Review: The Liberty Belles
by Michael Meigs
Carolyn Kennedy's script was still in its workshop phase, producer Peter C. Graupner advised the expectant audience. Musical numbers would be presented a capella because the company's accompanist had dropped out late in rehearsals.
That loss didn't seem to faze this cast of troopers, every one of them portraying a character whose name began with "B": Aunt Bebe, sisters Billie and Bobby, sidekick Bridget, ingenue songstress Betsy, extroverted empresario Buddy, tender young male lead Benny and soldier's-gal-disguised-as-a-bellhop Barbie. The actors were troopers for their show-must-go-on heart, and so were the characters they portrayed, members and associates of a vaudeville female singing act that disbanded before the war. It's December, 1944, and the action takes place in the shuttered Blue Sky Club at the Belvedere Hotel in New York City.
The Liberty Belles is a fond homage to 1930's and 1940's dream factory versions of show biz. As we watch this plucky cast and its characters we almost have the feeling that we're sitting in the balcony at the Rialto for Saturday afternoon's main feature. Kennedy's plot is carefully laid and her characters are the sorts you'd have seen portrayed by Ethel Merman, the Andrews sisters, Maureen O'Hara, Don Ameche, Judy Garland, Jimmy Stewart and the young Lucille Ball (wouldn't that have been a combination for this show!). The plot's a series of subterfuges to get the principals up and singin' for a USO tour to England where they can renew the old act, support the troops and locate a family member who ducked out of college to enlist and serve. It's like a jigsaw for first-graders, with big colorful plot pieces that are obviously going to click into place, and we enjoy the banter, reminiscing, tricks and disguises that fool no one, and a happy ending that brings a benevolent FDR himself into the mix to help resolve things.
The show's not a full musical, at least not in its current edition. Characters lapse into songs of the era but most of the time for no more than 12 or 16 bars, providing musical markers rather than full performances. The gals do the Glenn Miller standard 'Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree with Anyone Else but Me' clustered around the mute piano, delivering pleasant harmonies that could become much more with the help of a couple of musicians and a choreographer. The musical numbers and references adhere to the 1944 timeline (did you know that Disney's 'When You Wish Upon a Star' was from 1941 or that Bernstein's 'New York, New York' was being sung on Broadway in 1944?). Of all the musical passages in the workshop, by far the most memorable was Amber Quick's rendition of the yearning 'Skylark' by Johnny Mercer and Hoagy Carmichael (1941).
Under its monicker 'The Austin Producers' Club' the company has signed with the Scottish Rite Theatre in Austin to do a fuller production of Kennedy's comedy-drama this coming June. It should be a good time, particularly if the Producers' Club uses essentially the same cast. Particularly effective in the workshop version were Quick (with a fine, convincing Irish brogue), the pert Megan Ortiz in her bellhop outfit, Robert Deike in good bluster as the agent and -- proving conventional wisdom about self-casting and self-directing can be erroneous -- writer/director Carolyn Kennedy herself as the sister who married up and out of show biz.
The Liberty Belles
by Carolyn Kennedy
The Liberty Belles is staged four times for FronteraFest (January 25 and 27, February 1 and 2 -- tickets available here).
