EDINBURGH 2026: David Lutken on WOODY SEZ Guest Blog
Woody Sez: The Life & Music of Woody Guthrie is at Edfringe 5-30 August
Writer and performer David Lutken guest blogs for BroadwayWorld ahead of bringing Woody Sez: The Life & Music of Woody Guthrie to the 2026 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
What 20 Years Of Playing Woody Has Taught Me About The Man Behind The Myth …
To paraphrase a line used by a lot of folks:
“Come gather round me children, a story I will tell
Of Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, Oklahoma knew him well.”
My name is David Lutken. I grew up in Texas in the 1960s and ‘70s. In school, we learned Woody’s songs and a good bit about the travels of the famous folksinger. My music-and-then-theater career has taken me to a lot of fantastic places with casts and crews of wonderful, talented and inspiring artists. I’ve played characters from a singing Civil War soldier to Marley’s Ghost to Don Quixote to George Ritchie, (Tammy Wynette’s 6th husband), but devising “Woody Sez”, with Nick Corley, Darcie Deaville, Helen Jean Russell and Andy Teirstein, and growing with this musical’s dozens of years and scores of productions around the world has been, to put it mildly, a unique experience.
The show is pretty much what it “sez”: a biography for the stage based on the writings of one of America’s most celebrated songwriters, Woody Guthrie. Born in Okemah, Oklahoma in 1912, he lived through a rollercoaster of a childhood, punctuated by the tragic deaths of his sister, Clara, in a fire, and later his mother, Nora Belle, of Huntington’s Disease. The story of Oklahoma and the USA at this time includes events and people that would shape Woody’s life: the Oil Boom, the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, the Golden Age of Radio, the Labor Movement and the Second World War, and his musical relatives, friends and bandmates, some of whom went on to great fame themselves. Like our show, his life is inextricably woven together with his music.
His greatest works are his protest songs: topical ditties, biting satire, gut-punch balladry - uncompromising in righteous outrage and socially conscious criticism, brilliantly and beautifully combined with his sincere love for his country and his fellow man.
“Behind” it all is Woody and the thing he did best, which was to write - all the time, about all manner of subjects, including a lot about himself! He wrote songs, essays, love poems, stream-of-consciousness letters, as well as his newspaper items for The People’s Daily World - “Woody Sez” - which was modeled after one of his idols from a generation earlier: fellow Oklahoman, Will Rogers, and his famous column, “Will Rogers Says”. Will Rogers knew worldwide fame and met with celebrities, kings, presidents and princes around the world. Woody hitch-hiked and hoboed, “sang on the radio waves”, and wrote and recorded, served in the Merchant Marine in WWII; he lost a daughter in an accidental fire; he “kept on” with his family and his children until Huntington’s Disease claimed his last several years until his death in 1967 - in the same month as his son, Arlo’s famous, album “Alice’s Restaurant” was released.
Every step along my way I’ve learned more and more about Woody, not just the tribulations and tragedies and triumphs of his life, but the ever-widening swath of those his music and his life-story have affected and influenced. In those early years of our show, we met many folks who had seen him, some who had played with him and a few who knew him. Their anecdotes - some giddily happy, some decidedly not - all had one thing in common: Woody was an unforgettable human being. The word “ornery” is common in descriptions, as are “generous”, “genius”, “full of nervous energy”, “incredibly persistent”, “funny”, “abrasive”, “loving”, “childlike”, even “sentimental”.
He is justifiably mythologized as a brilliant poet and performer with a unique style. The man that I’ve come to know believed in human beings and in Humanity. He wrote hundreds of songs that put him in the place or in the lives of others. He wanted his listeners to understand them as they did parables in the Bible - more deeply than just trying to imagine yourself in another’s shoes. He believed that the hope of humankind is that we should believe in each other. What I’ve experienced in the “role” is that that generosity of spirit exists all around and throughout his sphere of influence - the art and the artists he has truly touched are vaccinated with that kind of hope: as Woody says: “A human bein’ ain’t nothin’ but a hopin’ machine..”
Woody Sez: The Life & Music of Woody Guthrie will be performed at 5:30pm at Underbelly Bristo Square from 5th – 30th August.
Booking link: https://underbellyedinburgh.co.uk/event/woody-sez
Photo credit: Roger Mastroianni
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