WILLIAMSVILLE-Rock River Players (RRP) continues its first Summer Musical Theater Revue — billed as a “Best of Broadway Experience” — this weekend in Williamsville.
With selected songs from the Broadway canon, from timeless classics to contemporary gems, the show is a tightly wrapped evening of lightly staged performances designed, according to director Walter Cramer, “to showcase the music and the exceptional talent of local performers.”
The American musical has a knack for cutting to an emotional core while honing microfocus on what it is to be vulnerable, brilliant, crazy, troubled, naïve, ebullient … alive. The RRP’s well-curated and balanced collection taps that knack, sending us through the gauntlet from silly to poignant, from innocent to heart-wrenching.
“I proposed such an evening of musical theater songs to fill a [perceived] gap in local theater” offerings, Cramer said.
“Of the many community theaters in our midst, only two regularly produce full musicals,” said Cramer, because “they’re expensive, with licensing, sets, costumes, musicians’ fees; they require extensive rehearsals for the book, the music, and choreography, and they’re typically more [technically complex].”
So, Cramer, who’s performed in various RRP productions and has been a mainstay in its winter cabarets, cooked up this summer fare.
“My experience with similar programs as an undergraduate, as a staff member at a special residential community at Indiana University, and with a [Friends of Music at Guilford] production, among others — and the positive reception these received — gave me the confidence that this could be successful here,” he said.
Cramer, who quips that his wife “accuses me of living in a musical,” was first on stage in kindergarten.
“I sang ‘Hound Dog,’” he says. “Can you believe that?”
First smitten with musicals in high school outside Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he recalls that “we didn’t do the classic Oklahoma and The Sound of Music. They did shows more on the fringe, such as Fiorello!, The Student Prince, and Around the World in 80 Days.”
With “terrific” theater and music teachers, Cramer had the chance to be in musicals at a local Actors’ Equity house, a summer stock theater where he did six shows as a teen before moving on to University of Pittsburgh.
There he majored in music, in “a tiny department with really great teachers” who gave him a lot of latitude and trust to create on stages.
For the Summer Musical Theater Revue, Cramer has staged each number, from solo to ensemble. He and his producer and assistant, Amy Donahue, have co-created an interlocking script to set the stage — and context — for each number in the two-act production.
The staging is varied and innovative throughout, with numbers popping up beyond the stage area in a few positions in the Williamsville Hall.
“I love this space,” Cramer adds. ”The best musicals I’ve done have actually been in smaller, nontraditional spaces.”
Referencing how the playing areas were configured for Patrick Keppel’s The Freeing of Mollie Steimer last summer, Cramer observed that “you can use this space in so many ways.”
Thoughts from the cast
Susan Boyd Joyce joined the Rock River Players to appear in the 2024 production of Steel Magnolias and has been in several productions since.
“I always wanted to be an actress, but I’m not blonde, and I’m not tall, and my teeth weren’t straight,” she says.
She first fell in love with musical theater when growing up in New Jersey, where her father, a pianist, played for community musicals such as Guys and Dolls, The Boy Friend, and Little Mary Sunshine — “all the old chestnuts.”
“It was wonderful, so that’s what I grew up loving,” Boyd Joyce says.
After a brief stint at Boston University, “I moved to New York and flopped in a play; I stuck around for a while, auditioned, and got in the chorus of Jesus Christ Superstar,” she continues.
“Then I landed in L.A., met the wrong guy, stayed in L.A. for all the wrong reasons, and I thought, ‘All right, here I am, [in] the Big Orange, you know, and so I did some TV acting.”
She was Fonzie’s girlfriend for four episodes of Happy Days in 1975 and 1976. “But I’d always be second banana,” she says.
So Boyd Joyce “started singing, and people started hiring me.” That shift launched a 35-year career as a professional doing backup singing, commercials, movies, records. “The phone rang; you went,” she says. “It was like playing in a sandbox and getting paid on a union scale.”
Jeff Seabaugh, known to RRP cabaret goers and from his performances in the RRP’s The Freeing of Mollie Steimer, spent many years in New York theater before moving to Vermont, where he directs theater and chorus at Thetford Academy.
Seabaugh says that after appearing in his first musical at age 12, “I was hooked.”
