Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry will come to life tonight (Wednesday) at Kaleidoscope Theatre.
Leader of the Pack: The Ellie Greenwich Musical will begin tonight (July 15) and run July 16, 17, 18, 20 and 21 at 7:30 p.m. with a special matinee performance on July 19.
“This is a play I found quite a few years ago and I’ve been wanting to do it for a long time, but it just didn’t seem like the right time ever, until this summer,” Director Becky Neuman said.
“I think what really made me want to do it was the music, because it is the early 1960’s rock ‘n’ roll. It just seemed like a really fun thing to do. It is actually a musical review more than a musical, so there is a lot of music and a lot of songs that people will remember,” she told the Mail.
The cast consists of 18 members with several other as crew and music. The part of the young Ellie Greenwich will be played by Rebecca Graf and the part of Jeff Barry will be played by Landon Brown. A young Darlene Love will be played by Misha Maeska and Phil Spector, under the name Gus Sharkey, who was a big producer in the 1960’s, will be played by Michael James.
Neuman said the musical is set in the early 1960’s when Greenwich and Barry were writing songs. They met, fell in love and were married.
“While they were together they wrote a number of songs and so this is some of the songs they wrote together plus some that they did on their own,” she said. “It is their story, how Ellie got started work and met Jeff and fell in love. That is just kind of interlaced through the songs.”
Some of the songs the cast will be singing will include: “Chapel of Love”, “Da Do Ron Ron”, “Be my Baby”, “Hanky Panky”, “Do Wah Diddy” and of course the title song “Leader of the Pack”.
Neuman said the musical was put together quite fast because of scheduling.
“I had readings and auditions in May, but we really didn’t start working on it until the end of May (beginning) of June. We have kind of hammered it together real quickly. It has been a lot of work because we didn’t have a lot of time to put it together. Normally I would like to take two or three months. We just had to rehearse a lot harder and a lot faster than we normally would have.”
Kaleidoscope Theatre, located at Drumheller Valley Secondary School on Highway 10, is Drumheller’s community theatre.
All of the cast, crew, and behind-the-scenes members are volunteers.
For ticket information visit www.kaleidoscopetheatre.ca
