Kevin Cahoon and Lesley McKinnell will be featured in the American premiere of PCPA’s production of My Fairytale, a new musical about Hans Christian Andersen directed by Scott Schwartz.
My Fairytale previews in Santa Maria Aug. 12 to 20, then opens in Solvang’s Festival Theater running from Aug. 26 to Sept. 25. Cahoon will play Andersen, the celebrated writer of children’s fairytales. His credits include the original Broadway productions of The Lion King and The Who’s Tommy, as well as The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and The Wedding Singer. Off-Broadway credits include The Shaggs, The Wild Party, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and The Foreigner opposite Matthew Broderick. Cahoon has numerous regional theatre, TV, and film credits, which include ABC’s Six Degrees, Woody Allen’s The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, and Wingnut in the Disney animated feature Mars Needs Moms.
Lesley McKinnell who will play Jenny Lind—the famous Swedish opera singer of the 1800s—as well as many of Andersen’s fairytale characters, comes to PCPA right off two national tours of Wicked, where she was a permanent ensemble performer and understudy to Glinda. She performed in the Hollywood Bowl production of Les Misérables and has appeared at the Musical Theatre West, South Coast Repertory, and Performance Riverside. Lesley is a musician who plays piano and cello, and throughout six years in Concert Choruses performed at The White House, Carnegie Hall, the Vatican, and St. Peter’s Basilica in Italy.
Other cast members include Erik Stein (Captain Hook, Peter Pan), Andrew Philpot (Richard Hannay, The 39 Steps), Sam Zeller (Edna Turnblad, Hairspray), and Karin Hendricks (Jane Bennet, Pride and Prejudice).
PCPA’s production of My Fairytale also features puppets designed by Emily DeCola of New York’s the Puppet Kitchen. Emily’s puppets for the story include larger than life ducks, chickens, and mermaids. She has produced characters for film, TV, and theatre and is an internationally sought-after speaker on puppetry. She has been invited to perform and speak from Italy to Idaho to Beijing to Reykjavik, where she performed in the third season of Nickelodeon’s Lazy Town.
My Fairytale, with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz (Wicked) and book by Philip LeZebnik (Pocahontas), was originally created by Flemming Enevold, a leading Danish musical actor and singer. This American premiere production—which was only previously produced in Denmark in 2005 in honor of the bi-centennial of Andersen’s birth—includes a rich score performed by the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, with live accompaniment by Kristin Blascyk, keyboards; Dave Becker, reeds; and Jeanne Shumway, cello. The musical director is PCPA resident artist Callum Morris.
For more information, call 922-8313.
This article appears in Jul 14-21, 2011.