Stop me if you’ve heard — or seen — this one before: lovable conman shows up to fleece the locals in the sticks and chances on an eligible woman whose life has an emotional hole at its center. He unknowingly searches for moral redemption while she knowingly yearns for emotional fulfillment.
Another remount of Meredith Willson’s eternal “The Music Man”? Nope, it’s “The Rainmaker,” a dramedy largely vanished from recent sight, now at Laguna Playhouse in an appealing staging with a top-notch cast and handsome physical production.
On Broadway in the mid ’50s three years before “The Music Man” (there is no sense Willson shipoopi’d it for source material), “The Rainmaker” became a Katharine Hepburn-Burt Lancaster movie.
The story was then refashioned into the musical “110 in the Shade.” With tepid tunes, that one cast a small shadow on Times Square.
N. Richard Nash’s play was once a staple of high school and college productions, probably for its plainspoken western American folksiness and ensemble acting opportunities. But perhaps why it’s not in fashion now is a central theme mired in ‘50s sensibilities where the storyline virtually emotionally batters the lead woman.
The central character Lizzie Curry is deemed — even to the point of seeing herself as — “plain,” doomed to be nothing more than “an old maid” with no future worth having.
And somehow it’s her own damn fault.
But a key scene of emotional resolution near the end of this production — superbly directed by Andrew Barnicle — shows her transformed during a wonderfully acted scene of cathartic self-empowerment.
Lizzie Curry may be in the physical arms of the conman/shaman Bill Starbuck when this occurs, but it’s her own, newly raised consciousness of self that emerges. It invests this show with a satisfying wholeness at its conclusion.
The key to these efforts is Barnicle.
As Laguna Playhouse’s artistic director from 1991 to 2010, he produced 150 shows, directing more than 40 himself as well as appearing on the stage nine times. According to well informed lobby gossip before Sunday’s opening performance, he performed in “The Rainmaker” in college in 1974.
This is his first work at Laguna since the COVID shutdown and he is especially welcome back, given this fastidious but not at all fussy mounting.
“The Rainmaker” calls for a cast of seven — six men and one woman. This is a talented group of actors who feel like an organic collection in their communal scenes and yet there is enough for most of them to do separately that there is a true sense of individual characters being inhabited through strong acting.
Actress Lizzie Zerebko is quite good early in the show at being quiet, muted by the incessant bluster surrounding her. Hers is not exactly a poker-face, but the patiently neutral expression worn by a character whose prairie lifetime has been forged by verbal buffetings from father, brothers and the local male dullards.
What’s great early on is how Zerebko conveys her frustrations with the smallest of knitted brows or crossed arms, so that later, when her inner tumult explodes in anger, relief and exultation, Lizzie’s emotions feel so earned.
James Taylor Odom brings the merry promise of slim-hipped shenanigans as soon as he dashes unannounced and unexpectedly through the open front door of the Curry household.
This is not some sly trickster. Instead, sporting a jaunty little neck kerchief Odom radiates reveling in being an animated changeling whose darting movements and joyous incredulousness at his very own boisterous personality and malarky projects a “can ya believe what I’m doing here?”.
The Curry clan rounds out with brothers Noah (Richard Baird) and Jimmy (Nick Tag), plus patriarch H.C. (Jeffrey Markle). These three play hot potato much of the time with Lizzie’s matrimonial fate, but each actor captures his character’s own trials and predicaments, sporting, as things go along, a limp, black eye and whitewash paint, respectively.
Rounding out the cast nicely are File (Andy Hoff) as a deputy sheriff who might be Lizzie’s longshot suitor if he could only get out of his own way and, in a supportive role, his boss, Sherriff Thomas (Barnicle).
Beyond the performances, the show’s other triumph is the physical staging. Resources for Laguna Playhouse productions seemed an intermittent challenge even pre-COVID and emerging from the pandemic the physical trappings of many productions were frankly pitiful.
But walk into the intimate hall for this show and the greeting is an emphatic visual statement: “We’re back!”
Bruce Goodrich’s lovely two-story open-air board and beam house is beautifully lit by Jared Sayeg’s dawn lighting, giving the wood and stage as a whole a discreet, golden glow and beckoning the audience into the setting.
It’s also rewarding to go to the lip of the stage at intermission and peer briefly around at props designer Kevin Williams’ many period items placed around the house, all amplifying the ambience.
The origin in North America of the word “rainmaker” comes from Native American culture, the conjuring up of nourishing replenishment. In this instance, it’s Laguna Playhouse and Andrew Barnicle as rainmakers in and of themselves.
‘The Rainmaker’
Rating: 3 1/2 stars
Where: Laguna Playhouse, 606 Laguna Canyon Rd., Laguna Beach
When: Through Oct. 8. 7:30 p.m., Wednesday-Friday, Saturday, 2 and 7:30 p.m., Sunday at 1 and 5:30 p.m. Added performances Thursday, September 28 at 2:00pm and Tuesday, October 3 at 7:30pm. No performance on Sunday, October 8 at 5:30pm.
Tickets: $50-81
Information: 949-497-2787; lagunaplayhouse.com
