Summer Stock: Staying Alive (Part II)
Posted by: Dan Shaw
Posted on: Wednesday, July 16, 2008
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Al Bundonis, Kelly Strademo & Michael Padgett in “Camelot” at TriArts
The Mac-Haydn in Chatham is not the only barn in our region where you can see musical theater with high production values, vigor and pluck. TriArts at the Sharon Playhouse stages three musicals every summer with a unique formula that combines first-rate regional and community theater: a couple of professional leads who belong to Actors’s Equity, knock-out costumes, inventive sets, and a chorus that ranges from grade-school kids to senior citizens. It’s not an easy feat to pull off, but TriArts always makes the most from every show such as the current production of Lerner & Loewe’s Camelot.
Camelot (Lerner & Loewe’s follow-up to their hit My Fair Lady) was never considered a great musical, although it starred the formidable duo Richard Burton and Julie Andrews when it opened on Broadway in December 1960. It has a luscious score that the 11 piece TriArts orchestra animates under the expert baton of Joshua Stone. But Camelot is undeniably dated, a pop-culture artifact from a far-off time when show tunes were popular music. The stars of TriArts production have a pleasing give-my-regards-to-old-Broadway quality: Al Bundonis as King Arthur is a good facsimile of the sort of matinee idol that don’t exist anymore. And Kelly Strandemo as Guinevere is the definition of the Broadway ingenue—as lovely to listen to as to look at.
For me, the enlightening thing for me about seeing Camelot was finally understanding why Jacqueline Kennedy compared her husband’s administration to this musical comedy in an interivew with T.H. White of Life Magazine one week after the assassination. As she said in the interview:
I want to say this one thing, it’s been almost an obsession with me, all I keep thinking of is this line from a musical comedy, it’s been an obsession with me… At night before we’d go to sleep… we had an old Victrola. Jack liked to play some records. His back hurt, the floor was so cold. I’d get out of bed at night and play it for him, when it was so cold getting out of bed… on a Victrola ten years old—and the song he loved most came at the very end of this record, the last side of Camelot, sad Camelot… “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.“...There’ll never be another Camelot again…
Do you know what I think of history? ... For a while I thought history was something that bitter old men wrote. But Jack loved history so… No one’ll ever know everything about Jack. But ... history made Jack what he was ... this lonely, little sick boy ... scarlet fever ... this little boy sick so much of the time, reading in bed, reading history ... reading the Knights of the Round Table ... and he just liked that last song. Then I thought, for Jack history was full of heroes. And if it made him this way, if it made him see the heroes, maybe other little boys will see.
The TriArts production of Camelot (through July 20) gives you a splendid and entertaining opportunity to understand the origins of the Kennedy administration’s nickname.
