Kitsap Sun, by Michael C. Moore, BREMERTON — There was a time when “Honk!”, a musical-theater version of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Ugly Duckling,” seemed poised to become the toast of Broadway.

But no one, at the time, was in the mood.

“I think it would’ve been a big success,” said Adam Othman, who’s directing the Mountaineers Players’ production of the show that opens May 25 at the Kitsap Forest Theater. “It was testing out in the U.S., and looked like it was going to be a big hit, but then the whole 9/11 thing happened.”

A success in its birthplace of London, where it won the Olivier Award (the Brits’ equivalent of the Tonys) for Best Musical in 2000, “Honk!” seemed like a sure bet for a similar reception across the pond. After the events of 9/11, however, no one was in much of a play-going mood, and the show moved onto a virtual back burner.

“It’s a shame,” said Othman, who’s a veteran of decades of shows around the Seattle area (including KFT, where he first appeared in 1987, and most recently in 2011’s “Into the Woods”). “This show is one of those undiscovered classics. It was bad timing that it didn’t get on Broadway, but a lot of people knew about it, and it developed a following.

“It has a lot of heart, and the music is very rich and deep,” he added of the show that will mark his KFT directing debut.

The musical — with music by George Stiles and book and lyrics by Anthony Drewe — might not be familiar to a lot of people as other entries in its genre, but the story certainly is: The “ugly duckling” endures the ridicule and ostracism of his peers, only to mature into a beautiful swan.

“It’s a good show for this place, and the audience they get here,” Othman said. “It’s a family show, and it’s got a good message about tolerance, and that beauty is only skin deep.”

As usual for the Mountaineers — who conducted auditions for its 2014 season in both Seattle and Kitsap — the show is a family affair on stage as well as in the galleries.

“We knew we would get the people out (to audition),” Othman said. “For this show, it was a matter of getting the right mix of people, both adults and kids. One of the great things about this theater is that you can have kids and their parents in the same show.”

There are several family connections in the cast of “Honk!”, including Beavan Walters and her daughter, Sophie, who play matriarch Ida and one of her ducklings. The two have been paired previously at KFT, most notably as Maria Rainer and the youngest Von Trapp child in “The Sound of Music.” (Her son, Scooter, is also in his very first KFT show!).

Several others who’ve done memorable turns in past KFT productions are in Othman’s cast, including Jenny Dreessen and Megan Castillo. But there are some newcomers who will make an impression as well, including Nick McCarthy, who plays Ugly, and Jason Gingold as a conniving cat who pretends to befriend Ugly when all he’s really interested in is eating him.

“There’s a lot of wonderful song-and-dance in the show,” Othman said. “A lot of it is slightly vaudeville-esque. But there’s also a lot of sincerity, in the ballads that Ugly and his mom sing, and as he goes through this whole process of finding out who he is.”

Musical direction is by Amy Beth Nolte, a veteran of several KFT shows both in that capacity and as a performer. Costumer Barbara Klingberg might well find herself up to her elbows in feathers for this show, and choreographer Heather Dawson’s dance steps will be performed at the waddle. Keyboard accompaniment will come from Greg Smith And Victoria Casteel.

“I’ve worked with Amy Beth here before,” Othman said. “As soon as I got this (assignment), I knew I wanted her for musical director. Heather’s new here, but she’s worked with me (with the student program at Seattle Prep, which he directs).
 

The following review was written by Michael Moore of the Kitsap Sun.

BREMERTON — This feedback is going to be partly about the feedback.

I think the Mountaineers Players have a fair-to-middlin’ production of “The Secret Garden” going on up at the Kitsap Forest Theater. At the July 28 performance I attended, though, there were more than the usual distractions that kept the charming story of the power of love from being as effective as it might’ve been under Craig Schieber’s warm yet efficient direction.

The show has plenty going for it, starting with impressive vocal performances by several of its leads, sterling accompaniment by keyboardist Greg Smith (the lone musician in music director Julia Thornton’s charge) and visual contributions from Barbara Klingberg (who designed both the splendid costumes and the minimal yet evocative set) to overcome those “usual” distractions — an atmosphere that is part stage play and part family picnic, with the ambient noise from young children and restless adults, the wind in the branches and the roar of airplanes from the nearby Bremerton Airport.

Throw in a sound system that was scratchier’n a new wool sweater, though, and things get a little dicier, as they did for the opening weekend’s Sunday matinee. Speakers buzzed and burped, microphones cut in and out ... With as modest a crowd as braved Sunday afternoon’s cool (which really wasn’t bad at all), they might’ve been better off ditching the mics and asking everyone just to slide on down to the front.

