Stage Version of Famed Musical Highlights Boise Music Week

By Dana Oland, The Idaho Statesman, Boise

Apr. 25–Boise Music Week is here. It’s one of the broadest, most inclusive community celebrations in the Valley as more than 1,000 singers, musicians, dancers, actors, choirs, bands and anyone who loves to make music in some way come together and share that love with an eager audience.

It has been a tradition in Boise for 90 years when the city became one of the first to create a week-long music festival in the spring. Each year, during the first full week in May, most of the city’s venues from the Egyptian Theatre to Taco Bell Arena to Julia Davis Park jump on the bandwagon.

As always you’ll find everything from church organ concerts to junior high and high school choral and orchestra concerts, to dance showcases and old-fashioned band concerts in the park.

The event culminates with a full-scale community musical that, since 1987, has happened on the stage of the Velma V. Morrison Center for the Performing Arts.

This year the production is “Singin’ in the Rain,” a musical based on the 1952 Gene Kelly film of the same name. The theater production came along in 1985, directed and choreographed by Twyla Tharp.

For Bradley Zarr, the show offers a dream opportunity to play one of the greatest roles in musical theater, Don Lockwood, immortalized by Kelly.

“I saw the movie my freshman year of high school, and I thought, ‘ah, man, if I could play that role one day, that would be so amazing,’” Zarr said.

And here he is, three years later, with a smile on his face and an umbrella in his hand, getting ready to re-enact the signature image of the film and Broadway production: the title number where he dances and sings in the rain.

“This role is pure fun,” Zarr said. This is his third Boise Music Week production.

Last year Zarr, 18, played Lumiere in “Beauty and The Beast” and in 2006 he did a turn in the chorus of “Crazy for You.” That is where he met director Allyn Krueger, who is directing her third Music Week musical. Krueger co-directed and choreographed “The Music Man” in 1997 and directed “Crazy.”

“Singin’ in the Rain” tells the story of two silent film stars — Lockwood and Lina Lamont (Kathleen Jacob) — who must cope with the advent of sound. He is destined for greater stardom; she is a disaster. Enter Kathy Selden (Melissa Hamilton).

Every musical number is great, Zarr said.

This musical is filled with hit after hit created by composer Nacio Herb Brown and lyricist Arthur Freed, including “Good Morning,”"You Are My Lucky Star,”"Moses Supposes” and “Make ‘Em Laugh,” a comedy tour-de-force for actor Jeff Winberry, who plays Cosmo Brown.

The cast rounds out with Melissa Hamilton, who often performs with Opera Idaho, as Kathy Selden, the high-spirited starlet with a golden voice, and Kathleen Jacob plays squeaky-voiced movie star Lina Lamont.

Zarr, one of the youngest in the cast, grabbed the top role with his expansive talent and a love of tap-dancing, Krueger said.

“I saw ’42nd Street’ on Broadway and fell in love with tap dance,” Zarr said.

His passion gave choreographers Kathy Lee and her assistant Kay Mack a lot to work with, Mack said.

“He is such a fast learner; they all are. I’m so impressed,” Mack said of her first Music Week experience. “Even those who have never seriously danced are passionate about it.”

Mack, who teaches tap and runs the performing arts programs at Fort Boise Community Center, gives this production its historical roots. Her first dance teacher “way back when” in Chicago also taught Gene Kelly, she said.

“I picked up that style, that broad, expansive — very male — dancing style that I just love,” Mack said.

Dana Oland: 377-6442

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