The Legend of Sleepy H llow
The Legend of Sleepy H llow
Adapted from a story by Washington Irving
Directed by Wade Hair
Starring Nic Jewell, Kelly McPherson, and Nathan Jones
Breakthrough Theatre, Winter Park, FL</strong>
While it wasn’t exactly a dark and stormy night, it was creepy enough. Two hundred years ago Tarrytown was out in the wilds, and Sleepy Hollow was more a clearing in the woods than a suburb. The town has called a new teacher, Ichabod Crane (Jewell), and like all educators he’s not paid much, has to sleep in the school house, and by the way could he teach some of those newfangled Connecticut hymns to the tuneless church ladies? The American Revolution is a fresh memory, inn keeper Peter Vedder (Larry Stallings) regales us with how he deflected a musket ball with his sabre. But while Crane’s salary is low, there’s the charming Katrina Van Tassel (McPherson); she’s attractive and attentive, but she also stand to inherit all of daddy’s money: There’s lots of it, and no other heirs. But his real challenge is brutish Brom Bones (Jones); he’s tough, he’s local and he’s got muscle. The foppish Crane can quote French poetry all day long, but he’s gonna get his heine kicked, possibly by some of Cotton Mather’s Satanic demons.
Jewell’s perfumed Crane is the star here, his foppish manners and fluent French mark him as someone who has no business on the frontier. The children respect him, but the consensus of the parents is a frontier gruff “We don’t need no book larnin’ round these parts.” Go, America! Education probably wouldn’t help, but at least hardnosed Hans Van Ripper (Thomas Ramsey) made the effort. McPherson’s feminine charms are obvious, yet she only sees Crane as a flirtation; she knows her future lies with Brom Bones. While Mr. Jones has a boyish face, he has a man’s jealousy over a woman and stuff like that often leads to war. And war is coming, with his wingmen Nicholas (Eric Callovi) and Christian (Armond Aponte) he’s invincible and can even ignore his father. Eileen Antonescu plays the grandmother with an ear piece; she great for those times when a plot point needs repeating.
Beside the missing “O” in the title of the show, my only complaint is it tends to be screechy. The children on stage are actual children (not stage children) and when they let go, its eardrum piercing painful. But besides that, this is a pleasant tale of self-deception and the joys of excluding superior outsiders from a closed community. Crane is mightily abused: unappreciated for doing what he was hired, deceived by the only eligible girl in town, and driven away by sheer meanness. No treats for him, only tricks.
For more information, please visit http://www.breakthroughtheatre.com or look them up on Facebook.
