Amanda Kristin Nicchol, Karen Killeen and Aimee Doherty in ‘The Hills of California’ (photo: Liza Voll)

“A song is a place you can live,” is the gauzy musical motto of Veronica Webb, the thorny Mama Rose to four singing daughters in Jez Butterworth’s tragicomic drama “The Hills of California,” now playing in a finely textured production at the Berkeley Rep.

While Veronica tried to groom her four daughters for success as an Andrews Sisters knockoff group during their 1950s childhoods, the song they live in (and that Veronica’s about to die in) by 1976 is less “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” than a bitter blues. While punctuated by bright comic passages and reprises of long-ago good times, there’s no denying that the sisters reside in a mournful tune.

The action, split across the two time perio

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