The Kalamazoo Civic Theatre's Senior Readers Theatre program opens Some Enchanted Evening: The Songs of Rodgers and Hammerstein on Friday, Oct. 2, at the Parish Theatre. Director Hal Hobson-Morse joins Cara Lieurance to talk about the revue, saying all 10 cast members are over 55. "It's an opportunity for actors who may not always be cast in other roles in the main stage productions […] to jump in and play a lead role and have a really significant contribution to the theater," he says.
Cast members perform with scripts in hand but still move through full staging, costumes and sets. "And really after the first or second song, the books kind of disappear,” says Hobson-Morse. The 1984 revue, compiled by Jeffrey Moss, packs more than 66 songs into the evening when medleys are counted.
Hobson-Morse is directing, music directing, choreographing and playing piano alongside Lori Hatfield. "She plays the up-high stuff and I play the boom-chicks down low and we're having a blast doing that." He also leads the Blendings Vocal Ensemble and does outreach for The Gilmore.
As for Rogers and Hammerstein, the team's shows can seem traditional today, but Hobson-Morse says they were daring in the 1940s. Musicals of the time opened with a big number of dancing girls and strung songs together loosely. Oklahoma! began instead with a lone woman churning butter and a cowboy singing a quiet ballad. "They broke free of a lot of the tradition of musical theater at the time." Their songs also carried the story and revealed character, so none could be cut. And shaped by the postwar era, they gave their women characters real independence.
He especially admires how well they wrote for the voice, shaping melodies around sustained vowels and interior rhymes, like the big open "oh" of Oklahoma! "Singers love to work on this material because it's really, really well written."
According to Hobson-Morse, the show is staged in the round in a venue that seats just under 200, “so you're never more than three rows away from the actors and you're right there watching their facial expressions."
Performances run through Oct. 11, with shows Fridays at 7:30 p.m. and Saturdays and Sundays at 2 p.m. Tickets are available at kazoocivic.com or 269-343-1313.
The interview was summarized by Claude AI and edited by the author.
