They'll never take our sons/to face those Yankee guns...

Ford's Theater down in DC is doing Shenandoah, one of my favorite musicals. Ryan, Susan and I did it down in Virginia--I was Jenny, Ryan was Henry (Ryan and I still call each other this) and Susan was the choreographer and later stepped into the chorus. (L.A. Powers, as she had us call her, was originally cast as my understudy--Ryan knew her and told the rest of us who she was and I was stunned--"why the hell are you working at THIS theater??" She obviously came to her senses because a few weeks later she stopped coming to rehearsals and Susan got to be in the show!) It's such a great show--based on a movie in the late '60s starring Jimmy Stewart, it's about the Anderson family who live in the Shenandoah Valley during the War Between the States, '63-'64. Papa Charlie is a fierce isolationist with 6 sons (and 1 daughter) who is determined that his sons will not enter the war. Some of the sons want to fight, the oldest is married and wants to settle down, and Jenny, the daughter, gets married to a Confederate soldier. (Drumbeat of theme "No man is an island" getting louder.) It's actually quite serious and violent at times, and *really* depressing--some of Charlie's best songs (the "Meditations") are at the grave of his wife. "Meditation 1" is a phenomenal song, one of those songs that make me curse my lot at not being born a booming tenor baritone so I could play that role!

And me, I've got 28 years in this farm,
My blood, my sweat and my tears in this farm,
And no one's going to come along and say,
That I owe any part
Not the tiniest part
To anyone in any single way...
This farm don't belong to Virginia!
My sons bleed, but not for the South...
This land here is Anderson land!
By the strength of my hand
and the sweat of my brow
For as long as the Lord
Will allow!

We had a wonderful time doing it--our cast even did road trips to the Valley and Winchester to visit sites and do research. And being surrounded by a ton of "brothers" in the cast and one of only 4 women in the cast was pretty terrific! I used to call them "the brother buffet." I remember Marcus, who played Sam (Jenny's fiance-turned-husband) teasing me about my cold readings at the auditions--I have always been good at cold readings (it's the musician in me, I'm used to sight-reading and acting off a text), and really nailed those. We did the scene where Sam awkwardly courts Jenny after church while two of her brothers yuck it up in the background. Sam says "I'd be eternally grateful if I could visit you this evening" and Jenny replies "Eternally is a long time, Sam." The line reading was so clear to me--I made it very teasing and really drawled out "long" flirtatiously. After that Marcus started calling me "Miss Two Good Readings."

Loved doing that show. I would do it again, for free.