Review: STORM LARGE MAKES IT HOME at Portland Center Stage

Storm Large MAKES IT HOME closes out Portland Center Stage's season and marks Large's first full-length solo show at the Armory since the 2019 anniversary remount of Crazy Enough.

That autobiographical musical-memoir dug into her relationship with her mother's mental illness. Here, she turns to her relationship with her father, who died in 2022, and to the larger, slipperier question of what "home" actually means. A place? She spent her childhood being both kicked out of, and running from, the house where she grew up. Her career has largely been spent on the road, though she recently moved back to Portland. A person? Her parental relationships were rocky and she’s made, by her own account, a series of bad choices in men. 

What MAKES IT HOME is really after is the harder kind of homecoming: creating a space where you feel comfortable with yourself, which requires figuring out, honestly, who and what to hold onto, and who and what to let go.

The show is more a cabaret than a musical. Barefoot and in sweatpants and a hoodie, she talks directly to the audience, telling stories and singing original songs that she wrote with composer and longtime collaborator James Beaton. Large is a disarming performer: somehow all swagger and total vulnerability at once, armored and exposed in the same breath.

When she talks, she swings between someone who has long since stopped apologizing for who she is and someone visibly still working it out in real time. The self-conscious teenager is still there, tugging awkwardly at her clothes. When she sings, everything changes. She’s completely settled, even with the most painful material. It seems as though music is where she can inhabit her emotions most fully and honestly - the place she feels truly at home. And, of course, she can sing the roof off not only PCS, but the surrounding buildings as well.

Large is a generous presence onstage, and it’s impossible not to root for her. She’s still figuring herself out (aren’t we all?), and it’s well worth showing up while she does.

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