McKenna Doebrick as Amy March, Denise Wray as Meg March, Heather Bazinet as Marmee March, Allison Bradshaw as Jo March and Lexi Kinniburgh as Beth March in Allan Knee's musical adaptation of Little Women. A production of the WISP Performing Arts Initiative (Wagner Iovanna Studio Performances), it runs Aug. 8-10 at the Old Stone Church in East Haven. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Jo March leans over an old writing desk, her eyes ablaze. Her hair seems to bounce with the movement of her body, so electric is this act of writing. Beside her, a flame dances inside an old oil lamp, its tip wispy and orange. Outside, snow has started to fall, blanketing the frozen New England ground. The world is so quiet. Jo pays it no mind.
“Carlotta,” she half-whispers to herself. “The madwoman in the attic.” A whole universe has started to open up in front of her, and she presses on.
Jo March, of course, is one of the March sisters—at turns devilish, winsome, kind, ambitious and curious—in a musical take on Little Women running August 8-10 at the Old Stone Church in East Haven. Written by Allan Knee with music by Jason Howland and Mindi Dickstein, the show is an affecting, mellifluous, laughter-stitched adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel of the same name, with a focus on the lives and loves of the four March sisters.
Those sisters are Jo (Allison Bradshaw), Meg (Denise Wray), Beth (Lexi Kinniburgh) and Amy (McKenna Doebrick), with a cast of supporting actors that criss-crosses generations and acting backgrounds on a single stage. It is a production of the WISP Performing Arts Initiative (Wagner Iovanna Studio Performances), a small but mighty crew that has been growing its musical footprint in Connecticut since 2017.
Martin Scott Marchitto and Karen Wagner-Iovanna at a tech rehearsal Monday night.
For this show, producer Karen Wagner-Iovanna has brought in director Martin Scott Marchitto, who has directed the musical for the Manhattan University Players and Northwest Catholic High School (a third production was an early casualty of the Covid-19 pandemic). Performances run Aug. 8 through 10 with both matinee and evening shows on Saturday; tickets and more information are available here.
“My dream is to make other people’s dreams happen,” said Wagner-Iovanna, who started WISP in Old Saybrook as a theater space for young people. She praised Rev. Mark Pilletere for opening the Old Stone Church to the company in 2021, as theaters were cautiously coming back to life. “With so much going on in the world, there’s so much noise. This gets us back to what matters.”
The church feels especially significant for this production, she added: it was standing in the same spot in East Haven during the American Revolution, during which the British occupied it. It stood there during the Civil War, as the North fought for an abolitionist future that Alcott herself fiercely believed in. Over a century later, Wagner-Iovanna and her daughter are devoted members of the congregation, which is also their artistic home.
And from the moment the lights come up on this production, it does get back to the necessity of family, with unexpected delight and soaring vocals that still makes room for the loss and grief of Alcott’s beloved story. Originally adapted in the early 2000s, Knee’s Little Women follows the March sisters and their mother, Marmee (Heather Bazinet, who is normally on the other side of the curtain) as they navigate life in Concord, Mass. during and after the Civil War.
When the play begins, the March patriarch has gone to serve as an army chaplain for the North, and Jo (Bradshaw, who is in her last WISP production before a move across the country) is keeping spirits high through her writing, including an “Operatic Tragedy” that she believes can save Christmas. As she enlists the help of her sisters, the audience can see the warmth—and the friction—between them, these four young women who are bonded to each other for life.
The actors are well-cast for these roles, with a grit and occasional churlishness that makes them feel so very real, as if they might wind down a production and all go home together to keep the conversation going. As Amy, Doebrick nails the petulant nature and sometimes wild-child-ness of a youngest sibling, able to mine the script for both physical and verbal humor as she sulks after Jo and acts on her impulses.
Sometimes it’s a pout or a snivel that gives her away, the corner of her mouth curling upwards just so. Sometimes it’s a knack for language, like a trilling “I’m reeee-a-dy!” as her older sisters head off to a Valentine’s Day ball that she desperately wants to attend. As a sort of foil, Kinniburgh bursts through as a charming and ebullient Beth, leaning into Jo’s words to her that “It’s you who make the clouds disappear!”
Wray, who in June graduated from the ACES Educational Center for the Arts, proves to be the cooler head prevailing as Meg, with a sort of even-handedness and calm that she brings to every line and lyric. Bazinet, meanwhile, is a sweet-voiced and persistent Marmee, able to lay the joy, toil and isolation of motherhood bare on the stage. When she proclaims that “We March women are in-vin-cible!” one can hear the exhaustion at the edges of her voice, and the way she is working so hard to keep it from her children.
Around them, the exposition blooms into Alcott’s world, thanks largely to a detailed, multi-level set that makes the March household feel very real (credit to MaryAnn Marchitto, Brean Yates, and Robert Iovanna for design and construction). Portraits hang from the walls, including one of Alcott’s father, educator Amos Bronson Alcott, that becomes a stand-in for Mr. March. A writing desk sits elevated at center stage, as if to show that it is an extension of Jo herself.
It’s a useful device for the introduction of characters like Laurie (Jack Vann) and an ostensibly severe Mr. Laurence (George McTyre), the sweet John Brooke (Luke Soja) and dour Aunt March (a dryly funny Michelle Rocheford Johnston, whose delivery doesn’t miss a beat) and in act two, the charismatic Professor Baher (Alec Corrado). Like the novel, Knee’s adaptation holds onto some of Alcott’s most canonical moments, and the cast commits fully to them with the rigor and zeal of a family that can and wants to travel back in time.
