In a Kitsap Operetta, It’s Pirates and Dungeons and Dragons
The Curse of the Red Mill, an original take on a century-old work, fits gamely into the theatre’s fantastical wheelhouse. It runs through 10/12 at Enoch City Arts.
You always like to see a little theatre take big swings. Bremerton’s Enoch City Arts has brought another eclectic new work to life, adapting a somewhat obscure 1906 operetta into a swashbuckling riff on a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. The playwright, Brian Shourd, was inspired by his time in a previous ECA production, a sci-fi themed adaptation of Gilbert & Sullivan’s comic operetta The Pirates of Penzance (see review here), coupled with the DnD culture already alive and well at ECA (which sponsors a weekly all-ages DnD club), and thus The Curse of the Red Mill was born.
The musical follows a frustrated Game Master (Roderick McMillen) as he attempts to wrangle his party into fulfilling his vision of their next adventure. But the players have their own ideas on how the night’s going to go.
Winsome Gwendolyn (Colleen Carpenter), bold Bernadette (Skyler Shourd), and text-happy Jax (usually performed by JM Specht, but played at the 9/28 performance by Caleb Avery Lizon, in a departure from his regular role as Thrulsnard the Barbarian/Greg) are less invested in LARPing a battle with the mysterious beast who haunts the Red Mill and looting her treasure than they are in saving Gwendolyn from a forced marriage and empowering her to escape the clutches of her pitiless mother, the local town Sheriff (Danielle Cox).
Can Bernadette, a daring pirate captain, team up with the roguish Jax to save her childhood friend and convince her to sail off to adventure?
The staging for this quest is minimal but has some clever flourishes, including an oversized dice piece the players can roll to utilize a spell or take some sort of action (usually to the GM’s chagrin). Meanwhile, Brian Shourd, acting not only as playwright but as music director as well, incorporates some nice music cues and manages to make the pre-recorded piano accompaniment feel seamless.
Curse has the loose, zany energy of an improv and an enthusiastic cast, though it does at times share some of improv’s feeling of being thrown together on the fly. But the party members bring a lot of heart to the piece, most notably Skyler Shourd’s Bernadette, a DnD noob brimming with improv-based confidence of her own, and Carpenter’s Gwendolyn, whose classically trained voice was the highlight of the evening. The show makes the most of its large ensemble of NPCs (non-player characters in DnD lingo), controlled by McMillen’s GM, to mine some comedy nuggets and to perform some dance numbers that strained the theatre’s small stage (but hey, if nobody got kicked in the face, who’s complaining?).
ECA is clearly a beloved community institution and a laboratory for new and quirky pieces of theatre. I, for one, will keep an eye on their future offerings with interest.
The Curse of the Red Mill runs through 10/12 at Enoch City Arts, in Bremerton. Tickets are $26, here. Accessibility notes: restrooms are gender-neutral and single-stall. Theatre and common areas are wheelchair accessible.
Jill Farrington Sweeney is a Texas ex-pat getting to know the Seattle-area arts scene, and is perpetually on the hunt for good Mexican food. Her writing has appeared on TheaterJones, Onstage NTX, and NWTheatre.