Sunday, June 20, 2010

City Theatre: Camp Kappawanna (1 review)

City Theatre opened Camp Kappawanna on June 17, 2010.  It's a new work, commissioned by the company, with music & lyrics by Lisa Loeb, and book by Marco Ramirez.
Take a trip to Camp Kappawanna—a world Premiere Musical  that will instantly transport you to summer camp with hip, cool music by Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter Lisa Loeb and a script by rising national playwright and South Florida native Marco Ramirez.

Join young Jennifer Jenkins, the show's awkward and adorable 12-year-old heroine, as she faces the fear and enjoys the fun of going away from home for the very first time.
Sean Paul Bryan directed a cast that included Melanie Liebner, Renata Eastlick, Troy Davidson, Gerard Pelati, Mary Sansone, Tom Anello, and Jameson Hammond.

Christine Dolen, who usually ignores children's theatre productions, reviewed for The Miami Herald:
City Theatre's Camp Kappawanna -- the commissioned collaboration of singer-songwriter Lisa Loeb, her writing partners Dan Petty and Michelle Lewis and Miami playwright-screenwriter Marco Ramirez -- is the company's 15th anniversary show, so I thought I should check it out.
The musical's terrific score is a hybrid of numbers from Loeb's second children's CD, Camp Lisa, and new songs. They're threaded easily through Ramirez's story about a lonely girl, Jennifer ``Jenny'' Jenkins (Melanie Leibner), who leaves home for a ramshackle camp on the verge of foreclosure and finds herself.
...director Sean Paul Bryan pushes the young-adult cast into broad, lively, loud performances, which seems to be standard kid-theater style. Leibner has some subtle, painfully introverted moments, and she sings like a dream. But everyone else is pretty much over the top, entertaining as that can be.
City Theatre's production of Camp Kappawanna plays at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts through June 27, and then plays at Nova Southeastern's Silverman Auditorium July 1 - 3.

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