Here they are again, those enamored youths hiding their passion from their feuding families in Verona.
Verona, Wisconsin, that is.
For this is not the latest revival of “Romeo and Juliet” but the musical “No Bones About It,” whose lovers, Ronny and Julie, hail from “two smokehouses / Both alike in enmity” that are competing at a barbecue contest. The audience laughed its way through the performance I attended last month, and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only one who left humming the song “Better Keep Away.”
The plot’s transposing was par for the course for Northern Sky Theater, in Fish Creek, Wis. At a time when many companies are undergoing identity crises or struggling to connect with audiences, this one endures by programming original musicals anchored in local history, institutions, archetypes and customs.
For regional audience members, the company’s artistic director Molly Rhode said, a Northern Sky show “is not just sort of about me — it’s really about me.”
Despite being decidedly not from the area, I very much enjoyed this summer’s three offerings, which are running in repertory through Aug. 23. Along with “No Bones About It,” the company is presenting “Something in the Water,” set in early-20th-century Waukesha, when that city was ending an unlikely run as a tourist hot spot popularized by mineral springs, and “Dairy Heirs,” which has a subplot involving a soothing hybrid of provolone and pepper jack called projack.
“The joy and silliness that perfumes the entire air of Northern Sky is something that I think a lot of theater is missing right now,” said Ava Giorgione, a rising junior at New York University who is playing Julie in the Shakespeare spoof.
Technically speaking, Northern Sky, located in scenic Door County, was born in 2015. But its story goes back to 1970. More on that later, so please keep reading for a tale so ingrained in Badger State lore that it deserves its own musical.
A Certain Kind of Storytelling
In the summer, the company presents its productions in a 748-seat outdoor amphitheater in the heart of Peninsula State Park, which juts out into Lake Michigan. In the fall it moves indoors to the 248-seat Gould Theater, which opened in 2019. (This year, “The Bachelors,” about a pair of immature Madison men, runs from Aug. 29-Oct. 25; there’s usually also a holiday show.) Encouragingly, attendance has almost recovered from the pandemic, when Northern Sky was limited to a virtual season. “Prior to 2020 we hovered between 25,000 and 30,000 attendees in the park,” the managing director Holly Feldman said. “This year we are projecting closer to 23,000 in the park and 10,000 in the Gould.”
With a budget of just $2 million, the company leans on mutually beneficial relationships with local donors and businesses. Its staff of eight swells to 56 in the summer, and is supplemented by a pool of about 200 volunteers.
And when it comes to finding playwrights, Northern Sky has long recruited contributions from its very audiences. For example, consider the journey of Matt Zembrowski, a Milwaukee native who wrote “Something in the Water.”
As a kid, Zembrowski and his family used to camp in Peninsula State Park, and in 1995, they saw “Bone Dance.” He was only 12, but was instantly hooked. As his love for musicals expanded, he remained enthralled by the company’s productions. “There’s kind of an ownership because you saw shows about people that you know, Midwesterners,” Zembrowski said. “I connected to that far more than I did a lot of the Broadway shows I was listening to.”
At a post-show gathering around a fire ring, a gregarious patron named Jerry Pomprowitz told Zembrowski that he loved another of his musicals, “Dad’s Season Tickets.” In that “King Lear” riff, three daughters vie for their father’s Green Bay Packers tickets — “and in the end it worked out that everybody gets to share them,” Pomprowitz said. Unlike Shakespeare, Northern Sky believes in happy endings.
Pomprowitz and his wife, Lynn, both in their early 70s, regularly drive about an hour to the theater from their home in Green Bay. Fish Creek has other theater companies, including Peninsula Players (“America’s oldest resident summer theater,” it boasts), but the couple especially enjoy Northern Sky. “The shows are funny, they have character, they have heart and they are family friendly,” Jerry Pomprowitz said. “It’s very nice that they do it that way.”
Indeed, the audience is filled with multigenerational groups. It’s also not rare for multiple family members to be involved with the company. Rhode’s sister Alissa wrote the music for “Dairy Heirs,” for example, and when I went to the White Gull Inn for a fish boil, the owner mentioned her years as a house manager at the theater. Her sister acted in “Northern Lights” in 1997. Another sister co-wrote the musical “Victory Farm” (2012), about German P.O.W.s working in one of the area’s cherry orchards in 1944.
