Hyper Gumbo

Went out to Mercer Island on Saturday to check out a performance of Bugsy Malone, by the Youth Theater Northwest.

The space is pretty nice for a youth theater, not really surprising, since it is mercer island. They had a bunch of items out for whatever-is-the-name-of-the-auction-style-where-it’s-a-list-of-prices-you-sign-up-and-highest-priced-signer-wins, at least marginally themed to go along with the show. I put my name down for the pasta and bowl combo.

I attended a 2pm Saturday show, so the crowd was mostly parents with children, many of whom I suspected would be a bit young for a two hour production, and indeed, the family sitting next to me never came back from intermission. Given the crowd makeup, there were amazingly few outbursts or distractions from the action on stage.

The casting was well done. Sasha Conley seemed ideal for the vampish Tallulah character, portraying her world-weary cynicism well for someone who by all rights shouldn’t have the emotionally damaging experiences necessary to inspire it, yet. And she does a great job when it’s her turn to sing. Jay Rosenstein did a good job with Bugsy as well, with the proper mix of bravado and insecurity. Noah Davenport played Fat Sam a little less over the top than the movie version, and wasn’t even remotely fat, like not even TV-fat; side-wonder if it’s difficult to find a young kid willing to play a character named ‘fat’ if said kid is actually hefty, kids not being known for acceptance of their differences. Nathaniel Zang seemed a very studied professional, playing Dandy Dan. It’s hard to know how much the perception of his greater maturity versus the rest of the cast is associated with his size (were 14 year olds really that big when I was his age?) and how much was his spot-on delivery. It’s funny, I still can’t recall Dan having a major song in the movie, but Nathaniel did a memorable-good job with the one he had.

They had a girl play the character who sings “Tomorrow”, but I can’t tell from the program who it was because they didn’t use the same character name (Razamataz) as the movie. She did a good job whomever she was.

I enjoyed the production, the scenery is reasonably done, not too sparse, not too overbearing. They use silly string for their splurge guns, and only splat one pie during the production, presumably trying to keep the mess down. The costume and hair were done really well. According to Sasha, one of the benefits of the 21st century is the availability of how-to videos for flapper stylings on youtube.

Recommended.