Fusebox Festival includes inventive Rude Mechs musical

A mountain lion. Star-crossed lovers. A string ensemble. A traveling cowboy variety show. Animated projections. A Western-themed carnival. Singers. The vanishing mythical American West.

All are elements of "I've Never Been So Happy," the new alt musical theater piece conceived by Austin theater risk-takers, the Rude Mechs.

Though it has already been presented to much acclaim as a work-in-progress since 2008, the final version of the multimedia-infused show formally opens today, dovetailed into the opening of the Fusebox Festival, the annual performance art celebration.

Since the mid-1990s, the Rudes have teased the boundaries of theater, putting out a vibrant, breathtaking body of work that has landed on off-Broadway stages and at international showcases like the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, among other notable gigs.

Yet, "I've Never Been So Happy" is almost four years in the making, likely the longest gestation period the theater collective has given to any of its more than 20 shows.

And it's already one of the Rudes' most celebrated.

In 2007, "I've Never Been So Happy" was selected as one of only seven shows to receive a grant from the NEA's Distinguished New Play Development Project. (Another show netting the NEA award is "Bengal Tiger in the Baghdad Zoo," now on Broadway starring Robin Williams.)

It's also the first time the collective has set out purposely to create a musical, even though music has factored greatly in other Rudes shows.

For the past several years, playwright Kirk Lynn and composer Peter Stopschinski have pooled their considerable creative talents to come up with lyrics and a score, respectively, that tell a story both grandiosely fantastical and homespun quirky.

During brainstorming sessions, the two made audio recordings, acted out rough sketches, singing all the parts, reading all the lines. Lynn and Stopschinski would also join up with the other Rude Mechs company members in creative jam sessions, fleshing out more elements of the play.

The Rudes also turned to their audience for inspiration.

At two different work-in-progress productions staged at the Rudes' longtime East Austin theater, the Off Center, the company augmented the shows with a carnival midway of quirky Texas-themed booths. Theater-goers could learn to make rope, sing country songs karaoke-style, dress up in Western wear or have their picture taken in a cutout of an infamous moment in Texas history (like the Kennedy assassination).

Those carnival playful romps let the Rudes work out ideas, test them against an audience and mine the richness of some good old-fashioned playfulness.

(Not to worry that you missed the circus: The current production of the play also offers the audience a few carnivalesque attractions.)

"I've Never Been So Happy" tells an imaginative tale that probes the American West and its accompanying myths about what is free and wild, what is beautiful and what is the right way to live.

In Lynn's and Stopschinski's quirky metaphoric tale, a single mother fears that she isn't able to model enough macho behavior for her son, Jeremy, so she ties him to the last mountain lion in Texas and lets both loose. Meanwhile, a dominating single father so fears for his daughter, Annabellee, that he refuses to let her leave unless she marries.

Like all good love stories, Annabellee and Jeremy meet and fall in love.

Along the way, a panoply of music conjures up everything from Dolly Parton to Prince, Western swing to lush romantic strings.

If it sounds like an odd jumbling of disparate things, Lynn suggests that the wild ride works as a metaphor for life: "Eventually, everything is connected to everything else and everyone is connected to everyone else."

jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699

'I've Never Been So Happy'

When: 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays through May 7, and 8 p.m. May 1

Where: Off Center, 2211 Hidalgo St.

Cost: $15-$25

Information: www.rudemechs.com

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'Let us think of these things always. Let us speak of them never.'