‘Cold War Choir Practice’ Review: When the President Made a Deal

For Christmas 1987, Meek knows exactly what she wants from Santa Claus. All three items should fit easily on the sleigh: a stuffed animal, a Speak & Spell for language-learning and a nuclear radiation detector. You know, to keep inside the fallout shelter she’s building in the basement.

At 10 years old, alert to the world, Meek is anxious about the Cold War and hoping to help stop it — or at least protect herself and her family, should Soviet missiles ever be aimed at Syracuse, N.Y. But she is also just a little kid, inquisitive and dreamy, with an “E.T.” sweatshirt and a taste for Atomic Fireballs from the neighborhood candy shop.

Played by Alana Raquel Bowers, an adult deftly channeling tweendom, Meek is the winsome protagonist of “Cold War Choir Practice,” a brainy new comedy by Ro Reddick that’s infused with choral music and spiked with espionage. Directed by Knud Adams, and featuring a jewel-studded cast, the play finishes this year’s edition of Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks festival on a high.

That’s true even with the whole extra set of reverberations that the show abruptly acquired after the U.S. strike on Iran on Saturday — world peace being one of Meek’s consuming priorities. In a children’s choir, she sings of de-escalation (sample lyric: “No one has to die”) and gets matched with a pen pal from the U.S.S.R.

“Dear Soviet Pen Pal,” Meek writes, brightly. “War is imminent. How are you today? Did you know the voice of a child has the power to stop a nuclear attack?”