Sister Act

When half a dozen nuns, in full habits and gaudy aprons, do a ballet with kitchen utensils, ending up with an imitation of the Rockettes, almost any audience is bound to be impressed. So, last week, were audiences that filled a University of Notre Dame auditorium to watch The Complaining Angel, a new musical performed entirely by nuns.

The Complaining Angel was a "harder ticket" than Broadway's My Fair Lady--only nuns were admitted to its three performances, staged as a training project by the department of speech for the summer school that annually brings some 800 teaching sisters to Notre Dame. "You can't teach a skill if you have never mastered it," explains Drama Teacher Natalie White, who wrote and directed the show. It is her third such sister act, but her first musical, and it was a hearty success. The nuns in the cast wore no makeup and wore their habits throughout the show. The lyrics alone, some authored by a cloistered Poor Clare nun with whom Miss White had to confer through a veiled grille, made many a gimp limp in her audience and dimpled many a wimple.

A Jesuit Gimmick. Heroine of the play is a guardian angel just released from the heroic job of keeping a movie queen out of hell. "Love was a game," she sings of her former charge. "Men were so tame/ Like Nashua she ran every race./Though in her prime She lost every time./ But she died in the state of grace."

Sure that being guardian angel to a nun "is a lot more fun/in the race to the state of grace" because all nuns do is pray all day, the angel agrees to change places with her new charge, Sister Angelica, to show her how simple a nun's life really can be. In no time the angel is in hot water with the mother superior for her angelic frankness. When Sister Angelica tells her to stop it, the angel complains: "Do you mean I cannot tell the truth in a convent?" No, says the sister. "Use mental reservation ... a gimmick invented by the Jesuits. Tell as much of the truth as you think advisable, and mentally reserve the rest."

Convent life whirls on at a bewildeing pace and even the mother superior, in her show-stopping song, laments that she can barely keep up with it: "Oh, the very interior life of a Mother Superior/Is not so interior/It's veiled hysterier./The roofs need repairing/The budgets need paring/This pace is driving me wild./If I get to heaven it's because I made twenty-seven/First Fridays when I was a child."

Bucking for Sainthood. A salesman for a religious supply house plagues the sisters with his sales talk for Rosary clickers (to show you where you were when you fell asleep), electric vigil lights ("flip it on for ten minutes on bus or car--gives you a lift for that tired feeling"), rosaries in which "each bead contains Waters of Jordan and a blessed guppy."

The show closes with the angel exhausted and the nuns engaged in a rousing chorus:

No more misdemeanors No more mortal sins I'm making novenas All day on my shins.

I don't want to kneel in heaven's left field with minor league prophets and all. I'm running this race for a major league place

right up there with Peter and Paul. I'm bucking for sainthood I'm praying all day I'm a-bucking for sainthood On that glorious ever morious glorious judgment day.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.