Halloween is past, setting the stage for the beginning of the two-month-long holiday season, but there’s one more spooky delight you should experience before moving on to Thanksgiving and Christmas.
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow—followed by an outstanding vaudeville revue—at The Great American Melodrama presents you with the opportunity to enjoy an original evening of entertainment as it enters its final weekend (the last show is November 7 and seating is limited!).
Written by the Melodrama’s own resident music director Jordan Richardson (proving his talent as a wordsmith as well as an awesome musician and adapter of song), this Sleepy Hollow follows the familiar plot of Washington Irving’s 1820 short story, adding a bit of a feminist perspective to keep modern audiences happy.
New schoolmaster Ichabod Crane (a most congenial and appropriately lanky Joshua Kenebrew) arrives at the Hudson River community and becomes a rival for the affections of Katrina van Tassel (an equally lanky and congenial Annaliese Chambers). She is being courted by the rough-and-tumble Brom Bones (the always reliable Noah Esquivel, who can play villian or hero in most any show because he can make either so darn funny).
Richardson and director John Keating play up the creepy aspects of the show right off the bat (so to speak), with fog rolling across the stage and Kennebrew covering Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition.”
The storytelling here is a nice balance of exposition (we get to hear the story of Rip Van Winkle, too) and song (think “Dancing in the Moonlight” and “Ballroom Blitz”), with the contrast between things fun and things frightful just right.
The stagecraft is magical, too, from the sound (Richardson—again!) and lighting (some of Cody Soper’s best work) to the scenic design (Shubham Rajpal & Nush Wadla).
A special call-out for puppet designer Jesse Mooney-Bullock, who along with the entire tech crew has designed an impressive visual spectre that finally answers the question we’ve been wondering all along: does the legendary Headless Horseman put in an appearance?
As if giving us an excellent re-telling of a seasonably-suitable tall tale weren’t enough, the Melodrama concludes your evening’s entertainment with a fairy tale vaudeville revue that should become a model for all future revues.
The multi-talented Rachel Tietz has written and directed the very-ironically-named “Happily Ever After,” an all-too-short 30-minute mash-up that might just as easily have been titled “Men in Tights Meet Women in Tiaras.”
All members of the cast—including Kenebrew, Chambers, Esquivel, Carely Quintana, Kelly Brown, Hunter Oehlschlaeger, and Anjewel Lenoir—are allowed to show their delightfully demented sides, especially Quintana (as a worried Disney princess) and Brown (as a ballet dancer worried that his seams aren’t straight). I dare you not to think back and enjoy another laugh at “Swine Lake” (complete with pig noses and tails), once you are headed into the night after another very satisfying evening at the Melodrama.