Broadway Night to Highlight Sitkans' Talent

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Created on Thursday, 30 January 2025 15:13

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By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
    Show tunes, from the familiar to the esoteric, will be in the air Friday at Broadway Night, this year starring the largest cast of performers ever lined up for the annual celebration of music with a Sitka flavor.
    Broadway Night is a talent show in which every song is one that originated in a Broadway stage musical. Performers are Sitka friends and neighbors, all of them eager to share their music. With more than a century’s worth of work to borrow from, the options are near limitless, and the event will include a broad range of musical styles.

Christian Litten and Keith Grenier perform at the 2024 Broadway Night at Odess Theater. This year’s program is set for Friday. (Sentinel File Photo)

    Over 20 performers, from grade schoolers to adults, will perform before an audience enjoying refreshments and drinks at round tables in the Odess Theater on the SJ campus.
    “It’s a pretty wide open prompt as far as people figuring out how they want to contribute to that show,” said master of ceremonies Andrew Hames. “And I think that you always get a really great variety of things that just naturally occur… It mostly just kind of shakes itself out.”
    The show will get underway at 6:30 p.m.
    “It’s a great time of the year for something like this,” Hames said. “We’re all kind of going through the January slump, and I think that in Broadway Night people show up just looking to have a really fun evening. And you feel that vibe – I feel it as soon as the show starts, the crowd is just excited to be there. Odess Theater is such a great live-but-intimate performance space as far as the lighting and just the coziness of the theater.”
    Along with his role as emcee, Hames will perform in some of the acts including a rendition of “Bells are Ringing,” which he first sang in high school. He’s eager to see old hands and new faces coming out to try their talent.
    “I just love seeing all the different performers that come out, people who you haven’t seen perform before, but then also people who you see perform often here in town,” he said. “So you see a lot of risk-taking on Broadway night, people just getting up and trying something different or trying something new, and the crowd is always there to support it.”
     Roller skates play a part in Leah Mason’s Broadway Night piece, highlighting the skating that was a dramatic part of the famous musical “Starlight Express.”
    “The whole thing’s run on roller skates, and the set is a series of highly engineered moving bridgeways, across the top of the audience in some cases,” Mason said, describing the original New York production.
    Her selection includes “a country song, and a ‘he-done-me-wrong’ song,’” Mason said. The country song is the first of its genre to be performed at Sitka’s Broadway Night, she added. Mason hopes to be ready to step into her skates by Friday, but a lingering injury may prevent her from participating in that aspect of the show.
    In her interview with the Sentinel she said she enjoys musicals in part for their social commentary.
    “They can be really interesting time capsules about social mores and social movements,” Mason said. Friday’s show, she said, is essentially a rock opera.
    “This is a very ambitious musical, and it’s non-stop music. It’s more like a rock opera, and it’s a very big ensemble, and a lot of music,” she said.
    Back for Broadway Night this year is Lola Hitchcock, now an eighth grader, who will sing “A Cockeyed Optimist” from “South Pacific,” and “I Won’t Say I’m in Love,” from the movie “Hercules.”
    The “South Pacific” number is about “how a lot of people are looking down on things, and saying how bad things are, and she’s just always looking on the bright side of things, and nobody can really take that away from her, no matter what they say,” Hitchcock said. “So that one’s just really happy and light.”
    Her second selection, from “Hercules,” is the opposite, she said. She performs “I Won’t Say I’m in Love” along with two other girls, “and so we’re all kind of a little trio, and we rotate between who’s the girl who’s saying that she’s not going to fall in love.”
    Involved in a rendition of “Avenue Q,” which is a take on the children’s classic “Sesame Street” but aimed at adults, Jack Petersen will sing “The Money Song.”
    “It’s basically adult ‘Sesame Street,’ like if ‘Sesame Street’ was made for the lessons that you learn as an adult, like how to deal with relationships and the balance of life and death and taxes and stuff, all within the satire of puppets and humans and monsters,” Petersen said.
    He will perform alongside Zeke Blackwell, Christian Litten, Grace Ivers and Andrew Hames. “The Money Song” tells the story of a couple similar to “Sesame Street’s” Bert and Ernie, and touches on their relationship and fiscal troubles.
    “It’s a song that comes a little bit later in the show. The character I’ll be performing, Nikki, has been kicked out of his apartment after badgering his roommate, Rod, for potentially being gay, and he is out on the street and he’s asking people for money,” Petersen said.
    Tickets are $50, and are available at fineartscamp.org. Broadway Night is a fundraiser for Sitka Community Theater and will help finance the organization’s spring production, “Rock of Ages.”