Review of Ash Lawn Opera's 'The Music Man'

If you fear that Ash Lawn Opera’s summer production of Meredith Willson’s The Music Man will offer surprises or innovations, be not afraid. This is just about as conventional a version of the classic 1957 musical comedy that you’re likely to see in this or any other season.

Having just reread Willson’s own account of the trials and tribulations that resulted in the original production (‘But He Doesn’t Know the Territory,’ published in 1959), I understand how his book (co-authored with Franklin Lacey) became ironclad. Only complete incompetency could breach that armor. That would explain, in part, why The Music Man is such a favorite of community and high school theatre troupes with limited resources.

Director Cate Caplin’s mounting at the Paramount Theatre in Charlottesville is more than competent despite some static and clunky blocking (due, perhaps, to the Paramount’s shallow stage area crowded with a large cast of 50 players) and a low energy level – neither of which seem to have bothered the near sell-out crowd in the audience, which thoroughly enjoyed the performance from start to finish.

Helping keep the balls in the air was conductor Jon Kalbfleisch, visiting from Signature Theatre in Arlington, who had the pleasure of directing a musical ensemble collected from around the country, including representatives from the Miami Symphony, Orlando Philharmonic, Florida Grand Opera, and Sarasota Orchestra. (Don’t they do music in Florida in the summer?) Sad to say, it was a nearly unique pleasure to hear a pit orchestra that was on pitch from the very first note of the overture to the last note of the bows. “Sad to say” because such discipline is all too rare in productions like this, and a greater pleasure on account of that.

It was a bit jarring, at first, to hear the principals’ operatic voices singing songs intended for musical-comedy actors. One could detect baritone Trevor Scheunemann (as Professor Harold Hill) fighting the urge to put full voice behind the patter songs that Willson so conscientiously wrote for the character (and not, as some might imagine, for the vocally-limited Robert Preston, who first played the role on Broadway).

Emily Albrink’s soprano is heavier than one might imagine Marion Paroo’s voice, suggesting a greater maturity than the 26-year-old character should possess. Still, her renditions of “Good Night, My Someone,” “Till There Was You,” “My White Knight,” and “Will I Ever Tell You” are lovely throughout.

(The maturity question comes into play in a couple of dubious casting choices. Sarah Kraus, who plays Marian’s mother, is about Albrink’s age and is simply unconvincing as an Irish immigrant in her mid- to late 40s. And baritone Christiaan Smith-Kotlarek is way too old to be playing teenager Tommy Djilas. Since that is largely a non-singing role, director Caplin could easily have given it to an additional young local actor, such as an older brother of those who fill out the hefty ensemble.)

Local actor Pat Owen – not an opera singer, but with a number of musical plays under his belt – is a blustery, curmudgeonly, grumpy, spooneristic Mayor Shinn. Paul Ford and David Burns would be proud to have him follow in their footsteps.

If any of the principals stood out, it had to be Meredith Arwady as Eulalie Mackecknie Shinn, the mayor’s wife. Chewing scenery shamelessly, Arwady had the audience eating it up with her and licking their fingers so as not to miss a bit. Every time she walked – or waltzed – on stage, the energy level in the theatre rose by several degrees. Obviously happy to have a role she could have fun with, Arwady played with it to the limit.

Speaking of limits, Ash Lawn Opera has long been known as short on dance and long on music, which makes sense given its mission. Consequently, the choreography in this production was simple – staged movement in most cases, some marching here and there. The dance break in “Marian the Librarian” was cut substantially, and the footbridge ballet was also circumscribed. (Why the soft-shoe encore of “Gary, Indiana,” a guaranteed applause getter, was also cut mystifies me.)

What dance there was, was executed mostly competently and effectively, although a few missteps could be detected -- not, as one might expect, from the youngest and most amateur members of the cast, but rather by the young opera artists, who seemed outside their element.

