By Rick Pender

Melissa Bohon does some heavy lifting as Princess Winifred the Woebegone in Once Upon a Mattress.

Richard Hess is one busy guy as artistic director of Hot Summer Nights (HSN), staged at UC's College-Conservatory of Music. This summer he's presenting Hello, Dolly!, Once Upon A Mattress and You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown with 18 young performers (nine men, nine women, 13 from CCM, five from Wright State). Most are in two of the three shows.

There's not much slack. So when Hess learned on July 21 that the actor playing Charlie Brown had been diagnosed with mono, he was in a pickle. In true show-biz fashion, he chose sophomore Doug Barton -- playing a small role in Dolly and serving as the narrator/ minstrel in Mattress -- to take over. Within 24 hours, Barton was onstage (without a script!) playing the role in a way that never betrayed his quick preparation.

That's what HSN is all about: developing professional chops. Actors rehearse intensively, then plunge into a grueling schedule of performance. It's great preparation for a professional career. This summer, HSN is using some well-established actors: Broadway veteran Pam Myers, CCM faculty member Pat Linhart and versatile local actor Greg Proccacino.

Barton exemplifies the kind of energy and verve onstage in this summer's productions. You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown is, of course, based on Charles Schultz' long-running Peanuts cartoon strip. In addition to Charlie, we are entertained by bossy Lucy (Lisa Marie Morabito), intellectual Linus (Neal Shrader), pianist Schroeder (Blake Ginther), little sister Sally (Jacque-lyn Vanderbeck, who steals numerous scenes with her pink dress) and Snoopy (the animated Will Ray). The show is full of warm humor -- coupled with the realities that life isn't always easy and people aren't always kind -- and great tunes: the hilarious book report on Peter Rabbit, Snoopy's over-the-top song about "Suppertime," and Sally's mercurial "My New Philosophy."

The concluding number -- "Happiness" -- is about finding joy in life's simple things: friendship, music, siblings, school, reading. So it's appropriate that Charlie Brown is a simple but entirely satisfying production.

Hello, Dolly!
Hello, Dolly! is typically as grand as Charlie Brown is simple. Jerry Herman's 1964 hit musical has the same energy that fires up each HSN show this season, epitomized by the famous scene at the Harmonia Gardens where Dolly sweeps down the staircase as spiffy waiters sing her praises. HSN does it with a mere half-dozen dancers, but they have the energy of a troupe of two dozen. It's a big-time greeting as Pamela Myers makes her glorious entrance as the scheming Dolly.

Broadway veteran Myers (CCM's first musical theater graduate) creates a Dolly who's a non-stop talker: She's never meets an argument she can't overcome with double-talk. Myers' distinctive phrasing and a choice for a slower pace brings forward Dolly's mischievous humor and sweetness. Myers' voice has tons of vibrato, so it was a bit dismaying to have it stifled by sound system problems.

Myers is paired with Greg Proccacino in the tough role of Horace Vandergelder, the "well-known half-a-millionaire" who Dolly is manipulating into a marriage proposal. The script calls for him to be an old grouch who has to make a 180 in the final 10 minutes. Proccacino is animated in his bad humor, but I wasn't entirely convinced he was truly won over.

The play's subplot has two young clerks (Will Ray, Beau R. Clark) on a lark with a hat-maker, Mrs. Molloy (Angel Reda), and her assistant, Minnie (Melissa Bohon, with a contagious giggle). They sing many of the shows nicest tunes, such as "Ribbons Down My Back," "Elegance" and "It Only Takes A Moment."

Scene designer Mark Halpin has created a frame of Victorian bric-a-brac and several drops that look like period paintings of 1890s New York that evoke the mood perfectly. Set design is no small challenge for HSN, where shows rotate and sets must be rebuilt on a daily basis. Halpin's drops and frames work flawlessly.

Once Upon A Mattress
Halpin's set for Mattress is brightly colored and cartoonish -- and just as flexible as Dolly. The design premise is "Fifties Medieval." Costume designer Rebecca Senske has outfitted the women in sheath-style ball gowns with medieval adornments and '50s bouffant hairdos; men wear fedoras ... with feathers. Oafish Prince Dauntless (Josh Dazel) has a coonskin cap (with a crown) and cowboy boots. The look is anachronistic and completely delightful.

Some musicals succeed with overblown emotion or grandiose spectacle. Mattress, a fractured fairytale based on "The Princess and the Pea," is a show utterly without pretense. This spirit is epitomized by Princess Winifred the Woebegone (Melissa Bohon): We meet her as she's hauled out of the moat. She spits a mouthful of water and wrings out the skirt of her pink dress.

Forget Carol Burnett, who originated the role in 1959, or Sarah Jessica Parker, who revived it on Broadway recently: The petite Bohon makes it her own. The smallest package onstage, she lights it up with unabashed physical presence and charm. Bohon, a junior at CCM, brings out the kid in everyone onstage and in the audience.

Director Greg Hellems' cast includes veteran singer Patricia Linhart as Queen Aggravain, a royal bully trying to keep her son under her thumb; Will Ray is her silent, henpecked king. Barton -- the newly installed Charlie Brown -- is the sweet-voiced minstrel and narrator.

In Mattress, the princess gets some help feeling the pea from a storehouse of armor and jousting equipment stuffed between the mattresses. That's rather like this HSN season: It seems frothy, but there's talent in the most unlikely places.

E-mail Rick Pender

Shakespearean Productions at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (July 19, 2001)
Contemporary Productions at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (July 19, 2001)
Curtain Call (July 12, 2001)
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