Rosebud Theatre plans season of heartfelt shows
In unveiling his 2019 season, Rosebud Theatre’s artistic director Morris Ertman stresses Rosebud is proud to be a small town that tells big-hearted stories.
The season opener in March will be the Canadian premiere of Bright Star, a musical written by Steve Martin and Edie Brickell. Set in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina in 1945 with flashbacks to 1923, Bright Star “tells the story of a woman who finds her long-lost son.
“It’s a great banjo-picking, fiddle-playing bluegrass musical and a really great mother and son story,” says Ertman, adding he’s been “listening to this wonderful music for two years now ever since I first heard it. This is a show I really wanted to do. It’s about love interrupted and, like the stories we love most to tell, it’s set in small town land.”
Bright Star features a 15-member cast, which Ertman says “will be composed of actors who are also musicians so the band is also part of the cast. Our story will be played, sung and told all at once.”
Rosebud’s summer show will be the return of W.O. Mitchell’s beloved prairie comedy The Kite, the story of a reporter who is sent to write a magazine article about Daddy Sherry, the oldest living person in Shelby, Alta.
“We did The Kite 13 years ago and whenever we ask our patrons what plays we should bring back, The Kite is always on the list. Nathan Schmidt nailed Daddy Sherry the first time he played him so he’s going to head up the new cast as well,” says Ertman.
“W.O. belongs on our Rosebud stage. His crazy, laugh-out-loud prairie characters are very much at home here.”
Beginning in September, Rosebud will present Katori Hall’s gentle drama The Mountaintop, about the night Martin Luther King was assassinated.
“It’s a beautiful story of how Martin Luther King is visited by an angel in the form of a hotel maid who has been sent from beyond the grave to take him to the grave.
“We never shy away from stories like this because the spiritual world permeates all of our plays.”
Ertman says what he likes best
about The Mountaintop is “it shows Martin Luther King as a real person with all his flaws. It’s a really human portrait of this great man.”
The 2019 holiday show at Rosebud will be A Christmas Story, the beloved story of little Ralphie who wants an air rifle for Christmas, which turns out to be the least of his parents’ problems, though by no means an insignificant one.
“I confess I wasn’t aware of the movie version,” says Ertman about the 1983 classic that ranks as one of the top holiday films of all time.
“I looked at several versions of this story and settled on a nonmusical version, which I think is screamingly funny. It’s about a Christmas where everything goes wrong and still it ends up being a wonderful picture of family life at Christmas.”
Rosebud has a second, smaller stage and in July it will present Libby Skala’s uplifting, true-life drama Lilia, based on her grandmother who was an Austrian actress who fled Nazi Germany for New York. She worked in a zipper factory, eventually making it back to her real passion onstage and eventually playing the Mother Superior opposite Sidney Poitier in the Oscar-winning movie Lilies of the Field.