Salome would like to do away with Rosamund, who spends her time dodging the horrible fate her stepmom plans for her. Rosamund's mother is dead, and her father is now married to the nasty Salome, who is brought to life in a rollicking comic performance by Susy Moorstein.
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He becomes smitten with the lovely Rosamund, played by the appropriately vixenish Cassandra Madsen, the daughter of wealthy Clement Musgrove, portrayed by Pat McInerney. Dashing Jamie Lockhart, played with understated flair by Terry Gosdin, is a gentleman with an alter ego, a bandit who plies his trade in the deep woods around the hamlet of Rodney. The story is the sort of tall tale that would have been told around campfires in simpler times. The best efforts of several talented actors cannot save the production, which is played out against plain beige stage curtains and only occasionally rises above the level of a high school assembly program.
THE ROBBER BRIDEGROOM EUDORA WELTY PLUS
The play has its charms and comic moments, but this production, directed by Larry Baird, is hampered by a ragged-sounding, occasionally out-of-tune "string ensemble" (banjo, bass, guitar and fiddle) plus flute, the lack of a set and lighting effects, and a leading lady with a penchant for going flat in her big musical moments. Uhry's lyrics have been set to bluegrass music by Robert Waldman for 32 mostly upbeat tunes with such colorful names as "Prickle Pear and Lilybud" and "Poor Tied Up Darlin'." It's a folk legend adapted from a Eudora Welty story centering on a bandit of the woods who falls in love with the beautiful daughter of a wealthy planter in the late 1700s. "The Robber Bridegroom" is a production Gilbert and Sullivan might have created had they been born in the backwoods of Mississippi. It's hard to believe both works came from the same pen. His gentle and thoughtful, and Pulitzer Prize-winning, "Driving Miss Daisy" is onstage at the Olney Center for the Arts in Maryland, while Prince William Little Theatre is staging his guileless, corn pone musical "The Robber Bridegroom" in Manassas.
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The breadth of playwright Alfred Uhry's work is on display locally.