Review: Tibbits Opera House: “On Golden Pond”
(Photo: Laura Pentecost)
When a pandemic raged through the world, a lot of people spent time reckoning with their own mortality and the condition of the relationships they have with the important people in their lives.
It’s why a show such as “On Golden Pond” can feel familiar and newly relevant even though it is more than 40 years old. Tibbits Opera House in Coldwater, Michigan is presenting a traditional version of this much-loved play about the summer an older couple spends at their cottage in Maine grappling with age, memory loss, and the difficult relationship they have with their only daughter.
If it has a familiarity and sometimes feels like a love letter to the Tibbits audience, it might be because Director Brenda Sparks knows the audience well. She first performed at Tibbits 30 years ago, her last performance with them in 1997 before returning this year to direct.
“On Golden Pond” features a cast full of Tibbits favorites, led by Paul Kerr and Gloria Logan as Norman and Ethel Thayer, the inhabitants of the cottage on Golden Pond. They have an easy chemistry, one developed over years of performing together.
Kerr’s Norman defines curmudgeonly, but he always lets you see what Ethel sees, a man who has a big heart and who is dealing with his memory loss in the best way he knows how. He peppers the curmudgeon with a playful childishness.
Logan fills Ethel with the energy that ties everyone on stage together. She is filled with love and affection, counter-balancing her husband’s harshness with warmth and sociability. Even Logan’s physicality contrasts with Kerr’s. While he moves slowly and sometimes with visible aches, she bustles around the stage filled with life and plans for the future, even in the moments where she faces darker realizations.
Stephanie Burdick, seen on stage earlier this season in the opening Broadway revue and who contributed to sets throughout the season, plays the usually absent daughter, Chelsea, for whom Golden Pond has more painful than fond memories. She’s skilled at instant changes in emotional levels, first displayed in the way she greets her parents. She shows the audience the fall-out Norman’s personality has had on those close to him, giving the first glimpse that it wasn’t always harmless.
Peter Riopelle, also a long-time favorite at Tibbits who is now the artistic director, plays Chelsea’s new boyfriend, a dentist that Norman tries to play mind games with. He captures the discomfort of the outsider, one who feels out of sorts in a non-urban environment, but who isn’t about to let Norman run roughshod over him.
Jack Hopewell, who is just coming off a run as Snoopy in “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” does an excellent job at playing a part far younger than his actual age. Hopewell is too old for the part of Billy Ray, the dentist’s son, just as Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta were too old to be playing teenagers in “Grease.” Sparks upped his age to 15, from the script’s traditional 13 and Hopewell does his best to have the physicality and speech patterns of a teenager. One suspects that he was cast in the part before the 13-18 crowd had access to vaccines—and this summer, it is necessary for all actors to be vaccinated—making it impossible to cast an age-appropriate actor.
Chad Tallon gives the play a somewhat goofy Charlie, the mail carrier who dated Chelsea during their own teen years and still carries a torch for her. Tallon’s Charlie is comical, clearly lacking in the mental agility that Chelsea has, but filled with a charming devotion.
While there were a few script changes that tried to bring the story forward in time, it does remain very much a piece belonging to the late 70s, early 80s, starting with the use of a dial phone and an operator who knows the area and the handy use of a Yellow Pages book.
Burdick and Sparks collaborated on creating a representational set, with a charm that evokes the type of cottage on a lake filled with older furnishings that stop just short of being run-down. It’s a site as familiar to Michiganders as it would be to the Maine residents of Golden Pond.
Catie Blencowe creates a more subtle lighting plot than in the other shows this summer. Instead of large splashes of primary hues across an open backdrop, she lights the dock, introduces flickerings of shadows, and moves the audience through time. It is a skilled design that the Light Board Operator Josh Rockwell executes well.
Scott Pauley, who doubles as props master and carpenter, fills the stage with fishing gear, boxes, books, newspapers, framed photos and everything needed to tell the story and create the atmosphere that is as much a part of the story as the actors themselves.
“On Golden Pond” isn’t designed to challenge audiences who are already coming out of challenging times. Instead, it offers them a dose of familiarity, of resilience, and of hope even in the face of mortality.