Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

Another busy weekend for The Gryphon and me. Saturday was an Otakon meeting, taking care of business and planning for the 2005 Otakon.

I thought it was important for me to be there, because the program book editor had asked me last year if I could pinch hit for her in May or June as she prepared for her June wedding. But I spoke to her, and she's doing fine so far.

Several people complimented me on my weight loss, which was nice to hear. The White Rabbit told me I'm looking good, and I told him that I'm down to what I weighed my freshman year (post Freshman 10, though).

Afterwards, we went with a few friends to dinner for a nice relaxing meal at a Italian restaurant. Considering how difficult it can be to get a table in Baltimore, we were lucky, with only a 15-minute wait.

Sunday we attended the performance of Annie Get Your Gun by a local theater group, The Footlighters. We got lost on the way there, but we managed to get in and find seats minutes before the curtain went up. Fortunately, we'd reserved seats ahead of time.

Agent Smith's wife, whom I'll call The Costumer, had done the costumes and was in the chorus. When I spoke to her about it several weeks ago, she'd told me she wasn't doing much singing and dancing. But in the first big number, "There's No Business Like Show Business," she was onstage with the rest of the chorus, singing and dancing!

So I asked her afterwards why she'd told me she wouldn't be doing any of that, and she explained that within the last few weeks they'd had a few women drop out of the chorus, and she'd been brought in to replace them.

The theater is a former church in Berwyn, Pennsylvania, converted for their use as a theater. They've put a proscenium arch and a nice sized stage at what used to be the back of the church, and the area that used to be the altar had stairs put in for access to bathrooms and a community room downstairs, and on the second floor, a booth for doing spotlights and sound. Light rigging is permanently affixed to the large wooden crossbeams of the church's high ceiling. It's a nice little setup, very intimate, with seating for roughly 200 people.

They had a pretty sizable pit, considering that it was all volunteer. I saw a couple clarinets, a flute player, a violinist, a trombone and a piano. I think there were one or two other instruments, as well. After the director introduced the play, the lights dimmed and the overture began.

We had a lot of fun watching this play. The woman who played Annie, Jennifer Fritz Dinan, did a terrific job. She had marvelous comic timing and created such believable mannerisms that when we saw her walking normally afterwards she seemed like an entirely different person. And she had one of the strongest voices on the stage. Very well cast in her role.

Her love interest, Frank Butler, was played by blue-eyed Italian John D'Alonzo who looked a lot like a young Elvis and even did a couple Elvis-like hip moves during the choreography to "My Defenses are Down." He had a sweet voice but was sometimes a little hard to hear. Clearly, he had a lot of female fans in the audience, evidenced by the female hoots and hollers when he came out for his curtain call.

One of the more outstanding members of the cast had a minor role as Annie's younger sister, Jesse. Cory O'Deens is only 14, and she seemed very comfortable on stage. She did very well keeping up with Jennifer Fritz Dinan in their scenes together and had a very clear, confident voice. I wasn't at all surprised to read in her bio that she'd once played the lead in Annie.

This was the first time for me to see this particular musical, and I liked it a lot. There were a lot of great songs, like "There's No Business Like Show Business" and "Anything You Can Do." The book, too, is fun, with a lot of humor and two romantic storylines.

The scenery and staging was really simple. As the director had explained at the beginning, this is a play within a play, being performed by Buffalo Bill's traveling performers. So they kept the scenery simple, and cast members in costume moved the set pieces around to create new scenes.

During intermission, they sold tickets for a raffle. The winner took home 50 percent of the money collected. The director, Tony Filipone, told jokes while some assistants counted the money. Now he's probably in his 40's or early 50's, and he's got middle-aged spread but has retained his thick dark hair. He joked that he found a picture of himself as a young guy and he looked like John D'Alonzo. He teased John that "this is what you have to look forward to."

Funny thing about that is that I actually commented to The Gryphon earlier that if they didn't have different last names I would have sworn they were father and son.

After the production, cast members came up and greeted the audience. We waited for The Costumer to come out and congratulated her on a great job. She'd done a lot for this production, when you consider that it was a cast of about 25-30 people, many of whom required multiple costume changes, including period evening gowns for several of the women.

We chatted for awhile about the production and how it had all come together, despite multiple problems, including the dropping out of some chorus members and a choreographer. The Costumer looked a little tired but animated. She's clearly enjoying her experience with this theater group. I told her it brought back memories of a local theater group I used to volunteer with, playing clarinet once in the pit for Annie and playing chorus parts in Bye Bye Birdie and Oklahoma. Good times. If I didn't work evenings, I might consider auditioning.

The best part about community theater is that you get to learn how talented your neighbors are. People who, by day, are insurance agents, pastors or music teachers, for those magic moments are performers, even stars. The energy of community theater is always so welcoming and positive it's a joyful experience, whether you're on stage or in the audience.

After we said our good-byes, we decided to get dinner. We remembered a Mexican place in Bryn Mawr, but when we looked for it, a pretzel place was there instead. So we found a Japanese restaurant called Samurai and had some sushi.

Back home, we dropped a few things off at the new place and then I drove The Gryphon to the 69th Street station so he could go to his gaming group. He made me promise to do something fun, but I wanted to get some things done, so I compromised by watching Red Dwarf while packing more things.

Copyright 2005 by Alyce Wilson

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