The Great American Melodrama’s current show, The Super Trio, has everything you might expect it to have from its title: super heroes, super villains, super powers, super costumes, super sets.
It even has things you might not expect, like a super song about a cat (I dare you not to shed a tear when Mike Fiore’s Captain Metal cries his heart out for his little lost Fifi).
Our attractive heroes (and despicable villains—Jill Price’s monstrous Minerva produces a cackle you want to kill her for) work super hard in a production that lets them capitalize on their superior comedic skills.
But this time on the Melodrama-go-round, it’s the vaudeville revue—always the third act on the Melodrama playbill after a two-act main show—that ultimately lets all our seven super-talented performers cut loose and really show off their singing and dancing and instrumental skills.
The Bluegrass Vaudeville Revue—written and directed by the multi-talented Central Coast native Rachel Tietz—is so much fun that you might leave the theatre with John Denver’s “Country Roads” more top of mind than Captain Metal and his comic cohorts.
And “Country Roads” is just the capper to a litany of country and bluegrass favorites you’ll enjoy tapping your toes to.
One of the highlights is Mike Fiore and Nolan Lemay in a “Dueling Banjos” sequence, and the whole crew gets on board showing that you can add a little tambourine and washboard to most any song, from Beyoncé and Bruno Mars classics to “Defying Gravity” from Wicked.
The Bluegrass Vaudeville Revue is a super follow-up to The Super Trio, giving Jeffrey Laughrun, Lily Cameron, Joshua Kenebrew, and Anjewel Lenoir along with Fiore, Price, and Lemay, a chance to shine.