To be fair, The Music Man has never been a demanding dance show. The original production’s producers were confident enough to entrust the choreography to a first-timer, Onna White, in recognition of this fact. (White was rewarded with a Tony nomination, as it happens.)

The set design by Evan A. Bartoletti and Lisa D. Lechuga (billed together as Lechetti Design) evoked a 1912-ish Fourth of July in small-town Iowa without being too naturalistic. The dark tones might have been more at home on a Ragtime stage, but that did not detract too much from the atmosphere.

For his part, Stevie Agnew’s lighting design made ample use of a favorite technique of Morton Da Costa, the director of the original stage production and 1962 film of The Music Man – a tightly focused iris effect, isolating one or two actors at a critical moment of the play. Da Costa used it in Auntie Mame, as well, but the two plays had different lighting designers (Howard Bay on The Music Man, Peggy Clark on Auntie Mame), so the conceit seems to belong to the director. Bay, as it happens, was the first member of the creative team to sign up for The Music Man once Kermit Bloomgarden agreed to produce it; Da Costa joined up shortly afterward.

Special praise is due to costume designer Shon LeBlanc, if nothing else than for sheer output. There have to be 100 or more costumes in this show, and each one is true to the era and to the character it represents.

People today sometimes react with bewilderment when they learn that The Music Man beat out West Side Story for the best new musical Tony Award in 1958. They think that West Side Story, after all, was the edgier show and the one with a collaborative team of Revered Giants Of The Theatre – Bernstein, Laurents, Robbins, and Sondheim – plus it was “socially relevant.”

Yet even 55 years later, it’s clear that The Music Man is the better musical play: a more solid book, a more innovative score, more colorful characters, better-constructed and -integrated. West Side Story remains flawed at several levels (some flaws tracing back to Shakespeare) while The Music Man is still more fully formed, even in a strictly conventional production like the one Ash Lawn Opera is presenting in Charlottesville.

Note:  The Music Man holds a special place in my heart.  It was the first show I appeared in (post-high school), at St. Bernard's Studio Theatre in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin.  That show was 35 years ago this summer -- a 20th anniversary production of The Music Man that will always be remembered.

Ash Lawn Opera’s The Music Man has three more performances at the Paramount: August 4 at 7:30 p.m.; August 5 at 2:00 p.m.; and August 7 at 7:30 p.m. Each performance is preceded by a lecture that begins 45 minutes before curtain time. For ticket information, consult www.theparamount.net.

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Christmas in Milwaukee - 1967

Back in 2008, I offered my recollections of how my family celebrated Christmas as I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s.

Now I have some videos to illustrate those memories.

I have transferred some ancient home movies, filmed with a Super-8 millimeter camera, to digital format. Through them, one can follow the holiday celebrations of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in the year 1967.

Yes, 44 years ago. Almost half a century. I was eight years old. I don't remember what it was like to be eight years old, but at least I can see myself then again.

First, the early evening of Christmas Eve. On this occasion, the rotating responsibility of hosting the Czuta family and its branches by marriage (Benkert, Geilenfeldt, Jaeger, Michalak, and Sincere) fell to my parents, so the party was held at our house in Wauwatosa.

Can you believe that one acceptable Christmas present in those days was a decorative ashtray? (Watch carefully and you'll see it.)

Next, my family took to the road -- no doubt leaving the wrapping paper on the floor and half-empty highball glasses on the bar -- to visit with the Sincere family. The first sequence is at my grandparents' home on North 49th Street, with most of my dad's brothers and sisters (especially those who were not yet married) finding their way there as well.

The later sequence is at the home of my Uncle Bill and Aunt Lucy. Note the several pre-teen boys dressed in tacky Batman costumes. (Adam West would appreciate the gesture if not the execution.) Christmas Eve was about the only time that we kids were allowed to stay up well past midnight. My guess is that this footage was shot around 2:00 a.m., even as Santa Claus was gliding up above to deliver his presents to all the good girls and boys.

