Coronado Playhouse has a new production underway at their theatre in the Coronado Community Center, and lovers of 1920s flappers and light-footed tap dancing won’t want to miss it. Thoroughly Modern Millie is playing now through Oct 18, 2015, with shows every Thursday through Sunday.
The play is based on the 1967 film of the same name with frisky flappers, a dragon-lady villainess, and mystery and mayhem that explode into a surprise fairy-tale ending. After its debut in 2002, the Broadway production earned six Tony Awards.
Raised hemlines and bobbed hair welcomed the 1920s Jazz Age in New York City, and Millie Dillmount is ready to embrace all of it. She arrives starry-eyed on the streets of Manhattan, elated to be out of her “one-light town where the light is always red” in rural Kansas. But just after she enthusiastically rips up her return ticket home, her suitcase and one of her shoes are stolen, and she gets some stern advice to go back where she came from. Millie is made of strong stuff, though, as the audience will come to admire, and instead she heads to a women’s boarding house and begins her search for work.
Millie’s main purpose is to find job with a handsome single boss and marry him — and she’ll skip right over love. As she sings, “Men say it’s criminal what women’ll do; What they’re forgetting is… this is 1922!” Before long she has a job, her eyes set on the man for whom she dictates letters, and a growing group of friends. Life is not so simple, though, when a young man about town steals her heart and the matron of her hotel turns out to be chloroforming girls to sell them into “white slavery.”
I have seen Thoroughly Modern Millie once before in a dazzling production at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. The Coronado Playhouse may be community theatre, but it did an excellent job of bringing the energy and glitter of the Broadway play to the smaller stage. The actors and actresses threw their hearts into the production, and no one missed a line or a step.
Sure, the fringe on Millie’s flapper dress was a little uneven, and the skyscraper that Jimmy and Millie sat and sang on wobbled just enough to convey the terror the characters felt at being 80 stories high, but that is part of the charm of community theater. When the actors perfect a laugh by adding their own spontaneous facial expression (Kay Marian McNellen as Millie was particularly good at this), or when Muzzy (Heather Barton) stepped onto the stage and dazzled with her speakeasy singing, the delight is even greater than in a grander production, and the success of the whole play feels more like a community celebration.
As always, Coronado Playhouse partners with a local charity organization during each production to raise funds for the local community in need. During the six-week run of performances, Coronado Playhouse is raising money and awareness for San Diego Habitat for Humanity. Along with collecting donations, the cast and crew of Thoroughly Modern Millie will raffle a large scale children’s playhouse they constructed to benefit Habitat for Humanity’s mission of providing homes for ownership by low income families.
Where: 1835 Strand Way, Coronado, CA 92118
When: Through October 18, 2015
Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at 8:00pm
Sunday matinee at 2:00pm
Tickets: $20 Thursday, $25 Friday, $27 Saturday, $23 Sunday
$3 Active Military, Student & Senior Discount
Great Group Rates
Phone: (619) 435-4856
Online: http://coronadoplayhouse.com/
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Becca Garber
Staff Writer
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