July 5-28
7 p.m. Thurs. to Sat.
3 p.m. Sunday
Anchorage Community Theatre, 1133 E. 70th Ave.
$15 adults, $13 students, senior and military
actalaska.org
Posted: Thursday, July 11, 2013 12:28 pm | Updated: 12:31 pm, Thu Jul 11, 2013.
Colleen Bailey
Summer theater in Alaska is a tricky thing to pull off. When you combine fishing trips, camping excursions, and long, lazy nights sipping beer on the lawn, it’s hard to get an audience to spend a couple hours indoors. It’s even harder to get a set of actors, crew, and volunteers to commit to the long hours it takes to produce a show. Despite the odds, Anchorage Community Theatre’s production of Roger Bean’s The Marvelous Wonderettes hits the nail on the head, providing an evening of escapism in the form of heady nostalgia and sweet sentimentality.
At the core of director David Block’s team is the tight ensemble cast, featuring the four “Wonderettes,” a voiceover, and some audience participants (tip—if being singled out is totally not your thing, don’t sit in the front row). The year is 1958, and it’s prom night. Billy Ray Patton, the lead singer of the Crooning Crabcakes, has been suspended for smoking behind the girls’ locker room, so now what? It looks like it’s up to Betty Jean (Emily Foreman), Cindy Lou (Emily Littlefield), Missy (Megan Perkins), and Suzy (Lisa Willis) to step up and provide prom night entertainment. With a doo-wop inspired soundtrack and four-part harmonies, the girls sing their hearts out to win prom queen—and points with the boys.
As the night unfolds, the perfect poise of the foursome unravels to reveal secrets—cheating boyfriends, boyfriend stealing (yes, the two are related), inappropriate feelings for the choir teacher—all set to music by The Chordettes, The Everly Brothers, Bobby Darin and more. Act One wraps up at the end of the senior prom, with the crowning of the new queen and the end of an era—and possibly the end of some friendships as well. Act Two picks up 10 years later, at the Springfield High 10-year high school reunion, where the Wonderettes have been asked to provide the entertainment. By this time love, loss, marriage, and family have all taken their toll, and the girls must put differences aside and support each other through difficult times. Up to this point, the show has a frivolous and light-hearted tone, but when Cindy Lou (Littlefield) sings a soulful rendition of “Maybe” by the Chantels under a blue stage light, it finally breaks through the candy coating, a poignant contrast between high school problems and grown-up tragedies.
Less of a standard musical, which features a dialogue-heavy script with incidental musical numbers, Wonderettes is more of an operetta. That is, the dialogue only serves to set up the next song, with simple choreography that looks designed to be stilted and unsure—after all, The Wonderettes weren’t the first choice in prom night entertainment. The result of this format, however, is the dialogue itself remains clumsy throughout the show. This looks to be a fault in the script, though, and not a failing on the part of the actresses. Though the lines are unimaginative, the four veteran actresses embraced the simplicity and created well-rounded performances, with sharp timing that had the audiences laughing.
The Marvelous Wonderettes has a well balanced and very talented cast, including an Anchorage Opera resident artist (Willis), a veteran of a New York City conservatory (Perkins), a former resident thespian of San Diego (Littlefield) and a young high school graduate who will be enrolling in a theater and music program in Virginia this fall (Foreman). Each actress brought an impressive singing voice to the stage, performing without the aid of microphones. ACT’s small stage, however, is not necessarily built for the four-part powerhouse of these ladies, and there were times when the balance was off and one voice dominated the others.
Wonderettes plays only til the end of July so, if you can, put the fishing pole down, grab your main squeeze and head down to ACT for a little trip down memory lane. Singing along is not unheard of in a show like this, and who knows? Maybe your pick for prom queen will be the winner. Mine was.
