Live from Upper Darby, Summer Stage is back. And ‘Hamilton’ tix go on sale. | Philly Theater Notes

Jane M. Von Bergen rounds up news and notes from Philadelphia’s theater scene on Wednesdays.

The Wizard of Oz, with a cast of 40 (!), couldn’t be a better opener for Upper Darby Summer Stage, the 40-plus-year musical theatrical tradition that has been a home for so many creative young people. (Tina Fey and Everybody Loves Raymond’s Monica Horan Rosenthal, are among an illustrious list of alums.)

After all, aren’t we feeling like Dorothy this summer, dazedly waking up back home in Kansas, wondering where we have been this pandemic year and puzzling out which reality was real?

Most years, 800 students — middle school to graduate school — participate in the whirlwind schedule of back-to-back Summer Stage productions, each mounted with costumes, complete sets, and casts of as many as 80, all on stage at the Upper Darby Performing Arts Center, located in Upper Darby High School.

This year, it’s down to 420 students. Changing COVID-19 restrictions made planning not unlike Dorothy’s tornado. “It was a roller-coaster up and down,” said executive director Harry Dietzler, who founded Summer Stage in 1976. Would the kids be allowed to gather? On stage? Could they invite an audience?

The answer was eventually yes, to all of the above — but all decided at the last minute, on June 1, with only three weeks from the first staff meeting on June 16 to July 7′s Wizard of Oz curtain-raiser.

This year’s Summer Stage lineup also includes Junie B. Jones Jr., July 14 through July 17, The Wind in the Willows, July 21 through July 24, Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, July 28 through July 31, Spookley the Square Pumpkin, Aug. 4 through 7, and Yo Vikings, Aug. 11 through 14 with four on-stage and two streamed performances for each musical.

College-age participants kick it up to pre-professional levels for the Mainstage program. This year’s musical is Tuck Everlasting, based on the children’s novel, on stage and streamed July 30 through Aug 8. Tickets available online at udpac.org.

For The Wizard of Oz this week, Philippe Jean-Louis, a 17-year-old rising senior at Monsignor Bonner, plays the Lion, in need of courage.

“I can relate, personally, to how he was very shy and secluded, and was a kept-in-a-bubble person. That’s how I was,” Jean-Louis said. He joined the group between seventh and eighth grade and found Summer Stage to be a safe and welcoming place at a time, he said, when his childhood was difficult.

“I didn’t have any courage, like the Lion,” he said. “I didn’t have the courage to express myself and sing in front of people.” That’s not the situation now — both he and his sister Isabelle hope to be in a second production this summer.

Last year’s Summer Stage was virtual, and Jean-Louis said he “missed being able to perform on the stage and to just create magic.” It particularly struck him when the cast gathered on stage for the first time for a rehearsal.

“When I looked out at all of the seats, I just imagined how it would look like with all the people there and I just imagined how I would feel,” he said. “It just gave me a feeling of joy.”

“I’ve always had this fantasy that if 1812 ever did a Shakespeare play, it would be Henry V… On Ice!” says Jennifer Childs, producing artistic director of 1812 Productions, Philadelphia’s all-comedy theater group.

“The opening scenes with the introduction of the court and the clowns would be like the Ice Capades, the battle at Agincourt would be played out by two rival hockey teams, and the ending love scene between Henry and the Princess of France would be a routine by a pair of ice dancers,” Childs says.

Fun to imagine, but a no-go financially. So, when the pandemic hit, Childs, like other theater folks, improvised. Instead of Henry V, King Lear. Instead of rival hockey teams, rival teams of set, lighting, sound, and costume designers, each coached by a director.

And instead of a skating rink? Legos.

In Set Model Theatre, available on demand until Sunday, three rival design teams conceptualize and create the set, sound, lighting, and costumes for King Lear in miniature, using Legos. It has the feel of a backstage reality show, combining video and Zoom for an inside look at how a production gets created. All five half-hour episodes are available via 1812productions.org; your $35 virtual ticket covers them all.

Philly playwright James Ijames is winning raves for a new production of his hilarious and pointed play, The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington, on stage through July 30 at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival. The New York Times called the production “stunning” and applauded they play’s “brutal sense of cynicism.”

The play, which premiered in 2014 in Philadelphia in a Flashpoint Theatre Company production, finds Martha Washington in a deathbed fever dream, reckoning with her enslavement of human beings as those who have been held in bondage at Mount Vernon wait for the end to arrive.

In addition to writing and directing, Ijames is one of three co-artistic directors at the Wilma Theater, where he’s preparing for his tenure as lead co-artistic in the upcoming 2021-2022 season. (Wilma cofounder Blanka Zizka set up a rotating lead co-artistic director arrangement prior to announcing last week that she would be stepping down and becoming artistic director emeritus.)

The Wilma presented director Morgan Green’s filmed production of Ijames’ Fat Ham, a take on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, this spring.

Single-show tickets for this fall’s Kimmel Center Broadway Philadelphia run of Hamilton go on sale Thursday, July 8, at 10 a.m. at the Academy of Music box office, online at KimmelCulturalCampus.org, or by calling 215-893-1999. The Lin-Manuel Miranda blockbuster will play Oct. 20 to Nov. 28 at the Academy of Music. Prices are $39 to $199, or $349 for premium seats. Ten-dollar seats will once again be offered by lottery.

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