Pink Umbrella’s Tiny Musical About Big Things

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Pink Umbrella Theater ‘Portraits’ banner

David Lancelle and Patrick Thompson debut a new musical with Pink Umbrella Theater this month. Portraits is a pleasantly sentimental, little 75-minute musical set entirely in a portrait studio. Pip Buffington plays Tony, a photographer in the unenviable position of working the studio all alone as his business partner has called-in sick. Tony is forced to deal with a strange array of different appointments and walk-ins as he manages a difficult workday.

Director Rebekah Farr conducts to flow of energy quite well in a small stage production of a one-piano musical with a humble, little cast. There’s an impressive range of different actors in a largely enjoyable cast that is anchored into place with emotional warmth by Eugene Strei in the role of a high school kid who comes to the studio looking for senior pictures only to find himself pressured to try to figure out how he is going to be defined for the rest of his life. 

Lancelle and Thompson to a good job on a small budget with a quaintly limited amount of time. The deeper aspects of time, memory and the value of images slide around onstage without reaching their full potential. The failure to meet that potential actually works to the advantage of the musical as a whole. A big part of the central them of Portraits is the imperfect nature of individual moments in the endless march of time as individual people try to make sense of it all. It’s an accomplishment that Lancelle and Thompson are able to reach for those deeper existential aspects of life in the context of a lightly brick musical sitcom. 

Pink Umbrella Theater Company’s Portraits runs through Aug. 11 at Christ Church Episcopal, 5655 N. Lake Drive in Whitefish Bay. For more information, visit pinkumbrellatheater.org/portraits.