Stage Review - Chicken Tinders (Copious Love Productions / Gaisma Theatre Group)

Stage Review - Chicken Tinders

Presented By: Copious Love Productions & Gaisma Theatre Group - Seattle, WA
Show Run: May 22 - May 31, 2026
Date Reviewed: Saturday, May 30, 2026
Run Time: 2 Hours (including a short intermission)
Reviewed By: Sameer Arshad

Every community sorts itself into an order, and we like to imagine that hierarchy is something nature handed us, a fixed ladder of who crows up the sun and who waits at the bottom of the yard. But a pecking order is not a law of the universe. It is a story a community tells itself until the story starts to feel like solid ground. What happens to that story when the one at the very top suddenly drops dead?

That is the clever, deceptively serious question inside Chicken Tinders, the bold new musical from Copious Love Productions and Gaisma Theatre Group. With a witty, original book and lyrics by Scott Zenreich, music and lyrics by John Gregor, sharp and confident direction by Jenny Cross, and music direction by Justin Tran, it is inspired by Chaucer's The Nun's Priest's Tale and plays as a fast, idiosyncratic farmyard romp: one morning the rooster who crows up the sun dies, and the farm, convinced this must be the last day on Earth, spirals into a frenzy. These chickens have cell phones and dating apps and a whole social world of cliques and gatekeepers, and what they do with the time they think they have left becomes a zany, heartfelt allegory about making original art and what we truly prioritize in our final moments. It is absurdist on top and deeply, sociologically intelligent underneath, and never asks us to choose between the two.

At the center is Noah Fletcher, charismatic and grounded, who builds his Chicken with such transparency that we understand a creature refusing to be a mere product of his social environment. The generosity of Fletcher's acting lets us root for him, sting at his stumbles, and try to think two steps ahead on his behalf, only for him to surprise us with choices drawn from an interior life we cannot predict. It lands hard, then, when he plays the moment of running out of good answers, and that held exhaustion opens the door for Rose.

Ania Briggs-Garcia performs Rose with restrained, luminous control, withholding and then releasing so that the character's moral positioning and challenging sociological reframes arrive as discoveries rather than lectures. She becomes the resignification element for the whole community, picking up the thread precisely as it slips from everyone else's grasp. Opposite her, Janet Krupin is sly and precise, her comedic timing selling a genuinely brilliant moral arc for Fox without ever tipping her hand too early. Jeremy Steckler, dashing and charming, plays Buddy with such command of ambivalence that a figure who could read as a cad becomes surprisingly redeemable, keeping us guessing about what he really wants.

Rebecca Cort makes Gigi Giblet the show's beating civic heart, grounded and rousing, embodying the patient, unglamorous work of community organizing with such conviction that the performance itself asks how deeply we know and care for one another, and who among us can be gathered together to make our shared problems surmountable. Nathan Smith is imperious and quietly wounded as Bernard La Plume, a kingmaker, tastemaker and gatekeeper whose bluster hides an unfulfilled life, taking his own suppression out on others when he should be reaching for authenticity. Justin Tran, foundational and delightful, pulls the hardest double duty in the building as both a member of the band and one of the farm's denizens. His keyboard work and his singing form the load-bearing core of the entire show, and he carries that weight while landing comedic timing so deft that he draws laughs in the very same breath.

The ensemble is where the argument about community comes alive. Gabe Zuniga is dynamic and exacting, moving through wholly distinct characters with total control, stealing a scene one moment and carrying it the next, his heroic rooster challenging the flock to push their understanding of the world further. Cheyenne Barton is delicate and vivid across her several roles, performing the show's most tender alchemy as she humanizes these chickens and draws out the truth that they live in a world apart from ours yet carry hopes that mirror our own.

John Gregor's score is the secret weapon, precise and inventive, pulling from Sondheim and the modern Broadway tradition to accomplish an astonishing amount of plot and character legibility in very little time, revisiting its ideas and turning them to catch the light from a new angle. It is high-craft songwriting deceptively hidden inside silly numbers about chickens with dating apps, and the band, polished and tight under Justin Tran with William Bryant on keys and Chris Monroe on percussion, carries it beautifully. The keyboard chair rotated across the run, and while my night was anchored by Bryant, I have no doubt that Paul Stovall and Will Sanders brought the same skill and verve to the performances they covered, and I am only sorry I did not get to experience their playing firsthand. Jenny Cross's direction and Jeremy Dumont-Eton's crisp, inventive choreography shape all that energy into something that breathes.

The design is a genuine standout, and I say that with a little jealousy. Bella Rivera's bright, cartoonish scenic world, populated by the dazzling world-building objects of all shapes and sizes that Kendall Yoder and Annett Mateo masterminded into such a pleasure to stare at, makes us feel we have stepped into an animated frame, and yet so much is achieved with so little that it plays like a big-budget show until you look closely and see how cleverly each piece is positioned. Kilah Williams's clever, stylized costumes deserve special praise. There are no chicken suits here, only accented, beautifully hinted touches in the smart signifying tradition of the SpongeBob musical, where you need not bury an actor in a body costume to land the illusion, only precision and wit. Every chicken reads as unique and fully inhabited, with Dave Baldwin's playful, precise lighting and Amber Granger's lively, immersive sound completing the world.

Underneath all the feathers and fowl puns, Chicken Tinders makes a quietly urgent argument about how communities save themselves: about mutual aid, about knowing your neighbors, about the slow work of saving one another when no one else is coming to do it for us. It asks who gets to crow up the sun, and dares to answer that maybe the whole flock can learn to.

This world premiere has now closed, but a review can still be a flare sent up over the horizon. If any version of Chicken Tinders ever lands anywhere near you, you need to go. There is something genuinely special about a Seattle-grown musical arriving with this much original voice and this much Broadway flair, and it deserves every future stage it can find.

Chicken Tinders, recommended for ages 13 and up, played at the Isaac Studio Theatre at Taproot Theatre. For more on Copious Love Productions and Gaisma Theatre Group, and to follow where this remarkable work travels next, visit https://copiouslove.org/ and https://www.gaismatheatregroup.org/.

Photo credit: Giao Nguyen