The Theater Angels Of "Old Oak Ridge"

SOUND & Stage Theater Company Photo. 

There’s a special circular magic to works of theater that take as their mission creating a product that tells the story of the process. This spirit imbues Old Oak Ridge, a new musical from SOUND & Stage Theater Company, with music and lyrics by Carol Taubl and book and direction by Dawn Taubl. The show premiered last weekend at Congregation B’Nai Jacob in Woodbridge as a loving testament to found family on and offstage.

Inspired in part by the famous Angel Oak in Charlestown, South Carolina, Old Oak Ridge, SOUND’s fourth annual production of an original musical, is a story of homecoming. Daisy Dawson (Jessica Coppola with the voice of a princess) returns to her small Southern hometown of Old Oak Ridge just in time for the Festival celebrating the 350th anniversary of the town, and the even more ancient oak tree at its heart.

The townsfolk are a-hustling and bustling to prepare the food, sew poodle skirts, and practice their moves in hopes of being named Most Valuable Bopper, with Evie Green (CC Hayden) and her teen Green Committee ensuring all business is conducted sustainably. When a big-city news crew comes in to document the festival, the “Oak Ridge Grapevine,” the town gossip network helmed by Babs Franklin (Tina Marie Manus, a remarkably talented and unselfish performer) goes into overtime.

News anchor Chuck Sterling (a just-sleazy-enough Sam Taubl) pulls the moves on an ultimately impervious Daisy while local jack-of-all-trades Bobby Blake (SOUND’s own jack-of-all-trades Jeremiah Taubl) tries to catch her eye. Camera operator Scout reveals her own secret reason for coming to Old Oak Ridge, and Jackson, the sound engineer, is definitely hiding something.

For all its action, the major plot beats of Old Oak Ridge largely happen offstage. The real story is in watching the community onstage exist together, making art. Old Oak Ridge may not be, or even resemble, any real town in the South, but it’s the spitting image of the town that is SOUND & Stage. As I took my seat I watched the musicians in the pit bop their heads to the piped-in pre-show playlist—Elvis’ cover of Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog,” The Searchers’ “Love Potion Number Nine,” The Supremes’ “You Can’t Hurry Love.”

I had no idea I was soon to be swept away in Carol Taubl’s soaring overture, a stylistic mash-up of The Beach Boys and Broadway’s Golden Age. The vibe was utterly unpretentious but, as actor Tina Manus explained to me before the show, there was very little to pretend.

“There’s no imitation here,” Manus said. Old Oak Ridge is a brand-new musical, and “nothing beats creating a character that you can’t watch on YouTube or look up in a movie.” The actors on stage were cast in roles they could shine in, and shine through. Some actors, like Nicole Scout, who plays Scout, share names and even biographical details with their characters— remarkable considering auditions were held without the future cast having seen the script.

The whole show was put together, from first rehearsal to opening night, in three weeks of weeknights, with a large portion of the cast working full-time day jobs. “You’ll be impressed,” several people told me before the show began. “I think you’re going to be happy,” Manus said simply.

And I was. High school rising-senior Tommy Francese’s easeful, committed silliness delighted in “Sunset Shimmy (Reprise),” in detective high jinks with fellow actor Jenna LaBranche, and in Act Two’s show-stopping men’s quartet “Right Man for the Job.” Rosemary Wilkinson, who serves as the show’s dance captain, was right to say this show wouldn’t be possible in three weeks if it weren’t for the talent of everyone involved. This is why “small-town-meets-big-city” shows like Old Oak Ridge, like its cousin Bye Bye Birdie, are perfect for a community theater—the village of “it takes a village” finds itself bursting at the seams with energy and talent.

As raucous laughter and a full-voiced belt followed by cheers from the cast came through from the sound-check happening onstage, I asked company-members Manus, Jeremiah Taubl, and Rosemary Wilkinson who the angels of this production, a show about recognizing the “angels” in our lives, were for them.

“My twin sister, I think she’s my angel,” Rosemary answered. She’s also in the show … And her being there with me to do the show—we play violin together, we dance together, we act together, we’re twins in the show—that’s really special to me.”

As the second act draws to a close, the tone grows somber. Camera operator Scout, who came to Old Oak Ridge to find her mother after a childhood in the foster system, learns, with the help of the town’s big-hearted busybodies, that her mother died soon after leaving her on the step of the Oak Ridge church. But just when Scout feels most alone, she finds she too has a place on a family tree. Nicole Scout helms a glorious reprise of “Seedlings Left to Grow” that aches with the grief of losing what you never had and the relief of finding what you didn’t know to miss.

Manus presented a crystal-clear explanation for why Old Oak Ridge is a new story worth telling. “It goes bigger than the tree," she said. "It’s more about our roots to each other and how we connect with one another and how we make those connections and make them stronger. And how we interact in our world, because this world right now has people that don’t interact in such a great way."

"But you’re not going to see that on stage. You’re going to see people who get along, who don’t get along, who fight and argue but at the end of the day we still come back together as a family … And it’s what’s onstage, and what’s offstage as well. That’s why it makes sense.”

SOUND & Stage is a family operation, in the biological and the found sense. The cast and creative team is star-studded with Taubls, without whom SOUND—its theater company, vocal ensembles, and music school—wouldn’t exist. Jeremiah Taubl spoke to the resonance of this show for his family: “I think a big part of what we’ve all experienced in the last couple years is, you know, families grow and shrink, and we’ve experienced a lot of the shrinking on our side, so I think family, to us, means now more than ever.”

Manus jumped in with her experience of feeling her family with her onstage: “All the people who’ve passed … They’re onstage the entire time. You said your family shrunk. They shrink in one way, but they grow in another.”

Community theater, when it’s done right, has the gift of taking that which may otherwise be saccharine or twee and rooting it in a context which realizes it. By the end of the show, Daisy (there’s more to her than your typical Hallmark heroine) comes to the realization that “Life is all about love and doing your best is always enough.” Old Oak Ridge earns its sentiment and, anyway, she’s right.

In the midst of the pre-show chaos, production manager Tiffany Ferriouolo took the time to make me, a newcomer (a reporter from the city, no less!), feel like I belonged. She spoke of all the new people who’d joined the SOUND & Stage community that year, from Manus, who’s “made all these connections” to Hannah [Bellows] “who plays the Sheriff and who’s hilarious.”

“They’re lovely,” Ferriouolo said. “It’s a great feeling that we’re growing.”