Once there, they would’ve found much to entertain and move them. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s beloved story, effectively adapted by librettist Marsha Norman and composer Lucy Simon, is treacle — but it’s well-done treacle that provides a number of opportunities for really good singers to show off.

Two Kitsap residents are among those who take the most advantage. Sara Henley-Hicks, making her first appearance at KFT, gives full, but just short of operatic, voice to ghostly Lily, while Eric Emans is also tremendous as conflicted Neville.

But Emans has to take a back seat for man of the match to the lovely tenor of Stephen Leigh Jones, who plays Neville’s even-more-conflicted brother, Archibald, who’s still grieving the loss of his wife by cutting himself off from anyone who reminds him of her.

Into the brothers’ unhappy home lands Mary Lennox, whose parents have been claimed by a cholera outbreak in their Indian outpost. Archibald is Mary’s uncle, but sees too much of his beloved Lily in the little girl’s face upon her arrival and soon exiles himself to his flat in Paris.

As Mary, 9-year-old Jasmine Harrick is whip-smart and feisty from the get-go, but gradually warms to the task of bringing love back to gloom-ridden, haunted Misselthwaite Manor. The youngest cast member is a fine singer and holds her own in the acting department, too. She also has extensive movement on her plate, part of the atmospheric choreography by Guy Caridi.

Mary’s posse at Misselthwaite includes chambermaid Martha and her brother, Dickon (Britt Boyd and Tristan Carruthers), Ben the gardner (Carl Olson) and Colin (Cymbeline Brody), who’s bedridden under Neville’s overprotective care. Both Olson and Brody are Kitsap products, and both add strong acting performances.

It all turns out well in the end, as you knew it would. But the joy in “The Secret Garden” is in the telling.

If you can hear it, you’ll like it.

Kitsap Sun Preview, July 15, 2013, by Michael Moore

BREMERTON — Craig Schieber sees dead people ... as a resource.

The Mountaineers Players director puts ’em to work.

“We’ve certainly had some experience here recently with ghosts,” said Schieber, who directed the Mountaineers recent production of “Fiddler on the Roof” (funny ghosts), and currently is prepping “The Secret Garden” (melancholy ghosts), both at the al fresco Kitsap Forest Theater.

“The ghosts become the walls, they become part of the scenery,” said Schieber. “We take them and make them functional.”

And it doesn’t stop with ghosts, either. If you’re in an ensemble, you’re conscripted, either to move set pieces, or to actually be set pieces.

“One of the rules I have is to never have an empty stage,” said Schieber, who directs at least one of the Mountaineers’ two annual productions at the bucolic amphitheater carved out of a hillside nestled among blooming rhododendrons and hulking evergreens. “When we use the chorus (and in this case the ghosts) like that, it really helps us keep things moving, and not have any of those dead spots.”

The set this time — both the ghostly and non-ghostly aspects of it — is being handled by Barbara Klingberg, well known around Kitsap more for her costuming wizardry. But the former Broadway costumer, who’s now a Bainbridge-based architect, told Schieber she had wanted to do a set for a long time.

“It makes a lot of sense, actually,” Schieber said of Klingberg, who also acts on occasion and has whipped up the costumes for productions at Ovation! Musical Theatre Bainbridge and Bainbridge Performing Arts in addition to her work for the Mountaineers. “The two things work so closely together, she would want to have her eye on both of them.”

The cast is pretty Kitsap-centric, compared to the Mountaineers’ normally Seattle-dominated companies. It includes Eric Emans, who was in KFT’s “Robin Hood” several years ago, and has appeared on several other Kitsap stages since, as Neville Craven; Sara Henley-Hicks, a regular at Port Orchard’s Western Washington Center for the Arts before beginning her college studies at Cornish, as Lily; Carl Olson, a venerable actor and director around Kitsap, in two supporting roles; and Cymbeline Brody, a recent addition to the BPA company, as Colin.

The “Secret Garden” role is Brody’s third (after BPA’s “Tommy” and “Distracted” last season) that calls for the seventh-grader to play against gender.

As Mary Lennox, the little orphan who’s relocated from India to England to live with her distant uncle, Schieber has Jasmine Harrick, who’s fresh from KFT’s spring production of “Narnia,” in which she played Lucy Pevensie.

The cast also includes first-time Mountaineer Stephen Jones, a Seattle Opera veteran who’ll play Archibald Craven; Adrienne Easton as Mrs. Medlock; Tristan Carruthers as Dickon; and Britt Boyd as Martha.

Boyd might qualify for some kind of “extra-mile” award for her work in the show.

“She’s missing her sister’s wedding to be here,” Schieber said of the Seattle actress. “She’ll get to go to all the other pre-wedding stuff, like the bachelorette party, but then we open. She really wanted to be in the show; she’s played Mary in two other productions.”

