Hello, Dolly! by Jerry Herman on July 6-9 is a lively musical perfect for entertaining your 4th of July guests and family. The lead character, Dolly Gallagher from Yonkers NY, is a widowed matchmaker and dance teacher who is trying to marry off the half-millionaire Horace Vandergelder. Lively dancing and humor abound. Carol Channing portrayed Dolly in several Broadway runs. She attended nearby Bennington College in Vermont and was the first celebrity to perform at the Super Bowl halftime show. The musical was the winner of ten Tony awards. Stage director for Seagle’s production, Meaghan Deiter, portrayed Dolly when she was a singer a Seagle a few years ago.
The Three Bears on July 9 will be held at the Boathouse Theater. Who can resist bringing children and grandchildren to this wonderful children’s opera by the dynamic and prolific composer and performer, Jonathan Stinson? The opera is loaded with laughs and good fun. This children’s opera will be performed throughout the North Country in the summer and fall.
Seagle Festival Gala Cabaret, the largest event of the summer, will take place in a giant tent on July 16. This fun, memorable evening is the highlight of the season. Gala honorees are Michael Adams and Joel Friedman. Musical goers recently went by bus from Schroon Lake to Cooperstown to hear Michael Adams perform the lead in Showboat at Glimmerglass Opera Festival. He has a distinguished opera career in Europe and the USA. Joel Friedman has been a dedicated supporter of Seagle Festival in volunteering for the Gala, the nominating committee and helping wherever needed. He also leads the Adirondack Marathon Distance Festival, a major regional event in Schroon Lake. Heidi Kelly, Gala Chair, has been devoted in spearheading this popular event, filled with delicious catered food from the Lily and the Rose, live music, dancing, and performances.
Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi by Puccini will take place on July 20-23. Both one-act operas will be sung in Italian with English supertitles. Suor Angelica is rarely performed and is also the composer’s only all-female opera. The broad humor in Gianni Schicchi makes it one of Puccini’s most popular works.
Fellow Travelers, a modern opera, takes place in the 1950’s during the lavender scare of the McCarthy era. The opera holds forth August 3-6, and debuted in Cincinnati Opera in 2016. The work is full of drama in its sixteen scenes set in Washington D.C. Gregory Spears’ music is described as a mix of styles, of minimalism, romanticism, and according to the NY Times, is “astonishingly beautiful.” Librettist Greg Pierce, is from Vermont and earned a BA from Oberlin and MFA in creative writing from Warren Wilson College, plus a fellowship at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs.
The musical comedy Once Upon a Mattress by Mary Rodgers concludes the main season on August 17-20. The musical is set in a fictional medieval kingdom in 15th century Europe. The play was written as a humorous adaptation of the 1835 Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, “The Princess and the Pea.” It is happy and funny during the right moments and serious when necessary.
A Labor Day spectacular will take place on Monday, September 5. The grand finale of the season is Happily Ever After featuring well-known and lesser-known songs of Stephen Sondheim. The late beloved Sondheim was described that he in a way “reinvented the American musical” and used unexpected themes. He was a magna cum laude graduate of Williams College and first fell in love with theater at the age of nine when he saw A Warm Day in May on Broadway.