I love the Reagle shows, which miraculously combine the "heart"
of community theatre with the rigor of Broadway's demands
re skill. Some, at least, of the "amateurs" at Reagle are
"retired" musical theatre professionals who settled in the
Waltham area to raise families, but keep up their skills so
that they can be in the shows they have always loved, even
if only in the chorus or in cameo roles. And as Larry Stark
says about the outsiders, "The principals that Bob Eagle hires
are people who have "lived" the show through long runs or
even longer tours, and there are simply no equivalent actors
in the Boston pool." These people model the style of show
for the locals, and set a standard locals exert themselves
to equal or better. Also, some of the "outside' Equity hires,
like Elizabeth Walsh (who starred in "Brigadoon" and "Guys
and Dolls") are natives who consider the Boston area home
and live here when not employed elsewhere.
MY analogy for Reagle would be to community choruses. Choruses
do great works that simply can not be performed professionally
in our economy. (They were written for musicians who worked
for free or for, basically, room and board-- boys from choir
schools, monks and nuns, minimum-waged salaried pros hired
full time at puny wages by churches patronized by the government
or aristocracy.) Nobody today can hire 100-plus choristers
to sing a requium or an oratorio. Amateurs (like me: I've
sung in choirs and choruses for 40 years, and like Steven
Jay Gould I've found performing the great choral works one
of life's peak experiences) train their voices, practice,
rehearse the great works under a hired choral director, and
then hire world class soloists to sing the spectacularly difficult
solo parts. IF the chorus has a home grown world class singer,
that amateur singer is awarded the appropriate solo part to
perform with the "ringers". Amateurs and professionals together
bring to life a great work of art which otherwise would exist
only as a historical record.
This may be the future of the American Broadway Musical,
our great native art form. The unions have worked to secure
a living wage and decent conditions on stage and back stage,
but one result is that there are no more blocks of cheap seats
in the 2nd balcony. Already the tickets to a Broadway show
are priced out of the reach of working-class people-- and
of most would-be performers, alas. And who is rich enough
to afford $65 tickets to take the kids? Kids who may not like
it?-- Or who may grow up to be tomorrow's audience? At Reagle,
a kid's ticket isn't much more than a ticket to the latest
movie, and in an audience of 100's rather than 1000's the
kid can sit close enough to see that some of the wonderfully
skillful performers are neighbors and classmates!
by 
