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Arts & Entertainment

'Snapshots' Puts Memories in the Picture

Touching musical comedy at Northlight blends new lyrics to familiar Stephen Schwartz music.

Nothing is ever simply black and white in a relationship, particularly in marriage. And it’s easy for one’s memories to play tricks as the years fly by.

That’s at the crux of Stephen Schwartz’s heartwarming 2005 musical comedy Snapshots: a Musical Scrapbook, making its Chicago-area premiere at Northlight Theatre in Skokie in a terrific production directed by Ken Sawyer.

Steve Orich serves as music director and Karl Christian handles musical staging. The play’s book is by David Stern.

Schwartz, a prolific composer and lyricist whose resume includes Godspell, Pippin, The Baker’s Wife, Working, Rags and Wicked, has taken more than 25 musical numbers from these and his other works and adapted lyrics to fit Snapshots. It’s a creative endeavor that works well.

The show, featuring a pitch-perfect cast bursting with talent, opens in a cluttered attic where middle-aged Sue (Susie McMonagle), packed suitcase in hand, is poking through keepsakes. Feeling distant from her workaholic husband Dan (Gene Weygrandt), she is ready to call it quits after 20 years of marriage to her childhood sweetheart in order to chase a dream of intimacy that has eluded her.

Before Sue can get out the door, Dan comes home early from the office and joins her, and the pair spend time pouring over old photos. These snapshots trigger memories of when they first met, birthday parties, family gatherings, “best pals” during their college years, dating experiences (with one another and others) and eventually their engagement and birth of a college-age son.

A series of projected photos help bring many of the those events into focus. But what really brings them to life are four hard-working cast members who re-enact these various milestones in song and dialogue.

Tony Clarno as Daniel, Jess Godwin as Susan, Nick Cosgrove as Danny and Megan Long as Susie are shadow figures from the past, younger versions of Ken and Sue with whom they often interact. As the events play out, they don’t always match how the principal characters remember them.
   
Many of the rekindled events are hilarious. In the first apartment that he will share with Sue, Dan has a number of surprise female visitors, baggage from his past, who literally pop up from the most unexpected places. Even funnier is a bedroom scene where more ghosts put in an appearance (Godwin, changing wigs and intonation in rapid succession).

Snapshots has many heartwarming numbers, from “The Spark of Creation” and  “All Good Gifts” to “The Hardest Part of Love” and “Code of Silence.” It’s a play that holds appeal for young and old audiences alike.
   
Snapshots: A Musical Scrapbook at 9501 Skokie Blvd. through Oct. 23. Tickets are $25-$65 and $10 for those 25 and younger. For more information, call 847-673-6300 or visit northlight.org

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