Charity Hope Valentine is always looking for love in all the
wrong places. Lacey McGee, a senior at Live Oak High School, is
convincing as the optimistic and guileless Charity in
“Sweet Charity,” opening Thursday at Live Oak High School’s
Little Theatre.
Charity Hope Valentine is always looking for love in all the wrong places. Lacey McGee, a senior at Live Oak High School, is convincing as the optimistic and guileless Charity in “Sweet Charity,” opening Thursday at Live Oak High School’s Little Theatre.
The ole-time musical set in New York City during the late 60’s has a cast of 32. The two-act play fills the theater with 17 blasting, guttural and poignant tunes, swanky dance numbers and funny misadventures of characters filled with fantasies and long-abandoned dreams. All this action comes alive with accompaniment from Live Oak’s 22-piece orchestra, conducted by band director Jeff Wilson.
The audience first meets Charity as a dance hall hostess involved with a married man who she’s sure will divorce his wife and marry her. Instead, he pushes the hopeless romantic into a lake and steals her purse with her life’s savings.
“It’s fun to play her because she’s kind of naïve,” said McGee. “She’s not really a ditz; she just doesn’t think things through, but she’s full of life.”
Back at the Fan-Dango ballroom where Charity works, she fesses up to her girlfriends, Nickie Pignatelli and Helene and the others that she’s once again been duped by the male species.
Nickie tells her friend, “You’re a stupid broad. You run your heart like a hotel, you got guys checking in and checking out.”
After Nickie berates Charity, it’s time for the gals to get back to work and the next scene heats up. Looking hot in feather boas, shimmery, short dresses, rhinestones and boots, the dance hall girls sing and strut to the popular “Big Spender” tune while interested men weave their way through the tantalizing women perched on risers.
“The best part is we get to sing “Big Spender,” said Alika Spencer, a junior who plays the rough but motherly type Nickie.
“I advise Charity with her love problems, and she has a long list of them,” laughed Spencer, who also acts with South Valley Civic Theatre.
Ananya Ashok is persuasive as Charity’s most sarcastic friend and Nickie’s cohort, Helene. The gum-popping, eye-rolling chick doesn’t see any way out of her situation, and therefore, offers Charity cynical advice and tough love friendship.
Heeding her friends’ counsel, Charity vows from then on to be strong and wise. She accidentally meets Vittorio Vidal, a famous Italian movie star in front of the glitzy Pompeii Club. He – played by Rory Tomasello – shamelessly uses her to win back the affections of his mistress Ursula.
While in Vidal’s apartment, McGee does a fantastic job with the familiar, “If My Friends Could See Me Now” tune.
Still, Charity is jilted again. But her encounter with Vidal whets her appetite for culture. She heads to the YMCA for enrichment, where she unexpectedly meets the anxiety-ridden and claustrophobic Oscar Lindquist – played by Brian Scott – while the two are trapped in an elevator together.
The chemistry between McGee and Scott is perfect. Scott is believable as the paranoid tax accountant Lindquist, who tiptoes through life until he meets Charity and flirts with the idea of love and chance.
“It’s fun to play a paranoid character,” said Scott. “Oscar is obsessed with purity and he’s kind of a nerd and a goober. He’s affectionate but timid and shy.”
McGee, who plans to be a theater major in college, plays Charity’s feelings toward Oscar with hope and optimism.
“Charity is a very relational person. She moves from one guy to the next —always incredibly optimistic,” said McGee, who’s had supporting roles in previous Live Oak productions including Dickens’ “Christmas Carol,” “Wizard of Oz,” and “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”
Charity and Oscar quickly grow fond of one another and Oscar nicknames her “Sweet Charity.” They attend the Rhythm of Life Church full of people down on their luck. The show’s biggest dance and song number, “The Rhythm of Life” follows with the entire cast. It’s fun and boisterous and very 60’s with tie-dye, afro-hair-dos and love beads.
Oscar appears to work through his neurosis and allows himself to fall in love with Charity. Desperately wanting to change her circumstances, she quits her job at the Fan-Dango, sings “Where Am I Going” and summons the nerve to come clean with Oscar about her real profession.
Oscar confesses he already knew and proposes marriage. He tells Charity, “I promise I’ll never mention it again as long as I live.”
Charity’s friends at the Fan-Dango throw her a party where they all joyfully sing “I Love to Cry at Weddings,” led by Herman, the unsympathetic dance hall manager, or as the girls fondly refer to him as “Der Fuhrer,” adeptly played by Billy Lewis.
Charity may have found true love with Oscar and she may live happily ever after. But then again, Charity may find herself hopefully looking for love long after the last dance is danced, the last song is sung and the curtain falls.
“It’s a fantastical musical,” said C. William Klipstine, director and drama and ceramics instructor at Live Oak. “These kids will be so animated. It’s a quality production and we stress professionalism.”
Klipstine said almost 100 people are involved in the show from actors, orchestra members and the oft-forgotten tech crew, who make it all happen behind the scenes.
“In a play you just have the director who’s responsible for all the action on stage,” said Catherine Dickstein, the associate director and senior at Live Oak. “A musical has so much more to make it all mesh.”
The musical, based on Neil Simon’s book, was originally adapted from the Federico Fellini film, “Nights of Cabiria.”
