The Marian Center for Non-Profits took very little time to become extremely packed. I don’t recall ever seeing that many people crammed into the hallway outside the Marian Center’s 4th floor studio theatre. The space now serves as local musical theatre talent Lisa Golda’s Vox Box.
It’s a space that she’s using to teach voice lessons. She’s hoping that it can be a space that can be shard by all of the disparate theatre families that make-up the Milwaukee theatre community. It’s an ambitious plan. A gracious hostess, Golda welcomed a well-dressed crowd to a classy New Year’s Eve affair. After a crowded mixer, the large group in attendance filed into the studio space for a musical revue. It was kind of a crowded, standing-room-only affair. As my wife wasn’t feeling well, we had to leave after the first of two intermissions—a major disappointment.
The performance started with a few students from the Vox Box performing a bit from West Side Story . . . followed by Golda performing Life Is A Cabaret. Having seen two different performances of Cabaret in recent memory, it’s a bit odd hearing that song out of context . . . the song has such a profound impact within the story arc . . . and it’s such strong characterization. Outside of all that, Golda did a pretty solid job of delivering an energetic performance. Heather Reynolds-Coonen did a particularly deft Sondheim piece. Getting Married Today is one of those songs from Company that stands relly welll on its own and Reynolds-Coonen did a brilliant job with it.
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The first part of the show ended with a Brian Myers at the piano. Myers wrote STATUS—a musical about online social networking that was slated to be performed at the end of the evening, Myers is quite at home behind the piano—performing music songs he’d written. He’s the type of piano man who makes indeffinately holding an audience’s attention seem absurdly simple. He rhymed “deployed,” with “unemployed,” in one of his better songs in the set. It was a great disappointment to miss the performance of his musical at the end of the evening.
STATUS moves to the Strawberry One Act Festival in New York next month.
