Nick Cearley and Lauren Molina have Broadway acting careers and they joke about spending time onstage wearing very little: She was a stripper in the Broadway production of Rock of Ages; he wore not very much in the Elvis musical All Shook Up. So dressing down for their “alt-cabaret” musical act The Skivvies, in which they strip down to their underwear and sing, isn’t a problem.
Cearley, who performed last season at Ensemble Theatre Cincinnati in the one-man show Buyer and Cellar, is back in town to play nerdy Seymour in the Cincinnati Playhouse’s upcoming production of Little Shop of Horrors (Jan. 21-Feb. 19). Using an evening off before the opening, he and Molina will perform as The Skivvies at Hamilton’s Fitton Center for Creative Arts on Saturday evening. It’s already sold out. (They did a pair of late-night shows at ETC in 2015.)
They met touring in a children’s theater production in 2003 (“We played in all the greatest cafetoriums in the land,” Molina says) and became fast friends who make quirky music. Molina, who plays the cello, performed in the Tony Award-winning Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, in which the cast accompanied themselves musically. Cearley notified her about the audition that led to her playing Johanna.
They both make their living in musical theater. (She recently performed in a Chicago production of Wonderful Town.) But in 2012, they decided to put together a YouTube video to spread the word about their musical act, featuring offbeat medleys and mash-ups of Pop tunes.
“We were trying to figure out what to wear for the video,” Molina says. “I was walking around in my bra. Nick said, ‘Why don’t you wear that? We’re stripping down the music, so we could just strip down our clothes, too.’”
Their naughty video, “Hardbody Hoedown,” went viral. For five years they’ve landed gigs from coast to coast, including 13 performances of a recent holiday-themed show in New York.
They both know Greater Cincinnati well. Cearley grew up in Hamilton, where he sang in a show choir; as a teen, he was the Fitton Center’s first “Rising Young Artist.” Molina’s parents graduated from the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music and her family frequently visited friends in Southwest Ohio from their home in Detroit.
They like to share the stage with guests. At the Fitton, Drew Lachey will be featured as well as Dylan Mulvaney, a junior musical theater major at CCM from San Diego.
Cearley plays guitar and melodica, a kind of mix between a pump organ and a harmonica. Molina is mostly on cello, but she picks up a ukulele occasionally. “We are kind of like adults living a childish life,” Cearley says.
A New York Times writer described The Skivvies as “a glorified sandbox for grown-up children” and Molina says the sandbox is a good analogy for the playful environment they create.
“We’re using simple instruments to create new harmonic structures to over-produced Pop songs or pieces that are usually lushly orchestrated,” she says. “It makes your ear kind of perk up.”
Their collaboration has created a repertoire of more than 100 songs. “We’re very twisted,” Cearley says. “Lauren will have an idea in the middle of the night and text me about it. In the morning when I see it, I’ll say ‘Oh my God, that’s so funny.’ We’re always playing the ‘Yes — and what about this?’ game.”
For instance, at the Fitton they’re likely to include a number inspired by “Three Blind Mice.” One mouse admits he’s not blind, but pretended to be, since he thought the other two were cool. The number includes snatches of tunes including “I Can See Clearly Now,” “Blinded by the Light” and even “I once was blind but now I see” from “Amazing Grace.” At the end, they use the melody of “Suddenly Seymour” from Little Shop — but with a play on words: “I suddenly see … more.”
That’s the kind of stripped-down but smart musical humor The Skivvies offer to audiences.
THE SKIVVIES perform a sold-out show at the Fitton Center for Creative Arts on Saturday. More info: fittoncenter.org.
This article appears in Jan 11-18, 2017.
