Play Review: Forever Plaid
It only played for two nights in Hutchinson preceded by 3 shows at Sterling but "Forever Plaid" was brought to amazing local heights by four Sterling College students who gave a memorable, uplifting and highly talented performance this past weekend on South Main Streets' Stage 9.
It's the smallest live theater in town but enjoyment and entertainment was at a high level when Luke Harding, Noah Svaty, Calebe Brownlee and Robbie Stansbury took the small stage in a building that only seats about 80 people.
Forever Plaid was a 1990 off-Broadway musical that became a movie in 2008 featuring songs from the 1950s and '60s. How the four students out of Sterling and Lyons High Schools were able to so artfully blend voices coupled with Broadway professional facial expressions and gestures along with style and rhythm is hard to describe without actually seeing their accomplishments.
They got help on a series of some two dozen musical numbers from a group of artistic backstage support personnel who enhanced the overall success. Although audience members 60 plus probably remembered and enjoyed the artful selection of songs the most everyone, young and old, could identify with the talent on display which included considerable humor highlighted by a terrific mock-tribute to the once popular and TV-dominated Ed Sullivan Show.
Forever Plaid tells the story of four young singers who return to life after 40 years for a performance they never were able to make while alive after being killed when their car collided with a school bus.
The four actor-singers from Rice County are raising funds to perform in late July in Cordova, Alaska, a small fishing community of 2500. Their Hutchinson performance raised funds for that trip and was commendably promoted by local radio/'family theatre personality Glen Grunwald.
If the four Sterling College students are still available as strange as it may sound, their performance of Forever Plaid is so good and would be so well received by the senior crowd that dominated Fox Theatre offerings, that it should be brought back to Hutchinson and on the Fox stage as one of their future season ticket offerings.
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