By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
When we meet Jo March she’s a struggling writer of blood and guts romance fiction, full of sword wielding villians and heroes and endangered damsels, who likely will die in the end.
The true hero, though, of her work is herself – she just hasn’t realized that yet.
“Little Women: The Broadway Musical” follows Jo as she comes to realize what she should be writing about.
Horizon Youth Theatre is staging “Little Women,” directed by Cassie Greenlee, at the Oak Street Theatre opening Thursday, Oct. 6, and continuing through Sunday Oct. 9. Showtimes are: Thursday-Saturday at 7 p.m. with 2 p.m. matinees Saturday and Sunday. Click for tickets.
Jo (Rose Walters) has a boisterous, unconventional manner that bumps up against the expectations for a young woman. She expects to live an exceptional life. She’s the second in a family of four girls that is more supportive of her than is society as a whole. She thrives here and longs to keep them together – as a writer she surely appreciates the range of personalities the family offers.
Her eldest sister Meg (Whitney Bechstein) bears the brunt of the family’s lack of standing and resources. She’s also willing to be the heroine destined to die at the end of her sister’s “operatic tragedies.”
Beth (Ava DuBois) is delicate and kind. Amy (Ginger Windom), the youngest is the sister who being in spirit and inclination most like Jo and given that the sister most in conflict with her. She is, Jo declares, “a demon in the child’s body.”
Left to care for them is the mother, Marmee (Maggie Titus).
She tells her daughters: “We March women are invincible.”
The family lives in shabby respectability. The father is off as an Army chaplain during the Civil War. Even when the war ends we never meet him.
His wife though sings of how much she misses him. “Do you know how much I miss you at this hour of the day?” she sings in “Here Alone.” “I wish you were the twilight. Come take my fears away.”
Instead of returning home, the father falls ill and she must hurry off to tend to him, as the sisters are scattered throughout the community.
The strictures of society are represented by the family matriarch Aunt March (Mali Cloeter) who tries to wrest Jo into conventionality with a promise of a trip to Europe, and the wealthy neighbor Mr. Laurence (Jeremiah Hanson) whom we meet after Jo has cut down a Christmas tree from his property without permission. His grandson Laurie (Drew Thomas) serves as a bridge between the elite and the Marches. He and Jo become fast friends, and he is accepted as an honorary brother.
The actors, especially those portraying the March family, achieve a wonderful sense of cohesion. Their love and conflicts pull the audience in. They seem like sisters. Titus anchors this family with her strong, emotive singing.
The songs, directed by Kelly Frailly and accompanied by pianist Olga Meade, consistently reveal the personalities and lay bare the emotions of the characters.
Rose Walters embodies Jo March with a beaming smile and an insouciant manner of one who believes she’s meant to accomplish the astonishing despite all obstacles.
As a cast of her characters plays out her stories, she enthusiastically mouths their lines. She revels in her own creations even if publishers and Professor Bhaer (Gavin Miller), a prematurely old German professor Jo meets in New York City, deem them lacking in literary quality.
Jo’s relationship with Bhaer seems to be deepening, just as Jo has her first story accepted. Then she’s called back home from New York City to nurse Beth, who has contracted scarlet fever.
Her world is overturned. The sisterhood she treasured seems to be coming apart. Meg marries Laurie’s tutor John Brooks (Jacobi Edge), who undercuts his character’s pomposity with just the right comic touch. The stern Aunt March, disappointed and disapproving of Jo’s antics, has taken Amy on the grand tour of Europe, where the youngest sister encounters Laurie.
Jo takes the deathly ill Beth to the beach where they reflect on life in the heartrending “Some Things Are Meant To Be.”
A dispirited Jo greets the now grown Amy (Calista Motisher) and Laurie as they return from Europe as a blissful couple.
All this brings Jo back to her neglected writing space in the attic having discovered that her family’s story is what she should write, a story that is astonishing in its hold on audiences 150 years later.
