There’s a lot to like about Sadie Flynn Comes to Big Oak.
First, which is a prerequisite to most theatrical experiences, is the script and in this, Norm Foster is impressive, having created a story and written funny lines that allowed him to spill the beans over the heads of the cast and directly into the audience. While the cast asks who could have shot Gil in the butt, we know right off the bat, and she enters stage right.
To tell the story of a woman on a rampage in small-town Canada, continuing to deliver her kind of justice to cheating men, Foster created a play with five characters, and the Kamsack Players, who staged the two-act comedy at the Playhouse on the weekend, found five actors, each distinctive in his or her role, to tell the story.
And the audience loved it. They laughed at the jokes and gasped at the edge of naughty, all the way through.
Because the Playhouse has a stage without a curtain, the audience’s introduction to the experience was seeing a visually substantial, well-crafted and decorated set that could hold its own amongst sets designed and constructed by any professional theatre company. As soon as the house lights dimmed and the stage was lit, the audience was pulled into the diner.
Jack Koreluik, who was responsible for much of the set which was decorated by Shelley Filipchuk, has been at the centre of a number of Playhouse productions. He entered the stage as Orson, effectively characterizing a rather dim-witted, small-town bumpkin and counterpoint to James Perry’s more flamboyant Tom.
In a number of Playhouse productions, probably most memorably in Scrooge Macbeth at the Christmas dinner theatre, Perry, as Tom the ladies’ man, has found his best role to date. He inhabits Tom with seeming ease, hilariously gesticulating and grimacing all over the place while bringing his character to life. He is emboldened enough to allow a lusty pursuit to champion fear of a killer while being compassionate enough to tell tall tales in order to attract a mate for his buddy.
As Bev, the spurned hairdresser from down the street, Beth Dix has also found a role that could have been written especially for her. Part hardened bad-ass, part lovelorn lass who was applauded at her first dramatic exit, she was very effective in her response to Tom’s depiction of Orson’s coin collection, a sustained joke which is one of the play’s funniest.
Memorable for chewing the scenery and singing up a storm with James Perry in Scrooge Macbeth, Ellen Amundson-Case marked her third time on stage in a Players’ production. As Rachel, a frequent customer of the diner, she showed the audience the personification of the small-town resident cliché, who pushes the narrative along with unabashed zeal, spreading the news of who’s seeing who and probably why.
Sadie Flynn marks the second time Casey Dix has taken on a role with the Players, and again she’s cast as the questionable villain with a gun. She sparkles as the seductress convicted killer who sweeps into town still on the prowl for a dastardly man who needs a comeuppance.
It fell to Nikki Larson, who has long been involved in Players’ productions, to pull everything together as the director of the play, and to that end she used what she has been learning as a student of Theatre Saskatchewan workshops.
As another Kamsack Players’ production, which kept the entertainment bar way up high, becomes history, we in the audience are left to wait for, and look forward to, the next one.
Congratulations guys. We enjoyed it. Keep it up.