“I come back to it [the play] because it’s a play about having passion and dreams and reaching out to fulfill them,” said Marchitto at a rehearsal Monday night, as the smell of baked ziti hung in the air from a family-style cast dinner before tech. “It’s about Jo’s journey to figure out what her voice is. She starts out with these stories, which are sensational, but she realizes that it’s about what’s in your heart.”
For the next 90 minutes, his words sprang to life over and over again, from his first harried mention of “Places! Places for the top of the show!” to notes delivered at the end of the night, the actors gathered in their street clothes onstage as the house remained dark. As the lights came up on Act I, a soundtrack swelling offstage, there was Jo, bathed in a perfect circle of fuschia light. She poked her head out, making her way forward, and the world was again in motion.
She bent towards a trunk at center stage, and it became a treasure chest, a portal to worlds unknown. She lifted a music box, its sound tinny and bright, and it tinkled in the palm of her hand. She placed a tri-cornered hat atop her head, a nest of lustrous, golden hair that becomes a plot point in the show, and was at once fit to be a revolutionary hero. She looked up, for just a moment, and took in the house around her.
Luke Soja as Mr. John Brooke.
It was just the beginning. In one of the rehearsal’s sweetest moments, McTyre-as-Laurence took a seat on the March’s well-loved sofa, his body at attention in a pool of light at stage left. Behind it, the March household was neat as a pin, warmed by a wood-burning stove. Across the stage, a winsome, birdlike Kinniburgh/Beth launched into the bouncy, “Off To Massachusetts,” her voice bird-like and rising over a piano that was always just a little off tune.
On his face, McTyre moved through worlds of emotion: eyebrow-bending skepticism, attention, the crinkle-eyed delight of watching a young person bloom into themselves. Something flickered for a moment—was is loss? Recognition?—and then it too was gone. Within moments, he was at Beth’s side, filling in lyrics to the song before turning it into a duet, complete with a little jig.
In another, the four sisters danced with Vann/Laurie around the stage, striking a freeze-frame meant to look like Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing The Delaware. It was maybe 20 seconds, a kind of subtle nod to American history that Wagner-Iovanna is especially good at. Then they fell back into the song, and it was enough to remember what it felt like to have wonder during one’s childhood.
That delight extended to the action behind the scenes and offstage. At tech rehearsal Monday, several of the actors expressed their deep gratitude to WISP, and to their peers in the cast. Bradshaw, who started her acting career at just three years old (in a church, no less) called the company a sort of second home, where she’s been able to grow into herself as both an actor and a person.
“It’s just been this beautiful experience,” she said. It’s emotional, too: she plans to move to Texas with her dad later this year, to pursue new business opportunities. Jo felt like exactly the right character for that inflection point. “I went to school for musical theater, and it wasn’t for me, and I was really lost and directionless. She’s given me so much to think about.”
Bazinet, who co-directs the Lights Up Drama Club at Wilbur Cross High School, agreed. While “I kind of fell into” the role—she was giving Vann a ride to callbacks, and ended up looking into WISP and then auditioning—she’s taken the production as a chance to learn about both technique and about herself. She praised vocal director Robert Iovanna especially, noting how generous he’s been as cast members learn their songs.
“I’ve learned a lot from him vocally,” including lessons that she feels like she can take back to her work as a speech pathologist at Wilbur Cross. “I’m thrilled to be a part of it.”
And she should be: it’s a show well worth seeing. Little Women is one of those plays that, like Alice By Heart or Les Miserables, is at once completely fixed and unfixed in time. In one sense, the text is very much a product of the late nineteenth century, from its mentions of the Civil War (although much of the novel operates on the periphery of that world) and clear, palpable tension between the aspiring “angels of the house”—trad wives without the influencer content, or what scholars would call the Cult of Domesticity—and what became the the New Woman movement.
But in another, it's a play that’s for the moment (Wagner-Iovanna said she’s especially excited to bring it to East Haven, where many of the audience members are senior citizens who don’t have other chances to experience the arts).
Little Women was written at the end of the Civil War, during a groundswell of hope that Alcott was very much a part of. Even then, the writer saw that another future was possible: she was an (imperfect) abolitionist and a suffragette, able to reconcile the two in her advocacy and in her writing in a way that many of her peers did not.
She made history as the first woman to register to vote in Concord in 1879, where she voted a year later. She held fast to her family but was also headstrong and creative, so much so that she still rankles some critics who don’t know what to make of her to this day.
And so it becomes a reminder—that even in the midst of loss, of discord, of rejection, of self-doubt and trust that changes shape and wears thin—there’s often family waiting. That those ties that bind, and those that we choose to enter into, are both hard-fought and perhaps stronger than we give them credit for.
Vann, who is going into his senior year of high school, can feel that when he’s onstage. Monday evening, he said that he’s valued getting to “know” Laurie, and thinking about how to act differently as his character ages.
When the audience meets Laurie, he’s still a teenager, on the cusp of adulthood with so much to learn about the big wide world. By Act II, he’s learning what it means to enter into marriage and exist in the world as an adult.
“I’m always happy when I act,” he said. “I feel like I’m in a totally different world. It seems like everything fades away when I’m on stage.”
Little Women runs August 8-10 at the Old Stone Church, 251 Main St. in East Haven. Tickets and more information are available here.