Ten Thousand Things offers special "Spitfire Grill"

Photo by Tom Wallace

 

The Spitfire Grill is special for me.

The heartfelt, heart-tugging musical has a place deep in my heart, and the current Ten Thousand Things production more than does the material justice. It's certainly the finest production of the material I've seen, as the company's stripped-down production style emphasizes 

The Fred Alley/James Valcq musical was in development at the turn of the century, when I was working in Door County. Alley was co-founder and a creative force with American Folklore Theatre (now Northern Sky Theater), and while Spitfire was in development outside of AFT, it was certainly in the air through 2000 and into 2001, as the creators prepared for a workshop at Playwrights Horizons, in anticipation of an Off-Broadway run. We chatted about his excitement and hopes for the show at his farmhouse in rural Fish Creek in mid-April, the landscape coming to life after a typical long winter. 

Alley died of a heart attack on May 1, 2001, before the workshop began. The work went forward, with composer Valcq taking the lead in preparing the show for its Off-Broadway run in September.

And yes, that September. The musical opened near the epicenter of a national tragedy. It earned solid notices (and even a few best-of-the-year mentions and award nods) but its life has really been away from the big city, where this small-scale musical can really spread its wings.

The Spitfire Grill centers on a small Wisconsin town haunted by the past. It takes a young woman, herself haunted, to be the catalyst for a change. Percy Talbot is fresh out of prison and decides, based only on an autumn landscape photo, to settle in Gilead.

The local sheriff is skeptical, as Gilead is a dying town with few prospects for employment -- or want of a stranger, one who is a convict no less.

Still, he helps Percy out by getting her a place to stay and work at the Spitfire Grill, owned by Hannah, a hard-nosed Gilead lifer. A trio of additional characters fill in for the rest of the town: friendly Shelby, her angry husband Caleb, and the town busybody Effy. 

The plot centers on two things: a raffle dreamt up by Percy and Shelby to raffle off the Grill, which Hannah has been trying to sell since her husband die; and a mysterious stranger who serves as a physical specter for this haunted town.

However, this musical is about the inner lives of the characters much more than the engine of the plot. All of them have flaws -- several are broken when it starts -- and most of them struggle to make themselves, and their town better.

This is brought out through Valcq's folk-infused score and Alley's dynamic lyrics. Merge these, and you have a musical that is a tough test for the actors, not due to any vocal pyrotechnics, but through the depths they need to travel to get the best out of the songs.

TTT is a perfect place for this, with its minimal staging and focus on clarity and depth of performance. Like all company shows, this is presented in the round with the house lights up. Like their characters, the actors can't hide, and they use that to generate terrific performances, led by Katherine Fried as the troubled Percy. That's aided by Michelle Barber as Hannah and Katie Bradley as Shelby. The balance of the cast -- George Keller, Tom Reed, and  Dominic Schiro -- fill in the emotional spaces as needed, and help to bring the whole town to life.

And while I've been talking about the heartache and tough journeys, The Spitfire Grill is also funny and charming, with light hearted songs about bad food at town diners and endless Wisconsin winters helping to keep the mood from getting too dark. (And if you have seen the movie: the musical takes a different path in the end.)

Bright staging helps to make it all work. The show evokes the beauty of a rural, Midwestern town, but has to do that with nary a tree or leaf in sight. Instead, with the aid of movement director Jim Lichtscheidl, the company members become those inanimate objects -- a bus in the opening scene, a hallway and stairs as Hannah walks through her empty house.

It's most impressive in Percy's act two standout, "Shine." Hurt and heart broke, Percy is taken a special autumnal vista. In this case, it's the rest of the cast, waving gently in the breeze, Here, the music (provided by Peter Vitale and Tyson Forbes), staging (co-directed by Marcela Lorca and Michelle O'Neil), and performance all come together for a few minutes of pure theatrical magic.

I'm always going to have a spot for The Spitfire Grill in my heart, but this production is a tremendous interpretation. It runs through June 9 at various venues.