Joe's Pub Presents McBride's Musical The Nitpicker, 10/30

Joe's Pub will present a reading of Mary McBride's new musical The Nitpicker on October 30th at 7 PM.

"The Nitpicker, a new musical by Mary McBride, tells the story of a lice epidemic gone awry in a small southern town, has been in development for six years and was most recently developed in conjunction with the Hourglass Group's New Works Project and as part of HBO's Stage-to-Screen Series," according to Joe's Pub.

McBride has teamed up with songwriting partner Aaron Maxwell (from award-winning band God Street Wine) to write twelve original songs, including "Bucketful of Bugs," "Betty's Got Lupus," "Me? I want to be an Entomologist," "Mama's Got a Boyfriend," "Roasting Pigs on Judgment Day," "Everybody's Gone Crazy," "Late Night Fadeout King," and "The Hair Fairies," among others.

"The characters in The Nitpicker include the title character Winnie Wanda Wiggins, a nitpicker who spends her free time concocting lethal potions to fight the lice; her brother, Ponytail Wayne Wiggins, whose love of Jack Daniels and sweet-talking ways gets him into deeper trouble than any one can anticipate; her mother, Hazel Wiggins, who has an unnatural infatuation with midgets and Percoset; Jitters, a teenager who 'is not quite wrong, but not quite right' and who dreams of growing up to study bugs; Sybil, the big-haired town gossip who keeps everyone dutifully informed about upcoming all-you-can-eat pig roasts; and Leland Cloud, a City Council candidate who reminds his constituents that the fight against the lice 'is not about itching or scratching or the exact millimeters of a louse in relation to a large head, but about good and evil, plain and simple.'"

McBride is a playwright and singer-songwriter who has been working in New York for the past decade. Most recently, she was featured on screen and on the soundtrack of Brokeback Mountain  Her two full-length plays – Gravel's Spine (starring cult rocker Mojo Nixon) and Bicker (featuring a cast of eleven women) were produced at the Ontological Theater, home of avant-garde veteran Richard Foreman. She is also a prolific songwriter; her third album, "Tricky Tricky World," will be released in 2007.

Tickets are $20; visit www.joespub.com. Visit www.marymcbride.com for more information.