In the outpouring of memorials following Irish musician and actor Glen Hansard’s untimely death last month, came the recognition of his vast gift to bring people together, to use music to cultivate community and make us feel less alone.
“Once,” the 2012 Broadway adaptation of the 2007 beautiful little independent Irish film that starred Hansard and featured his original songs, practically swept the Tony Awards and is shot through with his extraordinary gifts. And Saugatuck Center for the Arts is absolutely honoring Hansard and his gifts with their current production of this magnificent show that is an enormous part of his legacy.
With book by Enda Walsh based on John Carney’s film and music by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová (who also starred in the film), “Once” tells the story of two aspiring musicians, a guy (Zack Zaromatidis) and girl (Lily Talevski) from different cultures whose paths cross at a moment in their lives in which they’re each broken hearted. Surrounded by their respective tribes [she, a house full of Czech immigrants (Molly Coyne, Gerardo Garcia, Andrew Harvey), including her mother (Terry Palasz) and daughter (Saoirse Wagner); and he, his Da (Bristol Pomeroy) and fellow Dubliners (Chris Blisset, Todd Aulwurm, Alex Hamel, Dylan James)] in the glorious “dirty old town” and New Millennial EU metropolis of Dublin, they connect through the poignant ballads and folk rock they've written about their sorrow and angst.
And though with very different personalities and styles, and despite their wounds, they spur each other on and strive to create something together that’s larger than themselves while remaining committed to their familial duties. In the end they create an album, a community, and a friendship full of longing, perhaps the deepest, truest kind of love we so rarely see glorified, certainly not on stage and in a musical.
Director Trey Compton takes us on a very deliberate journey and tells this touching story, largely through memorable music that’s positively electrifying and performed live by the dozen extraordinary actor-musicians who make up the cast and each play their own instruments—as well as through the stunning little gestures, silences, powerful moments of humanity that sneak up on you and make your heart swell with recognition.
Academy Award winning “Falling Slowly” is but one of many brilliant songs drawn from the film that allow Zack Zaromatidis as Guy and Lily Talevski as Girl to communicate a vast array of emotion—and that begins quietly but swells to grandness when the entire ensemble joins, creating powerful sound and feeling beyond what one or two can do together. This happens again and again in the score, the arrangements, the performance.
Musical Director Chris Blisset is the fire at the center of this show who drives it with his powerful and often comedic performance as the delightfully bold and impassioned Billy, a role he reprises from the 2018 production in Saugatuck. He also effectively leads much of the cast in what can only be described as a Cèilidh, a big Irish dance party driven by traditional Irish music, beginning a half hour before curtain with an actual bar upstage serving patrons who meander onto the stage to wet their whistles.
At various moments throughout the show the ensemble members play and swap fiddles, guitars, mandolins—among other strings, a cajon box drum amid other percussion, and piano as well as accordion, sometimes all at once in a swelling crescendo, and for other quieter scenes, just one instrument and one voice. Individually and collectively they’re brilliant instrumentalists.
The music is also woven into exquisite scene transitions and set changes, with echoes of songs, slightly changed as interludes. It’s really a play with music. Or, a musical for people who think they don’t like musicals as well as for musical lovers alike.
The choreography here by Director Trey Compton is subtle, like modern dance in which ensemble members use chairs and tables to play out mood and feeling through movement peripheral to the performance of song.
Ranae Salmeyer’s set is like a blank slate of ersatz stone walls with one door upstage right and a bar upstage left with a cleverly hidden platform that effectively highlights a really gorgeous apex moment in the show. But more grit would make it feel a lot more like the place it’s trying to evoke. However, Jennifer Kules’s muscular lighting design brilliantly signals emotion and change of scene and place in this wide open space.
The Saugatuck Center for the Arts were deep in rehearsal when the news of Hansard’s death came to pass. Their love and kinship with his purpose and work is clear in this fine production of “Once”, a show that makes you feel more alive and less alone—and utterly honors Hansard’s legacy.
Once
Saugatuck Center for the Arts
Aug. 7-30
sc4a.org
