Game Cast a Credit to Spitfire Grill,
Last Show at the Barn
By Jim Cavener, ASHEVILLE CITIZEN-TIMES Correspondent..
September 2, 2005

BREVARD - Fred Alley and James Valcq's The Spitfire Grill is the final show
for Brevard Little Theatre's long run at the old Barn Theatre on the campus of
Brevard College.  The college is reclaiming the Barn, and the "Official
Community Theater of Transylvania County" must look for another home.

The Spitfire Grill is not well-known.  It began as an independent film with Ellen
Burstyn in the role of Hannah, the cafe owner, the key role played in Brevard's
version by Kathleen Healy-Schmieder.

Valcq and Alley liked this sentimental script enough to transform it into a musical,
adding an uninspired and repetitive score, simplifying the complexity of story-line
and bringing the film cast down to seven residents of Gilead, Wisconsin,
including the new arrival, Percy (Laine Lewis), a mysterious young ex-convict
looking for a fresh start.

But all is not welcoming in Gilead, and since Percy did time for murder, there is
opposition to her settling in this tidy little community.

Art Williams gives us the chief opponent, Caleb Thorpe, and the busy-body
postmistress, Effy Krayneck, done by Carol Hamann, joins him as the comic foil
for the whole plot.

Although pathos and poignancy are rife in this story, there are a few good laughs.

Terry Owen Upton is a lovely Shelby Thorpe and, teamed with Lewis as Percy,
gives us a few melodic moments in an otherwise pretty bland score.  These two
women's voices merit the effort at a musical, but other singers are not so blessed.  
Could be that performances have improved since opening night and the musical
renderings may be more palatable for the second weekend.

The fine young county sheriff is performed by Brevard veterinarian Mark
Thompson, and an ironic twist has this law officer getting romantically entangled
with the former felon with the cloudy past.  The thick plottens.  We hear a lot
about Hannah the cafe owner's son who was missing in Vietnam, and the presence
of "The Visitor," given by Howard McQuaid clears up some of that sad saga.

The story is sweet, close to saccharine, but tolerable in this dosage.  The weak
link is the music, formulaic to a fault and repetitive in both the score and the
lyrics.  One line is repeated over and over as though to fill the space.

The show would have been stronger left as a nonmusical vehicle.

Credit director Gene O'Hare for gathering a game cast and especially for the
musical director, J. R. Rhodes, who gets no bio in the program but who does
yeoman's duty grinding out the score and setting the pace from a perch above the
audience right.

Jim Cavener writes on theater for the Citizen-Times:
JimCavener@aya.Yale.edu