The Pinnacle Dinner Theatre is alive with the sound of cash registers. After a series of high-profile missteps, Denver’s newest dinner theater is finally drawing customers and stabilizing its bottom line with a good, old-fashioned family favorite that is hard to mess up.
Hard, but not impossible. This effort alternately soars to the mountaintops and crashes like an avalanche down the Alps. But despite its significant flaws, this is Pinnacle’s best production to date, and at this point anything that keeps the doors open should be considered a success.
But be forewarned: What you are getting only sounds like “The Sound of Music” you may remember. The script and score are considerably abridged and juggled, which compromises the overall result. And while the hills may be alive, the music is entirely canned.
On the other hand, Kristin Hathaway’s elegant performance as Maria is the crowning achievement in the career of a longtime area favorite who has been poised for years for a big star-making turn like this one. From her gamesmanship with Col. Von Trapp to her easygoing way with his kids to her sexual awakening, Hathaway has an easygoing manner, an infectious charm and an operatic voice so easy to love that she makes up for just about all else that ails this production.
She gets some help from Patricia Mansfield, who delivers a soul-stirring “Climb Every Mountain,” and director Gary Dean Hathaway (the star’s husband) has assembled an impressive roster of accomplished child actors. Seriously, if this were baseball, these kids would be the Little League all-star team. The 14 are split into two casts (though with shows only four days a week, one wonders if that wasn’t just a cynical ploy to sell more tickets to friends and families).
But what a roster it is: Matthew Rodgers is just back from a year on the “Oliver” national tour, Ben Larned and Colten Casteneda are veterans of the Denver Center’s “A Christmas Carol,” Brityn Martin just stole the show as Baby June in Country Dinner Playhouse’s “Gypsy,” and Malorie Stroud has grown up before audiences’ eyes. Yet on opening night, it was the elegant unknown Katie Wieland who absolutely channeled the film’s Charmian Carr as blossoming eldest daughter Liesl.
These cute-as-a button kiddies, notably the unnervingly poised Allison Savoy as Gretl, could teach some of their adult castmates a thing or two about stage naturalness. In particular, David Zambrano, as the widower Von Trapp, could take a cue. He’s a fine singer (“Edelweiss”) but stilted in his acting and exudes no real sense of empty grief or military stature. As much as things are cooking in the Pinnacle’s kitchen, one wonders why it always has such trouble turning up any emotional heat. The show’s end-of-the-innocence Nazi infusion and its “Great Escape” climax are utterly lacking any real menace or danger.
And longtime fans, especially those of us who believe Rodgers & Hammerstein knew what they were doing, will feel cheated by the liberties taken by the creative team. Pinnacle skips the nuns’ opening trio of gorgeous chorals. Instead Maria sings that the hills are alive – not while twirling in an alpine meadow àla Julie Andrews but standing in front of a painted concrete abbey wall!
Also excised are “How Can Love Survive?” “An Ordinary Couple” and the wedding processional – because there isn’t any wedding. Rather, the plot jumps straight from the captain’s proposal to the couple’s honeymoon return.
What must the director have been thinking to have skipped the show’s lavish, romantic payoff scene? That’s like staging “West Side Story” without the gang fight. As a result the show, with intermission, runs a half hour shorter than the film.
Another disappointment was a sprawling set that might have seemed adequate coming from anyone other than the award-winning Laura K. Love, whose fine work usually graces the Arvada Center stage. Her set here relies far too much on amateurish sliding flats, a cartoonishly painted Alps drop and an ugly yellow-dominated estate interior that seems reassembled from the recent “Rocky Horror Show” set.
Things will get better from a technical standpoint, but opening night was an ongoing flirtation with total disaster. The blaring, piped-in recorded music initially engulfed all vocals, and the actors appeared to be operating doors (or trying to) as if for the first time. One locked-in actor was forced to walk through an imaginary wall; another nearly took down half the set on one entrance.
These problems were not lost on the audience. When I asked my 7-year-old guest afterward his favorite part of the show, I felt certain he might mention lovely Maria or any one of the terrific kids. Instead he said, “When the lady pushed on the doors when she should have pulled – and the whole wall almost fell down!
“That was funny!”
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
“The Sound of Music”
**½
MUSICAL|Pinnacle Dinner Theatre, 9139 W. Bowles Ave., Jefferson County|Directed by Gary Dean Hathaway|Starring Kristin Hathaway and David Zambrano|THROUGH SEPT. 4|8 p.m. Thursday-Sundays, 2 p.m. Saturdays-Sundays (dinner service 2 hours prior)|2 hours, 20 minutes |$33.95-$56.85 (depending on entree)|720-214-5630
