CURTAIN CALLS: Civil War theme opens 50th season

Spoiler alert: The North still wins. 

Just about a mile from the Cedar Creek battlefield, little Wayside Theatre is girding its loins for a charge into the second half of what one hopes will be a full century of live performance. To commemorate the last fifty years and acknowledge the 150th anniversary of the “recent unpleasantness,” artistic director, Warner Crocker, has chosen “Reunion: A Musical Epic in Miniature.” It’s an interesting choice.

On April 14, 1865, Harry Hawk became a historical footnote. Hawk was the only actor standing on the Ford’s Theatre stage at the moment when a derringer shot rang out and John Wilkes Booth landed awkwardly on the planks next to him. Nearly a century and a half later, Jack Kyrieleison and Ron Holgate saw opportunity in bringing back the person of Harry Hawk and creating a struggling band of actors to tell the story of the war in miniature. “Reunion...” made its debut in 1999. 

Wayside sees in this fictional, financially diminished theatre company a kindred spirit and has embraced the pastiche approach to storytelling with skits, songs, and projected imagery. Those who appreciate historical accuracy will be pleased that most of the dialogue comes from letters, speeches, poems, and songs of the period.

It’s a patchwork quilt production that picks and chooses what to accentuate and what to ignore, and even though events and angles are accurate in themselves, this is unmistakably a “Northern” point of view. Of course we’re all Americans, but a Virginia audience should be prepared — some of them, anyway — for hearing their ancestors referred to as traitors.

Six actors play actors who play multiple roles. Bob Payne, a respectable presence on the Wayside stage, is Harry Hawk, who has the doubtful privilege of also representing Gen. George McClellan. The rise and fall of McClellan’s popularity, his increasingly tense correspondence with Lincoln, and his insufferable egoism are brought under history’s impartial magnifying glass. It’s one of the clearest through lines in the show.

Wayside’s resident music director, Steve Przybylski, is company member Augustin Lovecraft who plays the piano and represents Lincoln’s personal secretary. As such, he recounts a few especially folksy Lincoln anecdotes and reads letters from the frustrated President to McClellan. His lively but tragic rendition of “Pat Murphy of the Irish Brigade” illustrates the bloody fate of hundreds of newly immigrated Irish who joined the Union cause.

Wes Calkin has conceived a stage accurately reminiscent of a 19th century music hall or vaudeville house. Footlights, projection screen, and wood floor and a few subtle side touches make for a warmly intimate setting, accessible to the many quick changes of scene and mood. Those “magic lantern" projected grainy Matthew Brady photographs give us the grim reality of this war as nothing else can.

Driving the story along are twenty-six Civil War era songs, many of them still familiar: “All Quiet Along the Potomac Tonight,” “John Brown’s Body,” “Somebody’s Darling,” and “Tenting Tonight...” (but where was “Lorena”??) Brett Tubbs and Sehri Wickliffe play the husband and wife Hannibal and Cassie Drumwright, former slaves who represent the eager but rejected black soldier, the Underground Railroad conductor, the mother parted from her child, and more.

Their renditions of “Wake Nicodemus,” “Oh, Wasn’t That a Wide River,” and “Steal Away” as well as her solo in “Home, Sweet Home" are exquisitely done.

“Reunion...” is refreshingly honest when it deals with the issue of slavery in 1861. This political hot poker was not, as everyone knows by now, the reason the North invaded the South, but it was inseparable from it. Lincoln’s timing of the Emancipation Proclamation is given a clear treatment, and Mr. and Mrs. Drumwright are essential in presenting the newly freed slaves’ point of view.

Dana Colagiovanni plays Miss Cordelia Hopewell in multiple roles from battlefield nurse to “Our American Cousin” actress. Her sweet voice is adequate to her solo “Abraham’s Daughter” but is more easily appreciated when blended with Tom Trudgett (Jody Lee) in “Beautiful Dreamer” or in the many choral pieces where harmony is strongest. 

Costume Designer Tamara Carruthers has had her plate full with the quick multiple changes required to go from 1890s actor to 1860s characters and back again. Harry Hawk and Ton Trudgett are dressed in Yankee uniforms on stage by the rest of the cast, an intriguing action that frankly acknowledges the ingenuous nature of the play itself. The energy is bountiful and there’s a brimming sense of wanting to please as they tell their story.

Problem is — we already know the story. While the creators of “Reunion...” have gone to great lengths to pull out all the emotional stops (Hope! Courage! Comedy! Horror! Despair!) the ultimate impact is dulled by familiarity and the lack of any sustained personal conflict. We can see the suffering of a soldier dying on the surgeon’s block, but he’s just one of many brief sketches. We pity the slave mother torn from her child — but then the scene changes. 

The 150th anniversary of the event which tested this nation as no other event could cannot and should not be ignored. Battle towns all over the South (and a few in Maryland, and of course Gettysburg) will be dressing up for this important occasion. Stage productions such as “Reunion: A Musical Epic in Miniature” may help sustain the celebratory fireworks but lack the spark that lights the fuse.

Margaret Lawrence is a member of the American Theatre Critics Association. She has taught drama at CCHS for twenty years.

Want to go?

What: “Reunion: A Musical Epic in Miniature”

Where: Wayside Theatre, Middletown, Va.

Call: (540) 869-1776 or visit www.waysidetheatre.org

Playing through July 2