I'm sure if I uploaded just the 30 seconds or so of the Batman boys, that video would go viral.

Finally, Christmas morning arrives and it is time to open up those presents left behind by St. Nick.

The first 3'30" of this video takes place at the foot of the artificial Christmas tree at my own family's home on West Derby Avenue in Wauwatosa. The gifts that I open up, as toy poodle Tabitha bounds through the discarded wrapping paper, include a toy called "Incredible Edibles" and a "GI Joe Official Space Capsule," commemorating NASA's Gemini program. I also received a bowling ball (it weighed eight pounds, one pound for each year of my age, and did not yet have finger holes drilled into it).

Later, we traveled to the home of my grandparents, Chester and Josephine Michalak, on Spring Drive in Brookfield. Santa left behind a big haul for me and my cousins, Julie and Sheri (my sister, Cathy, and their sister, Jennifer, had not yet been born; our other cousins, Jason and Chris, were more than a decade in the future). Apparently I really liked that tacky Batman costume, since I wore it Christmas morning.

Whether this was a history lesson or simply an exercise in nostalgia, I don't know.

In any case, I wish you a Merry Christmas (1967!) and a Happy New Year!

Time Capsule

A few months ago, the Wauwatosa Historical Society put out a call for reminiscences of the Wauwatosa fire department.  The idea was to collect memories and memorabilia to put into a time capsule that will be embedded in the new fire department headquarters building.

I responded to the request with an original Wauwatosa News-Times edition featuring photographs and an article about the fire that ravaged my family's house in July 1975, along with the two blog posts I did about that event, printed on paper.

The latest issue of the Historic Wauwatosa newsletter reports that I was one of four people who answered the call.  I suppose it's a good thing that more people did not have recollections of interactions with the fire department -- it means most homes were not touched by disaster.

So I guess my materials will be immortalized -- or at least be found by some future generation that opens the time capsule.  I wonder if those who dig it up will be human or alien.  Will they be able to read 21st century English?

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Community Theatre - Part Five

Yesterday the world remembered the first time men set foot on the lunar surface, 40 years after that event took place on July 20, 1969.

Today a smaller number of people -- perhaps as small as one, but I hope more than that -- mark the 30th anniversary of the final performance of Fiddler on the Roof by St. Bernard's Studio Theatre in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, on July 21, 1979.

On previous occasions, I have posted photos and video of other St. Bernard's productions that I was involved in -- Meredith Willson's The Music Man (in two parts), Sandy Wilson's The Boy Friend, and The Fantasticks -- and one production from before my participation, Hello, Dolly!

Our Fiddler on the Roof was, in a way, a 15th anniversary production, since the original Broadway show had been produced in 1964 with stars Zero Mostel, Beatrice Arthur, and Maria Karnilova. We didn't think of it that way, however; we made it our own.

I have so many memories of St. Bernard's Fiddler that I don't know where to begin.

Like how I ended up (I still don't know how) sharing the principal women's dressing room: Just me (as Motel Kamzoil, the tailor) along with Golde, Yente, Tzeitel, Chava, Hodel, Sprintze, and Bielke. And nobody raised an eyebrow.

Or that we were performing in an un-air-conditioned school gymnasium during the dog days of summer, dressed like peasants during a Russian winter -- and dancing in those heavy clothes, to boot!

Or how this was perhaps the most glaringly goyishe production of Fiddler on the Roof in history. (None of the men, except for the two actors portraying Tevye, wore beards. And nobody, to be sure, wore forelocks.) There was even a crucifix hanging in the boys' dressing room! At least we all kept our heads covered.

This beardlessness resulted in, for instance, the rabbi (played by John T. Lynch) looking more like a Catholic priest officiating at Motel and Tzeitel's (that is, mine and Patty Fricke's) wedding than he looked like a, well, a rabbi.

