Cowgirls by Betsy Howie & Mary Murfitt

Jo has 24 hours to save Hiram Hall—her father's once-famous country-western saloon in Rexford, Kansas—from foreclosure. But what will pack in a crowd to make the money she needs to make her opening night a success? Mickey, her wise-crackin’, hard-livin’ waitress and Mo, her cook/cashier, both see this opportunity as their last chance to make it as country singers. But Jo decides to book the Cowgirl Trio instead, certain that it will save the place from ruination. The problem is, there is no Cowgirl Trio! A minor misunderstanding on the telephone delivers the Coghill Trio—three classically trained musicians currently on a reunion tour. The six women surely mix like oil and water. It's a face-off, with Classical versus Country. Can they meet in the middle?
Cowgirls made its west coast debut at the Old Globe Theater in 1996 and went on to have a successful run in New York, followed by a national tour. In its musical numbers, the show points out that the distance between “highbrow” and “lowbrow” isn't the unbridgeable gulf that musical snobs imagine and uneducated rustics fear. As the members of the Coghill Trio remind one another, folk music has long been a fertile source of classical themes, and Cowgirls’ 24 musical numbers run the gamut from “Chopin to Country.”
The cast includes six multi-talented women, most of whom are newly-arrived to the PowPAC stage. Raylene J. Wall plays Jo, the new owner of Hiram Hall; Heather Rager is Mary Lou, the tightly-wound, rigid member of the trio; Heather Barton is Lee, a “new age” devotee who is as adept at reading astrological charts as she is at playing her cello; Sarah LeClair is Rita, the seven-months-pregnant, piano-playing member of the trio, who views the tour as her last chance at stardom; Anya Tuerk is Mickey, the “rode hard and put away wet” waitress at the Hall; and Karen E. Donahue is Mo, Mickey’s greatest fan and Jo’s most loyal employee. Cowgirls is directed by Mary L. Smith, with musical direction by Kirk Valles, and is produced by Lynn Wolsey.