He continued performing through college, and then in New York and in summer stock in Maine while he was earning a BFA in acting from University of Memphis in Tennessee.
When asked what drew him to the RRP production, he explains, “I had such a positive experience last summer doing Mollie Steimer and I love the people, so I thought it would be a nice thing [to do this] summer. I also think it’s important for me as a teacher to practice what I preach and get back on stage any chance I can.”
He and his husband, Randy Lichtenwalner, have been in Vermont for five years. Lichtenwalner discovered RRP first, “and I saw all the fun that he was having,” Seabaugh says. “I’m so glad I got involved.”
Addie Mahdavi, a Newfane native, is an alumna of the Grammar School and New England Youth Theatre, where she played in several musicals.
With the Leland & Gray Players, she was seen first as an elementary school ensemble member in The Wizard of Oz and Oliver and later in high school with leads in, among other shows, The Drowsy Chaperone, in which she calls her portrayal of Janet Van De Graaff “the role of a lifetime” (and, Mahdavi adds, “the costume changes of a lifetime”).
A founding member of the Rock River Players, having first joined to play Emily Webb in RRP’s inaugural production, Our Town, Mahdavi went on to direct Justice? Just Us and to play a lead in Twelve Angry Jurors. Later this summer, we’ll see her in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, directed by her father, RRP’s Bahman Mahdavi.
When asked what drew her to this production, she says she’d “fallen in love with ‘Still Hurting’ from The Last Five Years” when she first heard it several years ago.
A while back, she recalls, she was driving from her home in New York City “and I just had this fantasy of how great it’d be to get to sing that song at the Williamsville Hall. It’s a beautiful song, and this is a place that I performed in for such a long time.
“I happened to be in town when Walter was doing auditions,” she explains, adding “it was quite impulsive, but it seemed too good to pass up.”
Now head of publishing at Echo Point Books and Media of Brattleboro, Mahdavi still works remotely from New York City, where she’s been living since late 2018.
“I’ve been very lucky to get to travel a lot around the world and spend a lot of time up here,” she says. “My parents are in Newfane where my mom grew up, and my brother is right next door to the Hall.”
Mahdavi did some acting while a student at Middlebury College, but she says her singing experience there was disappointing. Nonetheless, that experience compelled her to reinforce her connection with music as “something that really feeds me and allows me to connect with the people I’m performing with. That’s first and foremost for me — the people that I’m doing it with.”
Mahdavi adds that Rock River Players is “just my community theater. Even though I don’t live here anymore, even if I stay in New York for the rest of my life, it’s always going to be my community.”
In addition to heading a popular band and being a sought-after band member, music director Dan DeWalt has been involved in many area musical events over the years from accompanying silent movies with his own scores to coaching and accompanying for musical productions at Leland & Gray to being the one-man band for Rock River Players’ annual cabarets.
Of this production, he says, “musical theater, for me, for the people singing, quite often is an art form. For me it’s business,” too, though. “My job is to make them sound good, do everything right. So it’s a nice challenging job.”
With a company rounded out by Jonathan Benney, Addison Rice, Sea Rios, Laura Stickle, Gwyneth Thomson, and Marilyn Tullgren, the RRP program includes a diverse repertoire from legendary composers, Leonard Bernstein, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Jonathan Larson, among them.
Featured numbers are from popular shows such as West Side Story, Bye Bye Birdie, and Company, and some lesser-known such as Destry Rides Again and Finding Neverland.
The evening closes with a tonic for these times: “Being Alive” from Stephen Sondheim’s Company: “Someone to crowd you with love / Someone to force you to care / Someone to make you come through / Who’ll always be there.”
In addition to the nuanced, skillful staging, both the lighting by technical director Jess Guerrero and the set design and decoration of this production create fitting and effective locales for each of the 21 numbers in the lineup.
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Remaining performances are at 7:30 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, July 24 and 25, and at 2 p.m. on Sunday, July 26. Tickets are available at the door or online in advance at rockriverplayers.org. Williamsville Hall is located on 35 Dover Rd., in Williamsville, and is accessible and air conditioned.
Annie Landenberger is an arts writer and columnist for The Commons. She also is one half of the musical duo Bard Owl, with partner T. Breeze Verdant, and she is the founder of Rock River Players.
This Arts column by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.