There could be one competitor to our vanilla version of Fiddler on the Roof: the Arkansas community theatre production of Fiddler, once described to me by Tim Hulsey, in which Tevye narrates in an unmistakable Southern drawl. At least the good people of Wauwatosa could speak in the vaguely mitteleuropäische dialect so typical of Wisconsin. ("Tzeitel, come here one time." "Tevye's cow is lame again, aina hey?")

Last year I found an audio cassette recording of one of the performances of Fiddler; I think it was our charity show on Wednesday, July 18. I integrated part of that audio with a slideshow and posted it to YouTube. Unsurprisingly -- given the limited scope of interest in photos of a 30-year-old community theatre production of a classic Broadway musical -- there have only been 77 views on YouTube since I posted it htere last summer. Nonetheless, for the sake of history and of those who were there, here it is:

The St. Bernard's production of Fiddler was reviewed by The Milwaukee Journal, on the front page of the Accent (lifestyle and entertainment) section:




Looking back at the photographs from that summer (when I was, gasp, 20 years old) brings back many happy memories. (That despite the gasoline shortages, hyperinflation, and general sense of malaise that most people recall when they think of 1979.) Here are a few extracted from the video slideshow.















That should give you a good idea of what a shtetl looks like in Wauwatosa.



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Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

One morning earlier this week, as I was preparing to leave for the Tuesday Morning Group Coalition monthly meeting in Richmond, I became aware of the presence of several emergency vehicles in and near my cul de sac: fire trucks, an ambulance, and at least one police car.

At first I thought there was a fire, but it turned out to be something different -- an idling car had escaped its parking brake and crashed into a nearby house.

While both the car and home owner must have been grateful that the damage was not significant (and that nobody was hurt), the incident flashed a memory of mine.

During my first year as a blogger, I wrote about the time my house nearly burned down. That was 34 years ago today: July 17, 1975. The fire was big enough that it landed on the first page of the local newspaper on July 24 (the Wauwatosa News-Times, founded in 1898 but now, as far as I know, defunct) -- with not one but two photographs.



One picture appeared above the fold.



The caption reads:

In the Line of Duty

PARAMEDIC JESSE MORENO (right) ministered to a fellow-paramedic, Acting Lieutenant Jim Filber, who suffered from smoke inhalation while serving at the scene of a residence fire July 17. Awaiting treatment, Lt. John Accola mirrored the exhaustion of local firemen who fought the $50,000 blaze. Also on the scene was Reserve Policeman Grant Schmidt, one of several members of the Police and Fire Reserves who aided at the scene. Moreno and five other firemen also were treated later for smoke inhalation. Story on Pg. 3. (Photo by Arthur C. Hombsch)

The second picture appeared below the fold, but in the prominent lower right-hand corner.



Its caption reads:

Fire-Call Figures

LEAVING THE SCENE of a major fire last Thursday night, Wauwatosa Fire Chief Byard Sheldon (in white coat) followed Jim Washcovick, on-duty assistant chief, as the two left the Richard Sincere home at 1503 N. 70th St. The fire had just been brought under control after having been fought for almost three hours. Eight Tosa firemen were treated for smoke inhalation from the blaze which caused an estimated $50,000 damage to the residence and its contents. (Photo by Arthur C. Hombsch)

The story on page 3 provided a few more details than the captions on page 1 did.



The text reads:

Nine Tosa Firemen Treated after $50,000 Blaze

Three Wauwatosa firemen were taken to hospitals and six more treated for smoke inhalation at the scene of a $50,000 blaze at 1503 N. 70th St. July 17, according to the latest Wauwatosa Fire Department report.

The fire began when wiring in a pinball machine short-circuited. The fire quickly spread from its origin in a basement recreation room through air ducts to other portions of the house. Damage was estimated at $35,000 to the house and $15,000 to contents.

Three firemen suffering from smoke inhalation were transported to hospitals. Firefighter Larry Tesch was taken to County General and Firefighters Peter Ernst and Lee Werner were taken to St. Luke’s.

