creator know she was a character who intended to come to life in a musical.
"Those years spent at that beauty shop were highly influential in terms of understanding human behavior," Cowley says, "and getting to listen to women who have lived through the deaths of one or two or three husbands, even their own children. They were always finding something to laugh about, always finding some wisdom."
For a musical set in a hair salon, not a lot of actual hair styling happens onstage. That's on purpose, Cowley says, because she wanted to perpetuate the illusion that beauty shops create magic.
"It ain't high art, but it doesn't have to be," says Dan Larrinaga, who's directing the play and also happens to be Cowley's ex-husband. "It's an old theme, but how the story is told is fairly new. I watched that movie, 'The World's Fastest Indian,' and it's the same type of theme, following your dreams against all odds. That story has been told a jillion times, and people never get tired of it."
What's interesting about creating a new musical - one that isn't a parody, such as Salt Lake Acting Company's annual event, "Saturday Voyeur," or Desert Star's long-running populist fests, such as "My Big Fat Utah Wedding" - is that it's a relatively rare event locally. In fact, artistic director Richard Scott says he can't remember another new local musical being produced on the Grand Theatre stage. The company was drawn to producing "Shear Luck," he says, because of the "vibrancy" of the script.
Actors had the opportunity to create characters from scratch, without relying on a Broadway soundtrack for inspiration. Kevin Mathie, the musical director of the Grand, created a score that capitalizes on the actors' voices, like the high-tenor of Doug Irey, who plays one of the beauty shop owners, and the belting voice of Camille Gerber Van Wagoner, who plays Julia's self-absorbed mother.
Notable numbers include the rock-influenced opening song "Julia's Lament/Beauty Shop on 9th." "Everybody's singing, and at the end Julia belts this real high E, and there's a lot of energy to it as she's running around trying to please everybody," Mathie says. And then there's the off-kilter rhythms and meters of "The Cutting Edge," a piece the composer characterizes as a cross between the songs of the band Rush and Broadway composer Stephen Schwartz of "Wicked" and "Pippin" fame.
As for Adamson, who has become a fixture in the neighborhood after owning his K Street salon for 28 years, he says he's happy with the way his shop is depicted as a backdrop in "Shear Luck." For years, he and Cowley have shared laughs about events that occurred while they were working in the shop, and many of those episodes inspired scenes in the play. "Hopefully," the hairdresser says, "it will be funny to other people, too."
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Contact Ellen Fagg at ellenf@sltrib.com or 801-257-8621. Send comments about this story to livingeditor@ sltrib.com.
Snippets of wisdom at Grand Theatre
"Shear Luck" opens with Friday and Saturday performances at the Grand Theatre, 1575 S. State St., Salt Lake City, and continues with shows March 15-18 and 20-25. Curtain is at 7:30 p.m., with 2 p.m. matinees March 18 and 25. Tickets are $10 to $24 (senior/student discounts available). Call 801-957-3322 or visit http://www.the-grand.org.
