Passion, professionalism conspire to elevate ‘Kate’

Maybe you’ve had this experience. The curtain goes up on a Bangor Community Theatre musical, and a dance step is missed here, a line or entrance is missed there, but the singers blow the roof off the house.

I’ve been witnessing this phenomenon for more than 16 years. One of the first reviews of my career was about a BCT musical back in the 1980s. I remember laughing good-naturedly at the blunders and being wholeheartedly impressed by the occasional theatrical moment but really raising an amazed eyebrow when the lead tenor and soprano hit the high notes with stunning clarity and expression. If I closed my eyes (and if it weren’t so cold in the theater), I would have sworn I was in a Broadway house.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s a difference between a Broadway musical and a community theater production – it might be called professional versus passionate, big budget versus small. But I’ve always appreciated both approaches, as well as the fact that they often blur into one another.

Friday night, when I heard Missy Babineau’s radiant voice in the opening measures of BCT’s “Kiss Me, Kate,” which played last weekend at the Maine Center for the Arts in Orono, I recognized that enticing “blur” in its best form. Here was a voice to open a show. Here was a voice that could have just as easily been in the revival of “Kiss Me, Kate” on Broadway in 1999.

Ditto for Katelyn White, Tyke McKay, Elena DeSiervo, Dave Rode, Roland Dube and Steve Estey. They have real jobs and full lives outside this annual theater event. But they also have real voices, and it’s their avocation to share them with the rest of us every once in a while. We are the beneficiaries of their decisions to become stars of the local rather than professional stage. That was underscored, with the leadership of music director Lud Hallman, in the jazzy tunes Cole Porter wrote for this quirky adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Taming of the Shrew”: “Too Darn Hot,” “Why Can’t You Behave,” “Wunderbar,” “So in Love” and “Always True to You in My Fashion.”

And yes, the same singers grappled with Chez Cherry’s smart but high-maintenance stage pieces, pesky microphone wires and other technical demands. Mostly, these performers are more talented at delivering gorgeous music than they are at acting out dialogue, projecting their speaking voices or following the choreography. But they unfailingly kept the show on its vocal feet in such a way that you couldn’t help cheering them on, even as they overindicated a line or watched their feet during a dance routine. All very forgivable once they opened their mouths and let the music fly. And frankly, some of the acting – and here I speak primarily of the women in the cast – was quite engaging.

There were others, too, who sing well enough but whose real gifts come through in performance. Consider Steve Robbins. Despite the fact that Robbins has a habit of either forgetting his lines or rewriting them onstage, or both, he’s the clowningest man on any stage. Even when he throws a line into the curtain, there’s something winning about the way he does it. In their roles as gangsters, he and his less memory-challenged stage partner, Will Stephenson, shticked their way through “Brush Up Your Shakespeare,” and it was as gaffe-y as it was goofy.

The biggest challenge of this production fell to sound designer Jeff Richards, whose job it was to find the balance between miked voices, a 23-piece orchestra and a bouncingly live concert hall. His efforts were valiant and often successful, but the hall was not designed for this type of entertainment, and some of Porter’s very witty lyrics got lost somewhere between the brass section and the baffles.

No great matter. Between Doug Meswarb’s direction and Heather Astbury’s first time out as a choreographer – her moves were both cutesy and sexy – the show had all the charm and charge it needed. Add the supporting contributions of Sam Hallman, Mike Weinstein, Chuck Somers and a game ensemble, and the show can be counted as yet another BCT success.

Alicia Anstead can be reached at 990-8266 and aanstead@bangordailynews.net.