Among those treated at the scene were Asst. Chief James Washcovick, who strained some shoulder and arm muscles moving a hose to the second floor; Lts. John Accola and Frank Jankowski, and Firefighters Jesse Moreno, George Polly and James Filber. Filber also sustained a burn on his leg and Jankowski was treated for a cut hand.

One of the interesting things about finding the Wauwatosa News-Times report on my family's personal adversity was seeing some of the items in the paper that put the event in historical context. For instance, there was this photo/story about the new Bicentennial coins being produced by the U.S. Mint:



The caption says:

'Change' of Design

A BIG CHANGE IN SMALL CHANGE will appear when these new Bicentennial coins start circulating throughout the nation and, of course, in Wauwatosa. The quarter, half-dollar and dollar shown here will bear the same head but the dates 1776-1976 will be stamped underneath. On the tails of the three coins are a colonial drummer on the quarter; Independence Hall on the half-dollar; and the Liberty Bell and moon on the dollar. The Federal Reserve System will start distributing the Bicentennial half-dollar to financial institutions July 7. The other two coins will be released by the U.S. Mint before the end of the year.

What really demonstrates the historical context are the advertisements scattered throughout the newspaper. For instance, these two restaurant ads (fish fry with a free stein of beer $2.65! prime rib dinner $5.95!) would make anyone's mouth water, Pavlov-dog style:





Then there are the ads that remind us how much technology (and our expectations and familiarity of it) has changed.

Remember typewriters? And typewriter shops?



Remember when people paid to have a television repaired, rather than just buying a new one?



Now here's something I don't remember: Businesses offering lessons in how to use a microwave oven. Did anyone reading this ever take a class like this?



By coincidence, I just bought a new microwave the other day. I paid $39.00 at Walmart to replace one that I bought just about three years ago at Target. That one shorted out. The microwave oven I had before that lasted more than 20 years: I bought it in 1984 at Sears for about $400, which was a lot of money back then.

Oh, for the good ol' days!

Post script: That same issue of the Wauwatosa News-Times also included a feature article about St. Bernard's Studio Theatre's summer production of Hello, Dolly!



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Community Theatre - Part Four

On three previous occasions (usually toward the middle of the year), I have posted reminiscences of my summers with St. Bernard's Studio Theatre in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin.

The first two posts offered video and photographs from the summer of 1977, when we mounted a twentieth anniversary production of Meredith Willson's The Music Man.

Last August I posted photos and video of The Boy Friend and The Fantasticks, which we presented in repertory during July 1978.

This time around I am posting something about a show that was produced before I became a participant in St. Bernard's Studio Theatre -- the company's inaugural production of Hello, Dolly!, which went up in the summer of 1975.

The coincidence that brought this material to my attention was a very old, very wrinkled, and very yellowed copy of the Wauwatosa News-Times from July 24, 1975, which had on its cover two photographs taken when my family's house was nearly destroyed by fire. (It goes without saying why I kept the newspaper in my archives.) I just happened to leaf through the paper and discovered inside a photograph and article about Hello, Dolly! that I had never seen before.

My guess is few people have seen this material in the past 33.5 years, either. So, while my inclination was to wait until July to post these clippings, I had to ask: Why wait?

The article mentions several people I remember fondly from my few years with the Studio Theatre company, which was as much a family as it was a performance troupe. The article gives a sense of why this was:

The rousing musical has a cast of 90 amateur performers all from Wauwatosa and surrounding areas, ranging in age from five to 52 years old....

Edward Leahy ..., father of 10 children and one of two men taking the leading role of Horace Vandergelder, will ease through an intricate soft shoe dance with Dolly and some 20 men, representing two generations, in another highlight of the show.

Some of Leahy's family also will be actively engaged in the two weekend productions. Brian, 20, is producer of the show and a member of the chorus. Mrs. Leahy, Danny, Kathleen, and Gerald also are in the chorus and Maureen and Ned are members of the stage crew.

