Live theater has resumed indoors, but it’s slow going.
We the People Theatre, which produces plays in the Briggs Opera House, has been particularly cautious, and with good reason. When the novel coronavirus closed theaters in March 2020, the company was days away from opening an ambitious production of Man of La Mancha.
“It was really hard when La Mancha crashed,” Hamilton Gillett, who was playing the Man of the title, Don Quixote, said this week. The set and lighting design were amazing, and the rehearsals had been long and intense, he said.
So the nonprofit theater company has planned a simple return this weekend in the form of All Together Now!, a musical revue that publisher Music Theater International is licensing to theaters for free.
“I love the idea of it,” said Perry Allison, a cofounder of We the People. MTI has “made it as easy as possible to get back on stage.”
The idea proved popular enough that more than 2,500 theater companies around the world will perform a version of the show this weekend. MTI is offering the show to theaters gratis, as a way to get the ball rolling again, and to give theaters a low-cost way to put on a show that might not draw a big house.
We the People’s shows are scheduled for 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday in the Briggs Opera House in White River Junction. General admission tickets cost $15 to $22 and are available at wethepeopletheatre.com.
In addition, two of the performances will be livestreamed on CATV’s YouTube channel and broadcast on CATV for free.
For All Together Now!, MTI made available a menu of 35 songs from a wide range of shows, from Les Miserables to Mamma Mia. But theater companies are free to come up with their own context, so the music plays a little differently.
“The songs that MTI selected all have new meaning through the lens of having lived through a pandemic,” Allison said.
Among the songs are Back to Before, from Ragtime; Empty Chairs at Empty Tables, from Les Mis; and Tomorrow, from Annie. The titles alone now speak to a kind of loss the authors might not have intended.
The show’s four directors, Allison, Samantha Davidson Green, Jenn Langhus and Richard Waterhouse, weeded out several songs from MTI’s list, many of them usually sung by or aimed at children, said Langhus, a Norwich resident. Then they divvied up the rest.
“If you had a vision for it, it was yours” to direct, she said.
They also considered who among their theater contacts might lead each number. Each of the directors also is performing.
And the directors created a storyline, with Gillett, of Windsor, on stage serving as narrator.
Rehearsals have been in smaller groups, and masked. The singers and actors won’t wear masks during performances. They were all tested for COVID-19 last week and will be rapid-tested this week, as well. Masks and vaccinations will be required for audience members.
And the streaming and broadcast options are meant for people who are either too infirm or too uncomfortable to attend in person.
Both the broadcast and the sets, which consist mainly of projections provided by MTI and lighting design by Alex Taylor, demonstrate the growing partnership between the Briggs Opera House and CATV, which took over technical management of the space earlier this year.
“That’s just opened a few more doors for us that we wouldn’t necessarily have opened,” Langhus said of using the projections.
When the We the People team decided over the summer to go ahead with All Together Now!, COVID-19 case counts were at a low ebb. Last week, Vermont set a daily record for cases.
With precautions in place, this show seems likely to go on. But even if it didn’t, just rehearsing it has been a return to a cherished pastime.
“If we had to walk away from this, I think we’d all be disappointed,” Gillett said, but not on the order of Man of La Mancha.
“It’s already a win that we get to do it, we get to be together,” Langhus said.
For a while, that’s been and will be the story of the arts, in three acts: a dispersal, an exile, then a gathering.
“When everything closed down, the lack of performing arts was for so many people, for people in this profession, it was just so heartbreaking,” Langhus said.
The show, then, is about heart-mending.
“I love the title of this show, All Together Now!,” Langhus said. “It’s like a hug. It feels so good to be together.”
For information and tickets, go to wethepeopletheatre.com.
Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.
