Little theatre fall river
#Little theatre fall river series#
Whereas Cathy can be a rollercoaster of insecurity and passion, Jamie is a series of contradictions. That doesn’t make portraying him any easier. While Cathy delivers her narrative from the end to the beginning, Jamie gets to present his version of their relationship in a more linear way.
Yes, she’s falling in love, but she’s also steeling herself for every outcome, and so the end result doesn’t seem as jarring as it does inevitable, which is ultimately far more tragic. What I loved about her performance was the approach she took in Cathy’s younger scenes, where instead of just being bubbly and cheerful, you see that she’s someone who has to strive to trust. She has a fantastic voice that just got better and better as she reached some of Cathy’s more vocally gymnastic moments. Lundquist hit all the right notes in the early part of the show, both dramatically and musically. She gets her most dramatic moment two songs into the show, and from there, slides backward from heartbroken and frustrated to lovestruck and hopeful (wonderful if you’re Cathy, tough if you’re whoever is playing her). They sounded absolutely gorgeous.Īdina Lundquist has the unenviable task of taking Cathy from the present to the past, as well as finding a way to make her something outside of the desperate and high-strung actress stereotype. High praise also should be heaped onto the musicians, Michael Coelho (conductor), Eli Bigelow (piano), William Buonocore (guitar), Sam Kurzontkowski (bass), and Sarah Nichols (cello). It’s really easy to make the mistake of over-directing a show that allows for this much interpretation, but he let his actors shine, while not allowing for self-indulgence, which is another major trap when a show is so heavily focused on performance and emotion. Tarantino’s direction and music direction are commendable. The video quality was excellent, and I thought the sound quality was some of the best I’ve seen from a digital production, so Jose Cabral deserves a lot of praise for that, as well as for co-stage managing with Pat Taylor, who also handled props. The set design by Nathan Tarantino had all that detailing, as did the lighting from David Faria. The Last Five Years has become a go-to for smaller theaters because it’s both a performance powerhouse with two of the best roles in musical theater and requires virtually nothing in the way of spectacle, although I thought Little Theatre did a great job of finding the balance in a design that’s effective while understanding that what might read well in front of an audience needs to be even more detailed if you’re going to put it on film. The musical moves forward and backward, only allowing the two characters to meet when they reach the middle of the story. The show begins with Cathy having just learned that Jamie has left her only to transition into Jamie’s experience of just having met Cathy. It follows Jamie, a writer, and Cathy, an actress, as they navigate the highs and lows of dating and then marriage. After premiering in Chicago in 2001, it played Off-Broadway and quickly became the most talked-about show among musical theater aficionados and the most performed show in musical theater auditions. The show is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, and wow, does it continue to hold up. The company has made a name for itself over the past few years for reaching outside the predictable slew of titles that get mountings on smaller stages, but right in the sweet spot between “cult classic” and “beloved” is Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years. The latest comes from The Little Theatre of Fall River. I remember speaking to someone a year ago about what kind of shows could be produced successfully without an audience and with limited resources, and the answer came back, “Anything but a musical.”Īnd yet, we’ve seen that proven false with a string of recent productions that have found just the right mixture of intimacy and theatricality to make a digital musical not just work, but, well, sing.
#Little theatre fall river how to#
One of the great ironies that’ll be written about when people start assessing what the performing arts was like during the pandemic is that most of us only started figuring out how to do this whole digital theater thing right as the light was appearing at the end of the tunnel. “If I hadn’t believed in you I wouldn’t have loved you at all”