Other families who will participate in the show are Mr. and Mrs. Gordon Rise (he is the other Horace Vandergelder) and Sharon and Scott...; James Jacobs and daughter Patty...; William Staudenmaier and daughter Ann Marie...; Mrs. Irene Alberte, one of two who will do the role of Dolly, and children Lisa, Nancy, and Paul...; and Charles White and daughters Vicki and Peggy....

"Hello Dolly" is being directed and choreographed by Rozeann Campbell..., a teacher of dance at Divine Savior-Holy Angels High School and well-known in Wauwatosa theater. Her oldest daughter, Marla, has done the art work on the set while 15-year-old Suzann is costume mistress and Kimberly, 8, will sing in the chorus.

That pattern of family participation repeated itself in subsequent years: Ed Leahy played Mayor Shinn in The Music Man, Gordon Rise was one of two Tevyes in Fiddler on the Roof, and Irene Alberte played my mother in The Boy Friend, to give just three examples -- and each year also saw their own family members in cast and crew.

Click on the images below to embiggen and read the full article for yourself.








I promise more community theatre memories will be posted this summer.

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Community Theatre - Part Three

About fourteen months ago, I posted video and photographs from my first experience in community theatre, a production of Meredith Willson's The Music Man at St. Bernard's Studio Theatre in my hometown of Wauwatosa, Wisconsin.

After going off to Georgetown University, where I performed in my first college theatre show (Stephen Sondheim and Larry Gelbart's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) and working backstage on several other productions, I returned to Milwaukee the following summer and had my first experience of performing in repertory.

In the summer of 1978, St. Bernard's Studio Theatre for the first time (but not the last) produced two shows and performed them on alternate nights. While my expectations at auditions were not particularly high -- I was just looking forward to joining my friends in the joy of putting on a show -- it turned out that I was cast in major roles in both plays. It was the first time in my (short) career on stage that I was able to play the romantic lead, the male ingenue and title role in Sandy Wilson's The Boy Friend, and also the first chance I had to play a character role, The Old Actor in Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt's long-running off-Broadway gem, The Fantasticks.

(Back at Georgetown in subsequent years, this would turn out to be a pattern: playing naive boys and eccentric characters in such shows as Lanford Wilson's The Hot l Baltimore and Neil Simon's The Good Doctor.)

Around the same time that I found and edited the Super-8mm film-to-video transfer of scenes from The Music Man, I also found archival film of The Boy Friend and The Fantasticks. I posted the scenes from The Fantasticks over a year ago on YouTube, where it has had a trickle of traffic, and I posted The Boy Friend footage a few weeks ago.

I recently discovered, however, that I also had a live audio recording of a performance of The Fantasticks. (I also found another audio recording of just Act II from a rehearsal some months later; read on for the explanation. The Act I tape must exist somewhere, but it was not kept with its counterpart.) So I decided to re-edit the old footage, add a few photos, and superimpose the live audio -- as best I could, given the non-professional editing software I use -- onto the video.

Considering that I had to digitize excerpts from deteriorated 30-year-old audio cassette tapes without the benefit of high-end hardware, the result is pretty good. In fact, I was able to match the movements to the sound almost precisely in the "Episode" sequence that begins at marker 00:38 on the video playback. (The last few minutes of the audio track have some distortions, but those should not be too distracting -- I hope.)

I wonder if this effort indicates that I have an unseemly fetish for historical preservation of documents and artifacts? Or does it offer justification for my being a lifelong packrat, to the consternation -- and sometimes exasperation -- of my friends?

Here, then, is the newly re-edited video of The Fantasticks, as presented by St. Bernard's Studio Theatre in July 1978. (The audio was recorded at a special performance on Wednesday, July 19, in that year.)

