An eerie red light hovers over two bodies and fog rises from the raised platform on which they are laying. There's a slight chill in the air. A man in a bowler and bow-tie starts to sing, "Did you hear the story of the Johnstone twins?"
The story is about to begin at the Boal Barn Playhouse, 300 Old Boalsburg Road in Boalsburg, as the Penn State Thespians stage their show, Blood Brothers.
The story of the Johnstone twins is one of two boys separated at birth. Mrs. Johnstone, played by Jennifer Stearns (junior-advertising and public relations), is the poor, sad mother of the twins, whose husband has left her pregnant and penniless. Mrs. Johnstone shortly realizes she is about to have two boys instead of one, but cannot care for them both. Mrs. Lyons, played by Hannah Cranville (freshman-division of undergraduate studies) is a well-to-do woman who hired Mrs. Johnstone as a maid. She cannot have children of her own. The rich woman sympathizes with Mrs. Johnstone and hatches the plan that the boys could be raised separately by both of the women, so that each of them can live a promising life.
The Boal Barn is a unique space in which to tell the story of the blood brothers using a stage "in the round" with seats on all sides of the action, and there's no escaping the fact that it is a barn.
The cricket chirps of the fall night are easily heard and the chill from the night air creeps over the creaky, wooden seats, which, at certain points, distracts from the performance, but also adds to the eerie theme throughout the story that deals with superstition and paranoia.
The two brothers, Mickey and Eddie, are spot-on 7-year-olds in the first act. Mickey, played by Alex Jones (junior-pre-medicine), talks to his mother in quick, run-on sentences, punctuated with "mom, mom," when trying to convince Mrs. Johnstone to let him go play. Eddie, played by Aaron Nogan (freshman-science), is naïve but knowledgeable about girls and words from the dictionary.
The action of the musical moves much faster in the second act. The brothers age four years in the matter of one song, "Summer Sequence," and the rest of the action follows quickly after.
The musical is staged well to work with the small 360-degree area and uses placement of the cast nicely during songs, alternating action around all sides.
The only distraction, other than the chilly night air in the barn, was the overused but unexplained British slang throughout the production. Willy Russell wrote the musical, which includes slang words such as "quid," "git" and "bloody," in 1983.
"Now you know the devil's got your number," the narrator sings, and maybe the Thespians have got it, too, with the fall chill settling around the Boal Barn this weekend.