Choreography is by Schieber’s longtime KFT ally, Guy Caridi, and musical direction is by Julia Thornton, doing her first work with the company after working with Schieber last year on a production of “Cinderella” at the Snoqualmie Falls amthitheater. Her singers will be backed by keyboardist Greg Smith.

The ghosts in Lucy Simon and Marsha Norman’s musical, adapted from the beloved children’s book by Frances Hodgson Burnett, are most of the people Mary knew in India, before they were wiped out by a cholera epidemic. She’s sent to live with an uncle she’s never met, in a manor that boasts some ghosts of its own. Both Craven brothers are mourning Archibald’s long-dead wife, Lily, who haunts the place and tortures them both.

Meanwhile, Mary sets about transforming the place — and the people in it — from gloomy to giddy, enlisting the help of her maid, the gardener and her bedridden cousin to help her cheer things up.

The show is fairly new. It made its Broadway debut in 1991, earning Norman a Tony Award for Best Book, and didn’t open on London’s West End until 2001. It’s been done locally twice in recent years — at BPA in 2008, and CSTOCK in ’07.

Come to Narnia at the Kitsap Forest Theater!

Here is Michael Moore's review from the Kitsap Sun:

Solid storytelling and tremendous singing trump the rain at Forest Theater

BREMERTON — I was a little worried, as it became evident that the drenching rain wasn’t going away any time during the Mountaineers Players’ Memorial Day performance of “Narnia,” that I’d have to make some allowances for the miserable conditions, in compensation for the cold and wet and mud that director Jenny Estill’s cast was obliged to work through.

I needn’t have worried at all. Conditions were indeed dreadful, but you wouldn’t have known it to watch and listen to what turned out to be a spirited, sprightly and altogether enjoyable show.

Well, enjoyable as anything can be viewed from a relentless, sopping downpour that kept the May 27 attendance down to about 100 hearty, umbrella-brandishing souls.

Despite the wet, though, the Mountaineers didn’t miss a beat. The show was sung and acted just about as well as you might have hoped for had it had been sunny and 70.

The show follows the major plot points of C.S. Lewis’ “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” — the first of his “Chronicles of Narnia.” The story — siblings find fantastical kingdom by climbing through the back of a piece of bedroom furniture and are embroiled in a power struggle between the rightful king, a lion, and a cold-hearted witch — is prodded along pretty nicely by the songs by Thomas Tierney (music) and Ted Drachman (lyrics), ranging from finger-popping swing to big, anthemic productions.

Estill’s production is paced tremendously; there’s nary a dull moment, even though the book (by Jules Tasca) can seem a mite episodic. Multiple-keyboard accompaniment by Greg Smith is orchestrally rich and dramatic, the choreography by Lynda Sue Welch keeps everyone — even the cast’s passel of adorable youngsters — in constant and appropriate motion, and the reliably delightful costumes by Barbara Klingberg cover all the show’s bases, from bunny-and-puppy cuteness to White Witch wicked. Fight scenes choreographed by Ken Michels were a bit deliberate, but still a lot of clanky fun, right down to Peter Pevensie’s (Jake Friang) full-on roll across the muddy stage during one set-to with Fenris Ulf (David Cravens-O’Farrell).

But the standout aspect of the show to me is its vocal richness — especially impressive given the soggy conditions. Everyone in the cast, it seems, can sing, and the individual and corporate work they do merits a tip-o’-the-hat to music director Amy Beth Nolte.

The biggest voices belong to Dave Holden as Aslan, the lion who helps the four Pevensie children find their destiny, and Jenny Dreessen as the White Witch, who would gladly skewer them all to keep Narnia in a perpetual state of “always winter, never Christmas.”

But there’s plenty of depth, even among the youngsters. All four Pevensies — Friang, Katie Dreessen as Susan, a particularly impressive Daniel Geiszler as Edmund and Jasmine Harrick as Lucy — all are in fine voice, and many impress in smaller roles. (Kudos also to Kelsie Engen, who sang tremendously and clowned ably in her role as the the witch’s dwarf minion.) When the whole ensemble cranks up for moments like the inspiring “To Make the World Right Again,” it’s pretty lovely stuff.

The sound in the old amphitheater was surprisingly good, considering the rain spattering against the umbrellas throughout. There were some lines of dialog that were difficult to hear, but not that many.

I’m tempted now to go back and see “Narnia” again before the end of its June 16 run. After all, if it could be as charming, vocally impressive and just plain fun as it was, played out in ankle-deep mud, it might be even more of a hoot on a warm, sunny afternoon.

But not much.