The Boy Friend had more official performances in July 1978 than The Fantasticks (4 vs. 3) and it also had a considerably larger cast, which meant more friends and family enticed to see the show. (This was my sister's first performance on a public stage; those who know her will recognize her, at 7 years of age, in the "Sur la Plage" sequence.) Considering that both shows were performed in the gymnasium of a Catholic parish school, with much of the cast emerging from the same parish's members, drawing an audience from extended families was an easy expectation.

For those who don't know it, The Boy Friend is a pastiche of 1920s musicals. It uses every cliche from that era: an exotic setting (the French Riviera), aristocratic characters (including mine, who was pretending to be working-class to escape his overbearing parents), a lonely rich girl, a randy French maid, a flirtatious secondary female lead, and an older man with an eye for younger ladies. The music echoes Gershwin, Berlin, Rodgers, Porter, and other composers of the era. The lyrics work for what they're meant to do, but none of the songs are particularly memorable in their own right in the way the compositions of those giants being aped were. Wilson later went on to write something of a sequel, a pastiche of 1930s musicals called Divorce Me, Darling!, which did not have the same staying power or appeal that The Boy Friend has enjoyed. (There is, however, a recording that has developed a cult following.)

Perhaps it was unusually precocious discernment on the part of my 19-year-old theatre maven's brain, with the (correct) judgment that The Fantasticks is a superior musical play, or perhaps I was just neglectful, but I failed to make an audio recording of any performance or rehearsal of The Boy Friend that summer. Consequently, this video has as its soundtrack excerpts from the Broadway OCR, featuring Julie Andrews in her first New York role (preceding My Fair Lady by one season).

In any case, here is what may be the only archival video of the 1978 production of The Boy Friend at St. Bernard's Studio Theatre:

Both shows had something of an afterlife.

A couple of weeks after we closed, we had an opportunity to perform a handful of songs from The Boy Friend at an enclosed shopping mall in suburban Milwaukee. (To be truthful, I don't remember which mall it was; perhaps someone from the cast may remember and post the information in the comments section, below.)

What I do remember is how disorienting the experience was. (She wasn't around then, but I imagine it must be how Tiffany must have felt years later.) The acoustics were atrocious; we could barely hear the people singing five feet away from us, much less hear the piano next to the stage. While a few shoppers stopped to see what was happening, most went about their business, chattering more loudly than they usually would in order to be heard above our music.

Still, it was fun to get back together with fellow cast members in August, before people dispersed to go to school or on last-minute vacations. It might have been the last time I wore that red jacket and white Gatsbyish hat.

Months later, St. Bernard's Studio Theatre was given an opportunity to put on a benefit performance for the Wauwatosa Junior Women's Club. Rozeann Campbell, our director, choreographer, and producer, decided that revisiting The Fantasticks would be best.

Although the benefit, to be performed at Wauwatosa West High School, was scheduled for February 24, in the middle of the school year, I could not pass up the opportunity to do a "revival." So I flew home from Washington in time to do one rehearsal and the performance. We had to do some reblocking, because the Tosa West auditorium had a proscenium stage and our original production had been done on a thrust stage, but the adaptation was relatively seamless.

The rest is something of a blur. The auditorium was full, there were friends and family in the audience, and we had a terrific cast party afterwards. And I flew back to Georgetown feeling a bit puffed up and prematurely professional.

A bit of a backtrack here: Over Thanksgiving Weekend in 1978, I made my first-ever trip to New York City. At the top of my list of things to do was to see the original production of The Fantasticks at the Sullivan Street Playhouse. At that time, it had been playing continuously for more than 18 years; there were still more than 22 years left in its original run of 17,162 performances. It was a stirring event for me, as it would be for any musical theatre geek.

Ironically, the other show I saw during that trip was the musical version of the cult movie, King of Hearts, which only managed 48 performances, another flop by Joseph Stein.

Speaking of Joseph Stein, come back a year from now and I'll tell the story of St. Bernard's Fiddler on the Roof. If you can't wait, you can see the video on YouTube now. (It's more of a slide show with authentic performance audio, however.)