It’s in Their D.N.A.
History-inspired shows are popular at Northern Sky, which loves good yarns. And one happens to be attached to its birth. The company’s ethos can be traced back to Robert E. Gard, a Madison professor who promoted the interconnection of local roots and culture. (With research financed by the National Endowment for the Arts, he published a 1966 study-cum-call to arms, “The Arts in the Small Community: A National Plan,” that deserves to be rediscovered today.) One of Gard’s colleagues, Dave Peterson, spotted the amphitheater while camping and thought it would be a perfect place to present his revue “Song of the Inland Seas.” It ended up kick-starting the Heritage Ensemble, in 1970.
An early fan was Fred Heide, currently Northern Sky’s artistic adviser. “It was songs of the Great Lakes sailors, the lumberjacks, the early immigrant farmers,” he said of the show. “They were authentic folk songs, but Dave arranged them with complex Broadway harmonies. And he combined them with interesting bits of our history and humorous things he had pulled out of books. There was a tremendous depth to these songs, and power and universality to the stories they were telling.”
Heide joined the Heritage Ensemble in 1972, and performed in and wrote many shows. In 1990, he rebooted the troupe as American Folklore Theater with Gerald Pelrine and Fred Alley — the latter a tireless director, performer and writer whose hits with James Kaplan, “Lumberjacks in Love” (1996) and “Guys on Ice” (1998), have been produced around the country and are regularly revived at Northern Sky.
Being multi-hyphenate is as much a part of the company’s D.N.A. as the shows’ subject matter. As production interns (they are paid and receive housing), Giorgione and her “No Bones About It” co-star Owen Foulds, who plays Ronny, also help put up and take down sets, prep for meals and more. Giorgione said she found internships “to be very invaluable when it comes to learning the tricks of the trade and what I need to know outside of acting.”
Foulds said he loved the need to “commit to everything 110 percent.”
Another busy multitasker, Jeff Herbst, started collaborating with the company in the 1980s and became artistic director in 1993. He would preside over the Northern Sky rebranding in 2015.
“All of the musicals that we were writing were really not folklore,” said Herbst, who stepped down from the artistic directorship last year but continues to direct and appear in the company’s productions. “So I wanted a name that I could pitch to people around the country and would also resonate more fully with the demographic that was starting to come to Door County — a lot more affluent people have found their way up here for second homes.”
The population changes may explain why Door County, which had been a bellwether in presidential elections since 1996, went for Kamala Harris by a slim margin last year. Northern Sky navigates political waters gingerly, and by gingerly I mean it avoids them. Besides localism, the throughline is that the shows are, as Pomprowitz said, “family friendly,” though Feldman, the theater’s managing director, appeared chagrined that to some the term translates to a specific type of “family values.” (“What keeps us up at night is not the occasional email about something we had on our stage,” she said, “but our outdoor season being impacted by erratic weather from climate change.”)
This does not mean the company is stuck in place, either. A key program is NOVA (Nurturing Original Voices and Artists), which since 2021 has welcomed 62 playwrights from around the country to workshops and writing circles, both physically and virtually. Its director, Lachrisa Grandberry, was in the original production of “Dairy Heirs,” in 2018, for which she also learned to play the stand-up bass. (“People collect skills when they come to us,” Molly Rhode said, laughing.)
Grandberry and two others set out to write “Sunflowered,” a musical about a camping trip to Peninsula State Park that premiered in 2022 at Northern Sky. In parallel, she developed initiatives inspired by a workshop for writers of color, and those led to NOVA.
“Northern Sky is a very unique theater that only produces new works so it felt like there should be a place or a program within it that cultivates them,” Grandberry said. As a Black woman in a predominately white area, she said, “I know for a fact that I would not have been able to write for Northern Sky without first working there. I would not have understood the culture of Door County and of this theater. The challenge we have as a company is trying to cultivate new voices and make room for them in our space.”
All told, Northern Sky has about a dozen shows in various stages of development. Looking at the slate, one feels that the company will evolve while holding on to its identity and values in a world roiled by uncertainty. After all, Grandberry said, “Northern Sky is really good at creating stories that feel like home.”
The post Cheese and Packers Stories Help a Wisconsin Theater Thrive appeared first on New York Times.
