Little Women To Mark 1st Greendale Theatre Performance In 2 Years

GREENDALE, WI — After a two-year hiatus from performances, the cast has been announced and a course has been set for the return of Greendale Community Theatre.

Little Women, a musical adapted from a novel written by Louisa May Alcott over 150 years ago, will take the GCT stage in January 2022. It will be the first full-scale performance by GCT since Rock Of Ages in January 2020.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Greendale Community Theatre had regularly produced musicals since 2003. According to its website, the group has raised money for charities through performances. Titles such as Mamma Mia, Chicago, Shrek, If/Then, Les Miserables, Grease, and the list goes on, have been the subject of the theatre group.

Amanda J. Hull is directing the return show. It will be her first time directing for Greendale Community Theatre.

"I've done small, intimate black box shows for many years, and then also education," Hull told Patch, "but this is my first adult, main stage show. So I'm really excited about it, to have a staff and a budget and to be able to do things that you imagine and put them on stage."

Directing Little Women

Little Women has a long history of adaptations to the stage. It has routinely appeared as a play, or in this case, as a musical. A film adaptation was released in 2019.

"It's really a feminist piece," Hull said about directing it. "I'm trying to not get too stuck in the time period, and really finding new meaning in the theme and in the characters, to insert these plays with modern thinking and to reflect on how modern she [Alcott] was for writing this at the time."

Hull said the visuals are currently more abstract, and that elements and props will be added over time. The themes, characters and people are at the heart of Hull's goals for the production, she said.

"I'm really excited to look at what it means to be a woman and to grow up," she added. "Rationalizing how a woman should behave or how they should be perceived or what it means to be a woman today, its still unfortunately determined by society, and breaking those barriers is what we're kind of looking for. I think Jo is a modern hero."

Returning To The Stage After The COVID-19 Pandemic

The upcoming performance of Little Women marks a time when theater groups and live performances are finding themselves at the tail end of a pandemic, wondering how to move forward. It's been well over a year since news of COVID-19 dawned on America in 2020.

Things changed overnight for Hull.

"I remember the day it happened, I was costuming for Tuck Everlasting at South Milwaukee High School. It was opening night, and we had to shut down," Hull said. "We had worked so hard."

A performance still went on, but just for the students' parents.

"We had to strike the show that night, we didn't know whether or not we were going to be back again in the space," Hull added. "They had just shut down the whole city and all the schools were closing, we didn't know what was going to happen after that night."

Tim Backes, the artistic director for Greendale Community Theatre, said the experience planning Little Women so far has been refreshing after the pandemic. Backes moved into the artistic director role in March 2020 after years of acting in the group, and just weeks before COVID-19 shut down much of the theater industry.

"It's been strange. With GCT, going from the process of 'I'm going to be stepping into this new role', and then suddenly, no theater or live events happening anywhere — just sort of being in limbo and wondering when everything was going to come back," Backes said, "I think it was a really weird year for people in the arts."

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"It's really cathartic for us to be putting something like this together again after spending so much time isolated and not being able to perform." Backes added, "I think it's going to be a really special experience for us to be back performing for the first time."

Backes is also the theater director for South Milwaukee High School. After the pandemic hit and the school's performance of Tuck Everlasting was cut short, different forms of theater have emerged. Backes and his students distilled plays into a series of "radio shows," he said, and perfomances in the spring have returned with reduced capacities.

"With Greendale, we finally got to the point where we were coming back, but then the delta variant hit and that added a lot of complications," he added. "We've had to consider this year not only all the normal stuff for how we get a show put together again, but also what do we need to make sure we're creating theater safely."

When planning the show earlier this year, Backes said organizers found Little Women was "the perfect show for everything we needed, we wanted to keep it small and relatively safe because we had no idea what the world would be looking like."

Auditions took place last week, and the cast has been announced:

• Marmee: Carrie Gray
• Meg March: Katie Gruell
• Jo March: Alyssa Higley
• Beth March: Lauren Meidl
• Amy March: Megan Hofschulte
• Aunt March: Leslie J Fitzwater
• Laurie Laurence: Jonathon Gideon
• Mr. Laurence: Chuck Hanel
• Mr. John Brooke: Jacob Baker
• Professor Bhaer: Connor Blankenship
• Mrs. Kirk: Teresa Drews
• Ensemble, understudy Amy/Beth: Cora Trexell
• Ensemble, understudy Jo/Meg: Mary Grace Seigel
• Ensemble, understudy Laurie: Isaac Brust

The Details

Greendale Community Theatre will perform the show in the Greendale High School theater located at 6801 Southway on January 6, 7, 8, 13, 14 and 15.

More details on the show are available on GCT's website.

"Getting back into it after my year sabbatical, it's been a challenge, but it's been really fun," Hull said. "Auditions, I was so impressed, there were so many people who came out I think everyone is really eager to be doing shows again."

Not all was lost for Hull when the pandemic hit. She said she took the time to revisit what it was like to have a home life. She and her husband moved. Time arose to look at theater in different ways and how to interact with the community.

"I definitely have fresh eyes coming out of the pandemic, there's a lot of work ahead," Hull said.