Onstage 34 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY may 2-8, 2024 www.montereycountyweekly.com The Western Stage theater at Hartnell College announced a packed season for its 50th anniversary, initially planning to put on stage seven different shows between March and November 2024. Unfortunately, Babe, The Sheep Pig, was canceled, leaving the season with only six shows. But that also means that you didn’t miss anything yet. The opening musical, Merrily We Roll Along, will take the stage for 10 weekend performances, from May 18 to June 2. “This is not the most packed program in our history,” says Melissa Chin-Parker, managing artistic director at The Western Stage. She saw her first Western Stage show in 1987 and joined the theater in 1994. The Western Stage itself was founded in 1974. “Back then, we would normally have 10 to 12 shows per year.” Things have changed quite a bit since the venue was shut down by Covid in 2020, when the organization limited its activity to outdoor rehearsals. “We moved back into the building in 2024 and we are still establishing ourselves there,” says Chin-Parker, who curated the 2024 program, looking for a happy combo of musicals, traditional plays and brand-new material. Part of The Western Stage is a group of actors, from age 5 to freshman year in college, known as the Young Company. After losing access to the Salinas Women’s Club in 2005, the company has been forced to reduce its program due to lack of available space. All the shows below, comprising the 2024 season, are weekend performances. Merrily We Roll Along May 18-June 2. Mainstage. $30. Now mentioned as one of the beloved Broadway shows by Stephen Sondheim (music and lyrics), when Merrily We Roll Along debuted on Broadway in 1981, critics called it limping and a disappointment. But Sondheim continued to work on the musical and found occasions to show it in the U.S and around the world. In 2023, this classic play returned to Broadway for its rebirth, directed by Maria Friedman, with Daniel Radcliffe and Jonathan Groff (the original King George in Hamilton) in the main cast. The story is supposedly autobiographical to a degree, since it describes a clash between a wealthy playwright and his family life. Meet Frank, his miserable wife Gussie and his friends, and learn about the price of success. The Mountaintop June 8-30. Studio Theater. $28. This two-actor play was written by Katori Hall, a young writer from Tennessee, who envisioned the last night of Martin Luther King Jr., not unlike Jesus Christ’s Last Supper. The entire play takes place in Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on the night before King’s assassination. “It’s a powerful play,” Chin-Parker says. After failing to find a venue in the U.S., The Mountaintop was first shown in a small theater in London, then moved to the West End. It premiered on Broadway in 2011. The fictional King meets his angel, embodied by a beautiful maid, who tells him about the fact that he will die tomorrow. The Hunchback of Notre Dame July 27-Aug. 18. Mainstage. $30. First, there was a novel by French romantic writer Victor Hugo, titled Notre-Dame de Paris, 1482, published in 1831. This story of an unhappy Roma man and his love for Esmeralda, all set at and around the Notre Dame cathedral in 15th-century Paris, was first staged as an opera in 1836, with a libretto by the author. The ending became less depressing in the classic 1939 American film and the Disney animated production from 1996. The musical (with music by Alan Menken and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz) was inspired by the Disney feature and includes its songs. In this version, it’s an epic story about love, acceptance and what it means to be a hero. An Enemy of the Pueblo Aug. 10-Sept. 1. Studio Theater. $28. Henrik Ibsen-inspired, An Enemy of the Pueblo is a play about the border and a community that struggles with access to water. Sound familiar? The author, Chicana playwright Josefina López, focused not only on the border crisis and climate change, but also on Indigenous traditions and their forgotten wisdom. Curandera is a shaman woman who, not unlike Greek Cassandra, warns the people in Milagros, a border town, about poisoned water. Members of the community refuse to believe her because the economy relies on water, needed in their jobs and everyday life. The play is a modern take on Ibsen’s 1882 play, The Enemy of the People. The playwright thought himself to be a Cassandra, a society critic in the Norway of his times. The Last Five Years Oct. 10-27. Studio Theatre. $28. It’s a story about a couple who travels in time, written and composed by Jason Robert Brown, which debuted on stage in 2001. The Last Five Years is a musical that chronicles the five-year life of a marriage of a New York couple, from meeting to break-up and from break-up to meeting. Cathy and Jamie fell in love in their 20s, but they continue to fall out of and back in love with one another. To make it harder, they travel in time and, in fact, never meet, except at their wedding in the middle of the show. The obvious metaphor depicts millions of couples that either do not grow in a similar way or at the same time, as a result never really meeting in life. It’s a play about disappointment. Cathy tells her story backward while Jamie chooses to do so chronologically. We are the judges of the intimacy they strive for. Emilia Oct. 19-Nov. 10. Mainstage. $30. A relatively recent play from the U.K., written by a female playwright, Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, was available to The Western Stage only because of its association with Hartnell College, as the script is for university usage only. It tells the story of Emilia Lanier née Bassano, one of the first English female poets to be published. This mysterious historical figure is the subject of Malcolm’s award-winning play, in which Bassano Lanier is described as the rumored “Dark Lady” in Shakespeare’s sonnets, a radical feminist with North African ancestry, a mother, a mistress of Lord Chamberlain and a teacher who founded a school for women in 17th-century England. In this play, Bassano Lanier is a subject of speculative history, representing the stories of women everywhere whose narratives have been written out of history. The Western Stage is at Hartnell College, 411 Central Ave., Building K, Salinas. Check with the box office for discounted ticket prices for students, Hartnell faculty and staff, youth and more. 755-6816, westernstage.com. Staged Right The Western Stage celebrates 50 years with its biggest season in five years. By Agata Pop˛eda They travel in time and never meet. A rehearsal for the upcoming musical, Merrily We Roll Along, which opens the season at The Western Stage theater at Hartnell College in Salinas. A story about a forever conflict between art and life, it was written and staged by Stephen Sondheim. Zalissa Johnson
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