If you blinked, you may have missed seeing the latest version of [title of show] at Playhouse Square’s small theater, The Helen. Directed by Victoria Bussert with Matthew Webb as music director, it featured Baldwin Wallace musical theater students. There were only four shows (April 25—27).
The now-classic musical premiered in 2008 at New York City’s Lyceum Theatre with creators Hunter Bell (book), Jeff Bowen (music and lyrics), Susan Blackwell, and Heidi Blickenstaff playing themselves.
Saturday night’s performance offered an engrossing dramatization of the stress, uncertainty, and yearning for acceptance that writers (and other creators, to be fair) deal with every time they strive to complete a play (or a novel or-—anything, even a review).
The lively cast of four — I saw the “Bell Cast” (Jake Van Eycken as Jeff; Nic Rhew as Hunter, Eileen Brady as Susan, and Avery Fahey as Heidi) — all sang, danced, and debated with attractive conviction as they encouraged, doubted, and — hooray! — finally succeeded in completing a play to submit to a competition. At the end, they had to wonder (since it described their lives writing a play) “Where do we stop?”
The closing anthem sung by the whole cast, “Nine People’s Favorite Thing,” provided the perfect answer as they agreed they would rather “be nine people’s favorite thing/ Than a hundred people’s ninth favorite thing.”
Bottom Line: [title of show] still inspires as it gives emerging stars a place to shine.
[Written by Laura Kennelly]