76 Trombones parade into Forest Theater

Craig Schieber's last experience with "The Music Man" at the Kitsap Forest Theater was 15 years ago. He said the version he's directing there now won't bear much of a resemblance.

"Sixteen years ago, I don't think I had an appreciation for this show," said Schieber, who's directed at least one of the Mountaineers Players' two annual productions at the Forest Theatre since 2000. "When we did it then, we had most of the stage covered in boardwalk, big buildings, and the big house up on the mound."

But Schieber has learned a lot in his years putting on shows in the idyllic amphitheater, carved out of old-growth forest in the early 1920s and active as a performance venue ever since. For this year's "Music Man," he's gone two-dimensional.

"We really had fun with this one," he said. "We've got some furniture, some chairs, and we've got a piano. Pretty much everything else is two-dimensional flats.

"This is a real change" from the 2001 production, he said.

Schieber said he and set designer Chris Stanley originally had talked about doing pretty much the same set up as they had done in 2001. In recent years, though, Schieber has had good success with a more fluid style of storytelling, eschewing stationary pieces for flats carried by ensemble cast members, still getting the job done visually but giving him the option of moving the entire "set" on and off in a few seconds.

"We were walking around the stage area, and we both just decided, 'Nah, we don't want to do what we did before. We're older and wiser."

"The Music Man," Meredith Willson's classic tale (and his only significant hit) about a flimflam man who transforms and is transformed by a backwater Iowa town and its naive inhabitants, actually lends itself pretty well to the Forest Theater's al fresco aesthetic. Most of the production numbers already take place in the out-of-doors, and those that don't are easily representable with Schieber's portable-set strategy.

"We're using some two-sided flats that'll take you right inside a building," Schieber said. "For the library, we have one side that's the outside, and then we just flip them around and it's the inside."

The library, for those not already in the know about what transpires in "The Music Man," is ground zero, where the mysterious Harold Hill, in town to sell the idea of a boys' band, and the staid librarian Marian Paroo each meet their match.

"The Music Man" debuted on Broadway in 1957, but it has endured on the strength of its tremendous story and even better songs: "Goodnight, My Someone," "Seventy-Six Trombones," "My White Knight," "The Wells Fargo Wagon, "Till There Was You," and several et ceteras. It didn't win five Tony Awards, including Best Musical, for not being any good. But its music, and its outlook, are as refreshing now as it was nearly six decades ago.

"I'm playing a little bit with that whole veneer that we all have in society, and that is so much a part of this show," Schieber said. "What's interesting is what the characters are dealing with right underneath that veneer, the layers each of us has, that kind of yin-and-yang of life."

Jason Gingold, who went green to play the title character in last summer's "Shrek," will be the Mountaineers' Harold Hill, with Beavan Walters — a Mountaineers regular who starred as Maria in 2010's "The Sound of Music" and worked alongside Gingold in 2014's "Honk!" — cast as Marian. Both also have children joining them in the mammoth (more than 50) cast, an example of what Schieber said was his favorite thing about the 2016 version of "The Music Man."

"The whole idea of 'The Music Man' is community," he said, "and I think it's really great the number of families we have in our cast. I can't think of a year when we've had more, and cast members as young as a 5-year-old and a grandma.

"Kitsap Sun article here.