Rootabaga Country

I learned from John Hayes of Five and Dime Jazz about a Rootabaga Play last year in McCall, Idaho.

John said:

The play was produced in December 2006 by the McCall-Donnelly High School Drama Troupe. It had a three-day (Thurs-Sat) run at a local theater called the Alpine Playhouse in McCall, Idaho. Besides being the site of winter & spring school plays, the Alpine puts on a Winter Carnival & summer play, & also hosts the Seven Devils Playwrights Conference in June each year. There are also some music shows & film screenings at the Alpine.

The play was adapted from the Rootabage Stories by Judy Anderson, who's the McCall-Donnelly drama teacher; Judy also directed the play. Besides writing her own plays, Judy has done a number of adaptations-- right now she's working on an adaptation of Tove Jansson's "Moomipappa at Sea"-- we've worked a lot with Judy, & will be doing music for the Moominpappa play as well.

The play consisted of around forty characters plus three narrators; some of the main characters included Gimme the Ax, the Potato Faced Blind Man, Hatrack the Horse, Hot Balloons, Blixie Bimber & Bozo the Button Buster. There was also a great rendition of the two skyscrapers story. I think Judy did a great job of turning the stories into a stage production.

The score consisted both of material we specifically wrote for the play, & some other original material we had "lying around" that Judy liked & thought would be appropriate. We aimed to have the music mostly have an "Americana" type sound, but there are (we think) some interesting twists & turns within that context. The score used a number of instruments-- 20, including a toy train whistle. These ranged from really common items (piano, flute, guitar) to slightly unusual (marimba, plectrum banjo, melodica) to fairly odd (toy piano, bouzouki, kazoo). Some of the selections were taken from our scores to two Nell Shipman silent films-- "Back to God's Country" & "The Grub-Stake." The latter is available on dvd through the Idaho Film Collection's three dvd set of Shipman's existing films (we're on volume 3, entitled "At Lionhead Lodge.") The dvds are available at Boise State Bookstore.