The Nitpicker

The songs from The Nitpicker, a new musical by Mary McBride, tell the story of a lice epidemic gone awry in a small southern town. McBride has teamed up with songwriting partner Aaron Maxwell (from award-winning band God Street Wine) to write twelve original songs, including “Bucketful of Bugs,” “Betty’s Got Lupus,” “Me? I want to be an Entomologist,” “Mama’s Got a Boyfriend,” “Roasting Pigs on Judgment Day,” “Everybody’s Gone Crazy,” “Late Night Fadeout King,” and “The Hair Fairies,” among others.

The characters in The Nitpicker include the title character Winnie Wanda Wiggins, a nitpicker who spends her free time concocting lethal potions to fight the lice, her brother, Ponytail Wayne Wiggins, whose love of Jack Daniels and sweet-talking ways gets him into deeper trouble than any one can anticipate, her mother, Hazel Wiggins, who has an unnatural infatuation with midgets and Percoset, Jitters, a teenager who “is not quite wrong, but not quite right” and who dreams of growing up to study bugs, Sybil, the big-haired town gossip who keeps everyone dutifully informed about upcoming all-you-can-eat pig roasts, and Leland Cloud, a City Council candidate who reminds his constituents that the fight against the lice “is not about itching or scratching or the exact millimeters of a louse in relation to a large head, but about good and evil, plain and simple.”