Theater group brings "The Boy Friend" to Stuart"s Opera House
February 28, 2008
Outside the ground may be covered with snow and the streets slick with ice, buy inside Stuart’s Opera House, it’s summer in 1926 at the Villa Caprice, a School for Young Ladies, in Nice, and the young women there have only one pressing concern: how to attract that essential of life, the Boy Friend. Attentive young men are pleading for attention, but how to choose? And what if a suitor is really only interested in money?
Mix in two sets of parents and their expectations, a school headmistress with a romantic past, a helpful maid, and lots of song and dance, and you have “The Boy Friend,” presented by Berean Community Players and Athenian Players Theatre at Stuart’s Opera House at 8 p.m. this Friday and Saturday and March 7 and 8, and at 2 p.m. on Sunday, March 9.
The “perfect young ladies” of the Villa Caprice are Maisie (Tanyah Stone), Dulcie (Alison Bartlett) and Fay (Valerie Schrader), with Annah Arbetti playing Polly Browne (the role created by Julie Andrews on Broadway in 1954). The candidate boyfriends are Bobby (Bill L’Heureux), Pierre (Sam Witmer), Alphonse (Paul Rohrer), Marcel (Chaz Canter) and Tony (Andy Stone). Madame Dubonnet, the headmistress, is played by Linda Watkins, and Percival Browne, Polly’s father and Madame Dubonnet’s former flame, by Tom Schmitz.
Lord and Lady Brockhurst (Joe Balding and Karen M. Chan) are looking for their son, who has mysteriously disappeared from Oxford University. Madame Dubonnet’s maid, Hortense (Celeste Parsons) has a finger in all of the pies.
Sylvia Abbott directs the show, and Lynn Sullivan is the musical director.
Although “The Boy Friend” was first produced in London in 1953, it was written in the style of the light-hearted musical plays of the 1920s in which it is set. When Julie Andrews played Polly in the 1954 Broadway production, the producers of “My Fair Lady” were so impressed by her performance that they cast her as Liza Doolittle.
Tickets are available at the door or from the opera house office at 740-753-1924. They may also be purchased at www.stuartsoperahouse.org.
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